Wagons Wesht...

PD: Right, I'm ready ready ready, ready to run!

DM: The Dixie Chicks, eh??

PD: What can I say, I like the cut of their jip! Some candidate somewhere in the shticks is also probably playing Long Time Gone out a megaphone system in between appeals for a number one vote, so chalk it down to nostalgia.

DM: Well we had Jennifer Murnane-O'Connor of Fianna Fail driving her Battle Bus...hatchback round our estate with a very large loudspeaker calling for Carlow to have a university. It was like The Last of The High Kings around here...Really it resembled the German capitulation in Downfall, though...

PD: I think you can tell a lot about a constituency based on the wagons used to convey The Message. A hatchback in Carlow, august university town that it is, is one thing, but in Donegal you need a tractor

Case in point.

As for Kerry...what's the name of that thing John  Wayne and Maureen O'Hara were corting on in The Quiet Man?

DM: I think it was heavily censored lust, no? A love of Shamrock Rovers and ginge? I love the fact his name as actually Marian...

PD: That's interesting actually because Marian Finucane's real name is John.

DM: It all makes sense: and they both sound the same too: "Now Noel Whelan, will ye take em to Missouraaaa*wheezes*"

It was pulled by the only Green party member in Kerry. The trapped him wit the promise of organic Latte. Dead giveaway in Chiarrai.

PD: Ah, Noel Whelan, he's like what you'd get if you crossed an expert statistician with Springfield's education strongman Leopold. It looks like Kerry are going to elect two Healy-Raes this year, their numbers are good and as this attempt at Bohemian Rhapsody proves, vote management is being well thought through. Is this the renaissance for drink driving we've all been waiting for?

DM: are you LOCAAAAAL? Arthur Spring seen blacking out some of his teeth for the last week's canvass...But it does bring us to the big question: who the hell is going in and what's going on with all the polls. Which are plainly insane....

PD: A Labour guy who does something as notiony as run a smoothie bar would need more than that in Kerry these days mind. You're quite right though, the polls are bizarre like the lyrics of New Zealand's finest pop song  I mean, in Kerry Martin Ferris is apparently in trouble (and not in the usual way) yet in Clare Sinn Fein look likely to win a seat, where they've not been strong since DeValera was dressing up as a lady to break from prison.

DM: That was purely a comfort thing, Dev was always more of a coulottes kinda gal...it got worse with the conflicting reports as to how much Labour will be destroyed next Friday, though one local of Joan Burton's constituency, who was by no means antipathetic towards Labour said she was in big trouble. So it must be true...

PD: This local, It wasn't Leo Varadkar was it?

DM: Now that you mention it, the blond wig and boots didn't sit right...

But of I could offer Joanie some last minute advice:  stop referring to Inda as 'a certain special/important/doe-eyed individual. You will get this reaction:

PD: At last, a viable definition and use of Fiscal Space!

DM: *grabs bucket and pulls to face* Thanks Paddy *wipes chin* But speaking of fiscal space, and made up numbers, Mary Lou had the best line claiming to Ivan Yates that SF's numbers weren't plucked out of hers or anyone else's arse...

PD: "Has Gerry Adams being hiding poll numbers up his hoop for over forty years?"

DM: That would explain his eerie smile...So any predictions at this late stage, other than a lack of political leaders who want to go on Sean O'Rourke?

PD: In fairness, you'd be mad to go on with Sean, Destroyer of Distressingly Crafted Messages. Hmm, let's see...I predict leather jacket catalogue model Eamon Ryan will win in Dublin Bay South, a constituency which sounds like it does the best carvery this side of the M50. I predict Sinn Fein will win 7 out of the 18 Border seats but Gerry will resign, the party leadership to Mary Lout or Pearse, the best beard title going to Padraig MacLochlainn. I predict Galway West's count will last until the next election. And I really think it's only a matter of time before Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow get together again.

DM: Yip. I just dread to think which Irish politico will do a Gwynneth adn claim to have the rear of a 22 year old pole dancer...

PD: f you download TDer.ie you might find out...

DM: AS for the rest, brace yourself, because by next week, I think a few more of the over 60's could be culled. And if he's not careful Enda wil be dictating/asking Frank Flannery to write his memoirs earlier than he thought...

PD: I agree. Enda really has to shape up or the only thing he'll have successfully recovered is Fianna Fail.

DM: Sad but true. They're four points off and despite RTE's protestations yesterday, FG's message ain't hitting home. unless he's a sleeper, placed in FG by JAck Lynch. And 'Fiscal Space' was the trigger phrase...#mayonchuriancandidate

Worse yet, Labour TDs are very much hitting home, as in this time next week most of them will be staying in watching Jeremy Kyle in their slippers. Mind you, it's a bit more civilised than the Dail anyway...

Paddy & Don's National Conversation

In February 2016, friends and wiseacres Paddy Duffy and Don Morgan wanted to take their comic chops and political interest and provide the sort of sharp, rolling election coverage that other places just can't reach...but they were both had a lot on.

So last weekend, before Big Gerry Adams demonstrated where Chevy Chase, Steve Martin and Martin Short had been hiding out all this time, and Lucinda Creighton got tough on crime, Don (a new father and barrister in the making in Dublin and Carlow) and Paddy (a hotshot author and TV producer in London and never Carlow) decided to get creative, and decided to take one half hour a week out of their weekend on Google Hangouts (sure nearly worth the tax bill alone!) to make sense and make gags out of the most significant election in Ireland since at least the last one they had. This is their story:

Duhn duhn...

