The battles are over, and, as you read, the votes are being sorted, tallied and counted. By midday most candidates will have a fair idea of their fate, even if cliff-hangers will continue up to the last count. But the trends, whatever they may be, will be known soon enough.
On the Richter scale of apathy today's contests scored highly. The referendum probably broke all records for public indifference. Here and there, Drapier met a puzzled punter who asked what it was all about and he encountered occasional irritation that the Government would propose changes to the Constitution in an almost surreptitious way. Drapier expects a low vote and a higher than expected "No" vote, an indication that the people resent being taken for granted.
The local elections were candidate-driven. Policy mattered hardly at all and for the most part it was every woman and man for herself and himself. Posters were individualised, few candidates bothered to canvass the party ticket, many saw their running mates and not the other party as the real enemy and most will attribute their election to their own efforts rather than to the appeal of their party.
This trend has been there for some time. Drapier dates it in a formal sense to the early 1980s when party strategists, despairing of the obstructionist tactics of so many quota squatters, urged new candidates to get out and do their own thing. Many who subsequently made it to Leinster House might never have seen the inside of the place if they hadn't bucked the system at that stage.
In campaigning terms it works, giving each individual candidate an incentive to get out and maximise their vote, but there is a downside in the weakening of party solidarity and the growing conviction of many candidates that they owe their election to their own efforts. In its own way it's just one more indication of the changing nature of the party system and indeed of the weakening influence of the bigger parties.
In addition, the local elections absorbed most of the available manpower. Canvassing for Euro candidates was confined largely to the candidates themselves and their personal teams. For the most part it was a "blitz"-like campaign with no real discussion of the issues, not because candidates were unwilling but because the bulk of the public was uninterested.
If anyone claims this Euro campaign was a vote for Partnership for Peace they will be talking through their hats. The people were asked yesterday to vote for 15 MEPs, not on Partnership for Peace, and any claims to the contrary are fraudulent. Drapier feels on balance that we should join Partnership for Peace, but that we should go in the front door and not by some deceitful, sly route which misrepresents the Euro elections as some sort of referendum.
Drapier has long felt our neutrality is an inheritance of history which has lost any real meaning or relevance, but he recognises too that it has deep tradition al attachments, rooted more in emotion than in reason, but nonetheless powerful for all that.
Anything which touches on that neutrality must be treated with caution and respect. In Fianna Fail, in particular, it arouses strong feelings. Unless Bertie Ahern is up-front with his own party in a way he has not been up to now, he risks, not so much a backlash, as the persistence of a nagging issue with the potential to cause him considerable discomfort.
The Government is lucky the Dail was not sitting this week, thus allowing the Paddy Duffy issue to lose much of its steam. Drapier does not attach too much significance to the whole thing. Paddy Duffy, if what Drapier hears is true, had long since been marginalised within the Taoiseach's office by some of the younger Turks, even if his general demeanour suggested otherwise.
His offence was to be cavalier and uncandid in an age which makes no allowances for such lapses. Drapier doubts if there was any real conflict of interest or that he had any influence on the awarding of the contracts but, as with so much else today, appearances are what count.
The whole thing was messy and embarrassing and left its residue of anger among some Government people but most of all it emphasised that the rough and treacherous terrain of modern politics is precisely where business and politics intersect.
In an age of privatisation the stakes are high, extremely so, and defeated competitors, with their attendant retinue of highly-paid advisers, are quick to cry "foul" when a contract eludes them.
It will be remembered that Michael Lowry was the subject of considerable innuendo and rumour, much of it fanned by the then opposition, when ESAT got the second mobile phone licence.
In the years since then not a shred of evidence has emerged to indicate that proper procedures were not followed to the letter and it is significant that the first claims against Paddy Duffy came from disgruntled business sources. It is a pattern we may expect to see repeated as further major privatisation plums are dropped into the public arena.
It all brings into sharp focus an issue Senator Shane Ross has been highlighting for some time - the fact that the new breed of lobbyists are not subject to any of the ethics provisions which are now being proposed for ministers, TDs and senators.
It is a totally unregulated area. The presence of such lobbyists, often in considerable numbers and frequently just out of the Civil Service, is raising serious questions and they are questions which in Drapier's view need to be addressed with a degree of urgency.
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, Drapier came across an obituary of a recently deceased Tory MP in last week's Spectator. The piece was written by Drapier's favourite writer on British politics, Alan Watkins. The MP in question, Robert Rhodes James, had a considerable literary output, but as Watkins wrote: "Yet, whenever I came across him in the House - at least once a week, sometimes more often - he was in a condition varying between having had a few, as we old drinking men put it, and being completely plastered.
"He was almost excessively respectable in his appearance. Like most Tory MPs of the period, he wore dark suits, pale shirts, subdued ties and highly polished black shoes with toe caps and laces. He resembled a benevolent crow. His drinks were dry white wine, which with many others, he persisted in regarding, despite evidence to the contrary, as a non-alcoholic beverage, and gin and tonic without lemon or ice. He smoked old-fashioned Senior Service cigarettes in considerable number. Rarely could he be persuaded to buy a drink for anyone else."
Drapier just wonders if any of us will ever merit the same sort of treatment. Especially that last sentence - the least forgivable of Irish social sins.