After painstaking research we've come to the conclusion that if there was as little traffic on our roads as there is passing through your average politician's website you'd get to work in the morning before you left home.
Fianna Fáil TD Billy Kelleher, for example, invites visitors to post their views on his Internet forum. How many posts so far? Just the one ("Is there any hope of getting traffic lights at Riverstown Cross?"). And that was left on February 10th, 2001.
Séamus Brennan, it would appear, is having similar difficulty pulling in the cyber-punters. We noted that when he asked folk to vote on "What day of the week is best suited for polling - Thursday, Friday or Saturday", the turnout wasone. (Friday, incidentally, was elected unopposed, with an impressive 100 per cent share of the vote). Where are these politicians going wrong? Simple, they're not offering their constituents any incentive to divulge their views. From whose book do they need to extract a leaf? Kerry's very own Senator Dan Kiely.
"How would you rate my performance as a public representative?" he asks on his website, offering you a choice of "Excellent", "Good", "Poor" and "Don't Know".
"Would you give me your number one vote based on my performance to date?" he inquires, followed by "If not, why not and what vote would you give me?"
And why would you be more inclined to interact with Dan than you would with Billy and Séamus? Because, as Dan puts it himself: "Complete feedback form below and win tickets for the All-Ireland football final in Croke Park (draw will be made in Garvey's Supervalu, Listowel)."
See? Now you're talking. Granted, there's a problem - the tickets on offer are for last year's final.
Divine political intervention
Apart from Dana's cry of "Vote for Me", celebrity endorsements for candidates and parties have been scarce in this campaign.
It was with interest then, that we read of Conor O'Donoghue's election material for his campaign in Limerick East where he is standing for the Christian Solidarity Party.
According to the Limerick Leader he "takes health so seriously that he is standing for election and he takes honesty so seriously that he has an image of Our Lord on his canvass leaflets". Supportive intervention of the celebrated kind is always welcome, of course, but better still when it's of a divine nature.
Bertie loses to Kylie's bottom
Ugly rumours abounded in February that Australian popster Kylie Minogue had had cosmetic surgery to "lift" her bottom - "Kylie perter down under", as one headline put it - rumours she furiously dismissed.
"My rear end is 100 per cent real," she reassured us all, before lashing out at folk who feel the need to comment on that region of her good self. "There's much more to me than my bottom," she insisted.
We mention this only because Pat Rabbitte may have scuppered Labour's hopes of clinching the Kylie-loving wing of the youth vote last week by ignoring her plea to leave her bottom out of it.
"The Taoiseach's face has been more in evidence this last month than Kylie Minogue's backside," he said.
When asked which vision he prefers, Rabbitte gave a rather ambiguous response: "When you reach my age, it is a very clear decision." As Kylie put it last year, "la la la, la la la la la, la la la, la la la la la".
Minimising the differences
Because this will be the first general election in which photographs of candidates will appear on ballot papers, it would be hugely helpful if said candidates didn't resemble each other, particularly as their images will only appear in thumbnail size on the papers.
Last week we were alerted by a Dublin South constituent to the thumbnail facial and hair-do similarities between Deirdre Whelan (Sinn Féin) and Maria Corrigan (Fianna Fáil).
If you intend going by the photos when you're voting, rather than the names, bring your magnifying glass.
Muck-slinging picking up
Gratuitous and downright nasty insults of genuine quality were, regrettably, thin on the ground in the opening days of the campaign, with the Taoiseach's use of "eejits", "absolute dimwits" and "nitwits" (for those who don't understand the need for his Bowl) the best we got.
Mercifully the muck-slinging livened up beautifully last week, the highlights being the multinational abuse hurled in Fianna Fáil's direction - they were accused of engaging in "loopy Argentinian economics" and "Joe Stalin-like hagiography" before Bertie Ahern found himself loosely likened to Nicolae Ceausescu and Benito Mussolini. Argentina, Russia, Romania and Italy? Sounds like a World Cup group to us.
Still, much work to be done before anyone breaks in our Top Five Political Insults of All-Time:
(1) "A triumph of the embalmer's art" (Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan),
(2) "Attila the Hen" (Clement Freud on Margaret Thatcher),
(3) "Clinton is a man who thinks international affairs means dating a girl from out of town" (Tom Clancy),
(4) "How can they tell?" (Dorothy Parker on hearing of Calvin Coolidge's death)
(5) "If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?' " John Cleese).