PD: Well Don, we're finally there. The moment I've been waiting for for years. It's finally upon us!

DM: *Shivers nervously*

PD: Shivers? You mean you're not looking forward to Gilmore Girls reunion?

DM: What Eamon gets up to to earn a few bob is his business, but making skin flicks is right out...

PD: I think Alan Kelly has the monopoly on the "Labour getting screwed" genre anyway. Now Don, fill me in on this. I left to go work in England the day after the last election. I heard about young Alan Kelly's election on the radio while heading to the airport. How has he become the Supermacs Francis Urquhart in the space of my five year absence?

DM: Whellllll....You may recall Big Phil was moved upstairs to Brussels after his bang up job in Environment, and then he was there. The inspiration to one of the least inspiring Irish rap songs of all time in the Labour Firmament. What could possibly go wrong? Thusly we watched him make big claims on housing, water, probably pylons... and at each turn he was nixed. Best bit was his run in with aged political pugilist and my father's erstwhile mealticket, Michael Noonan. Which he lost, like a fight between Mike Tyson and Fievel Mousekovitch.

PD: You know, that makes so much sense. He's the latest regeneration of Ireland's long unofficial Ministry of Being An Asshole. That would explain why he's trying to rock the boat against Joan Burton so much, who he should know is more than capable of doing that herself. I imagine the Parliamentary Party will resemble the cast of Lost by the end of the month.

DM: Lost is indeed the operative word, though I would expect two further words to appear in conjunction with the Labour Parliamentary Party: House Private.

PD: So where do the Jed Bartlet appreciators and Frank Cluskey beard fetishists go now? The Social Democrats? The Greens? Emigration?

DM: Well the painful screaming match that was last Thursday's TV3 Debate was never going to feature in the West Wing. Maybe Season 5. That one was rubbish.

PD: I have heard about the debate alright. Which mercifully is not the same as hearing it. By the sounds of it it was like some Jon Cage piece where seven tracks play at once. That's the great thing about being in London, not even Vincent Browne's voice travels that far.

DM: Lucky you. It was painful unless you watched it numbed by wine. Which this writer may have resorted to. You asked about the SOCDEMS and Greens?

PD: Do they stand a chance of getting anything other than broad benevolence and #3 preferences in your leafy suburbs?

DM: They are only fielding something like 15 candidates. In my registered constituency of Dublin-Rathdown, which is addled with bourgeois guilt, they didn't run anyone. I mean, even Labour's Alex White is barely canvassing. It should also be pointed out that Fianna Fail, which once ran two poll toppers in that constituency is now only running one, a lady of 71 years who beat off Seamus Brennan's son. For the nomination.

PD: Oh yes, the chocolate lady, right? Is that how desperate FF are to get seats? "Vote for us and we'll give you sweeties?"

DM: Yip: How does she get to work? In her LIR Jet - GEDDIT???

PD: You joke but a private plane is probably the quickest way to get round south Dublin at rush hour. Forming a government looks like it'll be a similarly slow crawl, My current prediction at the minute is Enda Kenny wins his second, defaultiest term, propped up by Fianna Fail, with Gearoid the leader of the opposition consisting of 735 microparties.

DM: That's it: the only futuristic thing is the sound of 'microparties'. I would also think that if they do get in it'll be endgame for the civil war parties: the greener FF members will scuttle over to The Bearded One, whilst those who went to college and hate poor people will go to FG.

PD: Can you imagine a world without Fianna Fail?

DM: MMMMMM *strokes beard contentedly*... As for forming a government, it's never good when people mention 'Belgium' in a conversation about, well anything tbh, but in particular long periods of caretaker Endaships.

PD: Belgium? Fianna Fail in power? This is music to a chocolate impresario's ears...us becoming more like Belgium wouldn't mean us having to bring Phil Hogan back would it?

Mara *whispered in the tones of CJH*

Poor PJ: In a week when interesting men were busy disappearing, he left in good company. No feeble attempts at spurious claims of being Irish -"And tell me this, I believe Bowie's mother was from Waterford" asked one radio presenter, as if pushing the boundaries of gender politics and identity as well as innovating pop music could only come from one of the Deise.

Mara was 100% Irish and  played his role of urbane bon viveur as well as he did that of political operative. My memory is of him the Unicorn Restaruant of the early 1990's, a memory Sam Smyth echoed on the radio this morning. But that world no longer exists.

I wanted to make one small point which frustrated me all day. When in the reports, Scrap Saturday came up for discussion, not one reporter was able to distinguish the fictitious relationship of Mara and Haughey on Scrap with that of the real life relationship of two remarkable men. They failed to understand that the former was not an attempt at faithful depiction of the latter. Though my old man and Gerard Stembridge, also remarkable men, know this far better - and I claim no window into artists' let alone men's souls - yet it would have seemed pretty obvious even for someone with less than an undergraduate education in English, that this was a comic creation, even more so, one created to caricature a persona of Haughey the imperious megalomaniac; a persona the real Mara helped to fashion.

In fact, it was Mara who made a point years ago that the Scrap creation was akin to the work of Gerald Scarfe, rather than anything. Not that becoming a household name is anything to be sniffed at, and he certainly didn't. Even more so, that that fame came from a satirical radio show a quarter of a century ago is in itself worthy of comment.

Not a bad feat. Shame not everyone in Irish public discourse is as perceptive as Mara. He knew, God rest him.