It's a lonely life covering the Nice campaign. I couldn't get to everything, but managed to turn up for most of the press conferences and launches of the past week. In most cases, there was only one other journalist in attendance. You couldn't help feeling sorry for the groups and organisations who convened the press conference at considerable expense and inconvenience.
The fact that some media executives don't see fit to send their reporters to these events doubtless reflects the low level of interest and awareness among the public when it comes to the Nice Treaty. It's a chicken-and-egg situation: the public doesn't care, so the media aren't there. Or is it the other way round?
Yet as Mr John Rogers SC pointed out in a lengthy and thoughtful article for this newspaper last Saturday, you may not be interested in Europe but Europe is interested in you. The EU governs more and more aspects of our lives and has quietly and almost imperceptibly taken control in key areas of society.
You do not need the gift of prophecy to predict a low turnout on June 7th. Already I can hear - in my mind's ear - a politician or two blaming the media for this.
That's not the whole story. The complexity of the issues and the near-impenetrable jargon of Brussels-speak have a lot to do with it. There is also the terrible ennui that comes over, not just the Irish people but the whole half-continent, when European issues are mentioned. Rarely can an international political project of such weight and importance have sparked so little interest at ground level.
Of course the McKenna judgment means that a referendum campaign cannot be run like a general election. The Supreme Court decided public money could not be used to influence the vote either way and that in future the parties would have to dig into their own pockets. With a general election in the offing there is an obvious temptation for the politicians to sit on their hands instead and save their precious shekels.
Out of the McKenna judgment came the Referendum Commission, a group of worthy and responsible individuals charged with presenting the arguments for and against in a balanced and impartial way. Razzmatazz it ain't: there are no balloons, no cavalcades and no songs like Arise and Follow Europe.
Without the McKenna judgment, considerable amounts of public money would be spent promoting a Yes vote and we would probably not have the likes of Mr Michael Noonan, leader of Fine Gael, warning this week that the referendum could be lost. Indeed his party colleague and agriculture spokesman, Mr Alan Dukes, brought the campaign to life on Thursday when he openly criticised the Referendum Commission for failing to mention the E-word in an information booklet distributed to all households in the State.
The E-word is, of course, enlargement, which the Yes side says is the whole raison d'etre of the Nice Treaty. No, no, no, say their opponents: it's not about enlargement, it's about deepening, which, for the uninitiated, means strengthening the power and control exercised by the EU's institutional core as part of the process of integration.
Not for the first time, one felt the two sides were living in parallel universes. The Yes people, personified by Mr Alan Gillis of the European Movement or Mr Brian Cowen, Minister for Foreign Affairs, regard Nice as yet another step in the realisation of the European ideal where nations pool aspects of their sovereignty for the benefit of all.
Mr Gillis compared the EU to a club which was expanding from 15 to 27 members: the influence of the core members might be temporarily diluted but they would gain in the long run from the overall increase in the club's size and influence. Mr Cowen dismissed fears about loss of our neutrality by comparing participation in the European Rapid Reaction Force to UN peacekeeping.
This benign view where "all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well" in the dawn of the grand European dream was the exact opposite of the "Fright Night" scenario from the No camp. Body bags in Ballyfermot and Ballina were conjured up by the Peace and Neutrality Alliance with its poster of a wounded soldier being stretchered off the battlefield and the slogan "No to NATO, No to Nice".
The President, Mrs McAleese, took off for Finland and Estonia and the anti-EU campaigner Mr Anthony Coughlan got the whiff of an Iveagh House conspiracy to use the visit for the promotion of a Yes vote back home. Be that as it may, reports indicated that the President kept the issue at arm's length.
An indefatigable sender of email messages, Mr Coughlan mysteriously disappeared from the information superhighway for nearly a week. He returned eventually to explain that a virus - possibly dispatched in a hostile e-mail - had attacked his computer. A sinister coincidence or just another wobble on the Web? Given their sunny and optimistic natures, the Yes people would opt for the latter but with their more suspicious dispositions, the No camp would smell another Euro plot.
Many years ago there was a film called Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came but perhaps we need a remake called Imagine They Had a Referendum on Europe's Future and the People Stayed Watching TV.
If the referendum falls once, it can probably be revised and presented again; if it falls a second time, the treaty is gone and Europe is plunged into crisis. Now do we have your attention?