Compiled by OLIVIA KELLY
O'Reilly banking on call centre blitz
Thousands of voters are being contacted directly by telephone by Fine Gael in a bid to drum up support for one of its Euro candidates in North West, Senator Joe O'Reilly.
Up to 2,000 telephone calls have been made nightly from the call centre created by the party's director of elections, Sligo/Leitrim TD John Perry, from the US-style "phone banks". The calls are made between 6pm and 9pm, and at weekends.
On Sunday, 15 people - some volunteers, some paid - worked from The Coach House in Ballymote, Co Sligo, making calls to people living in the eight counties allocated to Senator O'Reilly: Cavan, Monaghan, Louth, Longford, Westmeath, Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim. More than 22,000 calls have been made so far.
Green poster campaign packs a powerful charge
The gods are surely trying to give the Green Party a message. For the second time in as many weeks a Green politician has come a cropper while try to erect election posters.
The party's transport spokesman, Ciarán Cuffe, narrowly escaped being hit by lightning when trying to put up a poster for colleague Deirdre de Búrca during heavy rain last week.
Cuffe said he was luckier than Martin Hogan, the party's local election candidate for Dublin's South West Inner City, who a week previously broke his ankle, his foot and his elbow when he fell off a ladder while erecting posters in high winds.
The lightning strike, which apparently extinguished the lights of five lamp posts, left Cuffe unscathed, proof he says that someone up there likes the Greens.
However, perhaps the party should stop tempting fate and take a leaf out of Labour's Dublin city councillor John Gallagher who is not putting up any posters.
The community worker and conservationist, who describes himself as a "red green", said he won't be littering his local area with posters and says the electorate should vote for people with ability, not pretty faces.
Young start on canvass
You wouldn't abuse a man holding a week-old baby would you? Well that must be the hope of Fianna Fáil's local election candidate Cormac Devlin. Devlin, who is seeking re-election to Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council, has been canvassing this week with his newborn daughter Caoimhe. Devlin said he had promised constituents he would bring the baby around after she was born and that he wasn't using her as a tiny human shield against anti-Fianna Fáil aggression on the doorsteps.
Quotes
Avril Doyle has been wheeled out from retirement to engage in gutter politics- Labour's director of elections Liz McManus accuses Fine Gael of a smear campaign against Labour Ireland East candidate Nessa Childers
France and Britain have nuclear fuel and we have to be competitive and move forward . . . I've a farm that's worth very little at the moment, so it's available to use- Ireland South Fianna Fáil candidate Ned O'Keeffe telling Today FM's Matt Cooper he would have no objection to a nuclear plant in his constituency
Shake me hand and get me vote, then you treat me like a goat. - A line from the campaign song of John Bracken candidate for Offaly County
Growing pains for George Lee
George Lee might have been thinking about running for election for some time but there is a rushed quality to the manifesto he has circulated to constituents. There are at least half a dozen typographical errors or grammatical inconsistencies in the glossy letter, including a missing apostrophe and stray full stops, use of upper and lower-case versions of "Government", and ambiguous sentence structures such as "after many years of growth no child should be educated in a prefab". (Is he talking here about economic growth, or children's growth?)
You'd expect better attention to detail from a man touted as a future minister.
Taxi drivers in vote roundabout
The taxi drivers' protest group, Taxi Drivers for Change, is putting its weight behind the left-wing People Before Profit Alliance for the local elections and Libertas for Europe.
In a circular sent to member yesterday the group said it had been invited to meet Declan Ganley and was "very impressed with the the agenda Libertas wish to pursue on our behalf". It urged members to keep this in mind when it came to polling day and said a vote for Libertas would be "a vote well made in all of our interests".
However Taxi Drivers for Change has a wide embrace when it comes to politics and for the local elections it is encouraging its supporters to consider People Before Profit candidates.
The group says it is meeting Bertie Ahern next week and who knows where its allegiances will subsequently lie.
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