No splash of colour on our dull blank canvass

ONLY three days gone and I'm fed up with the lot of them.

Bored with radio callers complaining about canvassers. Bored hearing about the environmental damage caused by posters as if they were leaking radiation. Bored senseless with the bleating about bunk" mail from the candidates and the waste of it all.

Where is the passion, the originality, the anarchy? For the first time in decades, I am jealous of the British. They had all those hate figures - Portillo, Mellor, Hamilton - slapped up like targets at a funfair, nude people answering the door and chickens harassing candidates.

Now they have a whole new establishment culture. (Out: air kissing. In: hugging. Out: smoking. In: diet coke and guarana gum). They have a dazzling new government which claims to be hitting the ground sprinting. Sprinting. Doesn't it make you long for something ... different, passionate, risky?

How many nude voters did Ruairi Quinn encounter on his weekend canvass around Dublin 4? How many headless cattle pursued Albert Reynolds through Longford to stop him chopping up animal bits for dog food? How many of Brian Cowen's constituents donned veils and gentle voices to mark his transmogrification into the most sensitive man on the planet? How many of you realise that Prionsias De Rossa's tie is in fact the insignia of a secret cult? Not.

Fado fado, I was an election junkie. They were the Wonder Years, when everything was slightly anarchic. The ready access to the homes of trusting strangers, the 10 shilling bribes pinned to babies' prams, the ripe sniff of vote rigging at convention time, the slogans painted on the roads, the hot whiskeys at 9 a.m., the odd canvasser falling in a canvassee's door, the adulation at one house and a shotgun at the next, the "boys" being chaired around the counting hall, the sudden, shocking discovery that the enemy wasn't Satan incarnate after all, just a sad loser.

There are probably pockets of the State where some of these manifestations survive, but barring the odd deranged citizen (hysterical about being dragged away from Coronation Street), canvassers are dealing with a different political landscape now.

Issues are the thing, we're told; people before politics, things more serious, not like before, blah, blah. But a recurring image from the Wonder Years is the number of houses that eschewed tasteful landscapes over the mantelpiece in favour of the triumvirate of Pope John XXIII, John F. Kennedy and a hunger striker (Michael Gaughan from Mayo?) Looking back, it's an image so old fashioned, conservative and wrong headed that no doubt, there are people this morning hugely entertained by it - the kind who stuck posters of Che Cluevara above the bed, took part once in a giddy sit in for higher college grants and thought the revolutionary soul was safe with them.

But those icons represented something that our current leaders with their "steady as she goes" approach might ponder. Change, enlightenment, glamour, excitement, the notion of sacrifice, a youthful spirit. (Not a million miles from the Blair formula when you think about it). Like it or not, that triumvirate had something to which people could aspire. Now that we're all grown up and shop at Habitat, what have we got instead? Who have we got to look up to, to admire, to emulate, to get excited about? Baby Spice? Mick McCarthy? Rocca v Ryan?

We are a tougher, faster moving, more aggressive people now. We are also thoroughly disillusioned. Politicians, religious, businesspeople, farmers, sports figures - no one has escaped.

A RECENT Irish Times poll told us baldly who the public believes in the Dunne/ Haughey matter. We know about the devastating fall-off in Irish vocations to the Catholic Church. We know that in plucky little Ryanair, while employees were cleaning the planes themselves and working for risible basic wages, their executive directors were raking in millions of pounds in "bonuses".

Yes, you could say we're disillusioned with people. So is there anything - an issue, maybe - that excites us anymore? Crime, you say? Yes, that's a safe one. Crime, they say, is the big door steps issue, the one guaranteed to get our dander up. Yet the single most depressing aspect of the bail referendum was not that the measure was passed but that much fewer than a third of the citizenry cared enough to vote.

As for zero tolerance: if the Justice Minister is already snowed under with "petitions" from public representatives seeking mitigation for errant constituents, what in God's name will it be like in a zero tolerance scenario? It's a bit like the hypocrisy surrounding media intrusion into private lives. If everyone is so disgusted by such encroachments, who then buys the bold newspapers and keeps their circulations in the stratosphere?

So let's move away from the issues and look at party culture. Should you give a stroke to the "national movement that idolised Charles Haughey for over 30 years and never once raised an eyebrow about the source of his wealth? Or the one that got a mandate to govern on the basis of openness, transparency, etc, and then responded to an accusation of less than full disclosure with the retort: "You didn't ask the right question"? I think these things matter a whole lot more than who sticks their posters where. But that's for us all to decide in the privacy of the ballot box.

MARY HARNEY said last Thursday that for the next few weeks, politics will be on trial and she's right. But we should begin by being honest with ourselves. Should we ask of our politicians things we wouldn't ask of ourselves? Do we want leaders who are prepared to rock the boat? If they take risks, will we reward them?

I want icons again. I want risk takers, enlightenment, that old notion of self sacrifice all wrapped up in an exciting parcel. Fine Gael is "offering" £1.5 billion in tax cuts, for example. Think what a slice of that could mean to the four or five areas around Dublin that currently contribute nearly all of Mountjoy's inmates. If we can't aspire to a vision like that in the boom years, what awaits us in the downturn? If that's an impossible dream, then I'll settle for this. Give me a leader who will promise solemnly never again to wait for the "right question" before giving the full and frank information that we - whom they are there to serve expect and deserve.

Then let the healing begin.