"According to The Irish Times poll of last weekend, [m]ore than 60 per cent did not want Kenny as taoiseach [sic] and 65 per cent said they didn’t want Cowen as Taoiseach." - Vincent Browne.

I'd like to see a follow-up question, such as, "is there any politician you'd like to see as Taoiseach?" If 50 per cent said "no, they're all a shower of b@$!#rds," I would not be surprised. In a poll such as this, the questions asked (or not asked) are equally as important as the answers given. For example, why don't you want Cowen to be Taoiseach? Because of his mishandling of the economy and the banking sector. Reasonable enough. However if asked, why don't you want Kenny to be Taoiseach, and the answer comes back, em...there's just something about him. He seems like a nice fella but...you know... Sarah Carey in the Irish Times is more succinct in her analysis when she says the Fine Gael problem is one of "conveying an air of authority without actual authority."


Voters in Ireland don't vote for a Taoiseach. Polls in opposition are personality contests and Enda Kenny's inability or unwillingness to woo the post-Bertie electorate, is his (perceived) Achilles heel. The electorate is a like scorned lover. That smooth-talking, snake charmer, Ahern, broke our hearts but we still want a bad boy.


Another factor to consider is if 65 per cent of those polled did not want Cowen as Taoiseach and when asked about Kenny, that same question results in a differential of only 5 per cent, one is left to wonder; are these the sort of opinions we should be taking seriously. After all as Vincent Browne went on to write in his Irish Times column of Brian Cowen:

More than any other person, possibly with the exception of Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen bears responsibility for both the economic collapse and the banking collapse. The recent revelation he interfered with the financial regulator in the latter’s attempt to get bank directors to sign statements of compliance with proper bank practice is, itself, devastating to his credibility, that is if he had any credibility left to be devastated.

If Bruton becomes leader the irony of such an outcome is that, as the past few days have shown, he is not nearly as savvy a political operator as Kenny has proven to be. Bruton and his camp have behaved like a teenage boy, who moments after a first kiss with a beautiful girl (way out of your league) clumsily and in a panic (thinking, this may never happen again), gropes her breast, much to her dismay. She gets up and leaves (probably with Kenny).


The Irish Times have a formidable reputation and illustrious history but a poll, such as this, is self-serving. It makes the news and as such undermines their journalistic independence. One could argue that the challenge to Kenny's leadership has arisen because he doesn't sell enough newspapers. He's not box-office enough. Vincent Browne ends his column by writing that no matter what the outcome of the FG power struggle "the charade of what we call democracy would persist." Is it democracy that a poll in a newspaper and the subsequent inflated and reactionary views of some of its journalists, sets the terms by which our (potential) leaders are measured?

BREAKING NEWS.....Ha, made you look!

Perhaps, it was post-election fatigue. Thanks to Twitter my index finger was, for a few weeks, in a state of cat-like readiness and is now permanently crooked, for optimal Twittering. Let's ignore the obvious feline evolutionary oversight; the index finger, and the inability of cats to type (generalisation) and focus on the crux of the metaphor: Tweeting in an illness, not a verb. Tweeting is apprehension. Tweeting is the need to be involved, to be heard, to be retweeted.


Watching the UK leaders' televised debates, I was merely a conduit for information. Through me it flowed, in real time, to the wider world, or to no one. Only later when I reviewed my tweets (does that sound dirty?) of the debates, was I able to formulate an opinion of who the winners were and who the ultimate loser was destined to be. I noted how different my conclusions seemed to be from the consensus. In the first debate, I thought Clegg's staring directly into the camera was creepy, I tweeted as much, but most made him the clear winner. Maybe I'm just not the hypnotising type. Look into my eyes...


I felt completely at one with Twitter during the election. Day after day, zinger after zinger, such as, "Cameron gets egged. Poor guy, last week he got Clegged!" or during the second debate, "Clegg: 'can we move beyond this political points scoring?' Someone should remind him where he is." I was at one with the world, a disharmonious voice in the chorus but a voice all the same. Into the infinite chasm, along with the chattering, tittering, twittering, the insightful and the snide, I cast something of myself. My message in a bottle, in a sea full of them, unsure if mine will ever wash up on some far off shore.


And then there was silence. Near silence. There were whispers and the odd light-bulb flickered into being, to cast a feint hue over the dark and largely vacant recesses of my mind. Perhaps it was a Yeatsian desertion. Perhaps they have all gone on holiday, it is the summer after all and thoughts and words and index fingers need rest.


Daily, global news stories broke. Sky News for example hardly had to repeat themselves from minute to minute as environmental disaster, political scandal and a military offensive against civilians ensured that  'Breaking News:', in alarmist yellow and black, kept us fixated. But I was powerless. All I could do was just sit there....and watch. No tweeting, no blogging, no facebooking. It was like I had gone back to the twentieth century. The pre-socionetworking, pre-fat-ass-ic period. Not quite the dark ages, I grant you. More of a gloaming.


Real people, with real names are so last decade. In another decade's time will this generation of social networkers name their children, @problogger Smith, or Jessica @applejuicesnap Murphy?


The good news is, I am recovering well. I kept my index finger elevated and my opinions to myself and who knows, someone, somewhere may even have noticed my absence. In Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod Beeblebrox is subjected to the torturous Total Perspective Vortex (TPV).

"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

Sound familiar? Twitter feeds the twenty-four hour news cycle, unfortunately it's a diet of mostly cheeseburgers and deep-fried Mars bars. It's not Breaking News, it's broken.