The Time is REALLY Here

I had such magnificent plans for this election. I was going to follow it religiously right here, slagging off all the candidates, maybe live-blogging the debates. Unfortunately, my college work really stacked up (though I did make some slight attempt at the latter on the WAKE UP Twitter account. I think it amounted to three or four tweets altogether). I was at least going to live-blog the election results, but busy social and academic lives have conspired to prevent that. Well, at least I can try to provide some kind of summation.

I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the posters this year. Labour's Henry Upton reminded me of a younger Frasier Crane, which pleased me. Sinn Féin candidate Ruadhán Mac Aodháin (whose blog, incidentally, seems to consist largely of articles about himself in the third person, which is rather disconcerting) had a poster which seemed to have a charcoal drawing of him, which reminded me irresistibly of a drawing from a witness report (perfect for a Sinn Féin candidate, I thought, even leaving aside the "Black and Tan" reference). Then there's Conor Lenihan's poster, which really speaks for itself (I couldn't find the actual poster, but believe it or not that is the picture he inexplicably used). Sadly, I didn't get to see many outside Dublin (contributions are welcome on that front), but Tom Fortune down in Wicklow struck me with his... wonderful hair. Then there's old favourite John Foley, who looks like Richard Dreyfuss as a werewolf; a terrifying thought indeed.

So what did we learn about the main parties in this election? Erm... not much, really. The debates degenerated into shouting matches between the three main leaders, while John Gormley grasped at some shreds of credibility and Gerry Adams seemed to use the word "citizen" as punctuation. Otherwise, we learned that Fianna Fáil aren't quite as doomed as might have been expected, and Éamonn Gilmore hasn't been quite as successful as might have been expected. Sadly, we haven't had anything as entertaining as Gordon Brown's wonderful "bigoted woman" moment from a little less than a year ago.

We're in for some fun times ahead, of course. It's possible that the only way to make the coming budgets more terrifying would be to have Joan Burton read them out (actually, I shouldn't even joke about that...). As ever with politics, we shall have to laugh so as not to cry. At any rate, soon enough, we'll find out the presenters of our coming misery. Let's just hope it isn't anyone as creepy as this frightening character.

...Wait, what? Seriously? Oh God....