Ballot capers: A sideways glance at Election 2016

The buzz of current affairs

Joan Burton was up with the lark yesterday morning to make an appearance on TV3's 'Ireland AM'. Her fairly gentle turn on the telly started off swimmingly as she read from a well-thumbed playbook and reminded viewers that the state of fear and impoverishment left by Fianna Fáil had now lifted thanks to all the hard work put in by Labour.

It was only when she showed what a good sport she was that things started to come undone.

She agreed to take part in a “fun” challenge which involved her running a looped piece of wire around a complex mesh through which an electric current flowed. It was an ideal chance to bring the metaphor of the steady hand to life, but in a (predictable pun alert) shocking development, things did not go well for poor Joan.

Faster than it takes to fall out of a canoe into 18 inches of flood water, the Tánaiste had set the device abuzzing and after five short seconds her goose was cooked.

By comparison, Stephen Donnelly managed a creditable 32 seconds on the same device before setting off its buzzer, while Shane Ross avoided the shock for a whole minute.

Signing off in Donegal

Are you sick of the doorbell going in the middle of a particularly dramatic ‘Fair City’ scene? Or have you grown tired of entertaining canvassers on your freezing cold doorstep as your once-hot dinner chills just yards away?

If you’ve had enough, you might do well to look to the northeast for a way of not having to answer your door.

According to ‘Donegal Now’, a local family has been using a Derry relative and a very simple sign to keep politicians at bay.

“A very talkative wee Derry man lives here,” the typed notice starts. “He doesn’t have a vote in this constituency but he’ll keep you at the door and tell you his life story if you ring the doorbell . . . Your move.”

Too important to follow

Enda Kenny has an Instagram account. We're pretty sure you didn't know that because the poor Taoiseach has a tiny number of followers – at least tiny for a head of state. Less than 600 people have hit the "follow" button on his account; Barack Obama, in contrast, has 6.8 million followers on the snap-happy social network.

Mind you, it’s not that hard to see the lack of appeal of the Taoiseach’s Instagrammed efforts.

For starters, he features in every single photograph. There are pictures of him as a young gun speaking at his first ardfheis and there he is in the Golan Heights wearing the famous blue helmet of the UN. And then he’s hugging flood victims, chairing important-looking meetings and being an all-round statesman.

Would he not just take pics of his dinner like the rest of us?

Healy-Rae: the hits continue

A single election tune clearly wasn’t enough for Michael Healy-Rae. He has followed up the, um, rampant success of his early campaign hit ‘Making the Diff’ with a new number called ‘Back to the Dáil’. Like ‘Making the Diff’, the new track has been written and performed by Kerry band Truly Diverse.

It doesn’t have the awesomeness of the first song, which contained lines of lyrical genius, such as “He’s flat to the mat with his black cap” and the simple but elegant “He’s amazing”, but it should still go down a treat at the inevitable victory rally this day week.

It’s no ‘Michael D’s Rockin in the Dáil’, mind you.