FOR once the weather gods were good to work bound people on a hank holiday weekend. Our national run of luck continues, even in this. The place has been looking lovely lately. This first spell of brightness, when everyone is still surprised by the sweetness of a sunny lifestyle, is special.
The gentle delights of suburbia come into their own in this weather. Children play tennis in the street. The pleasures of the most desired way of life in the world are on modest display. The sun makes things better for everybody.
The winos in the park sit in the grass, this weather, more in a line than in a huddle. They're facing the sun - they wave their cans at it and almost bask.
The very worst places to live in Dublin - and on the outskirts of every town in the country - take on a bit of charm in the good weather. Picture them: the wide grey roads of the big, bleak estates and the occasional few barred shops, and the babies in crooked sunhats chortling in their buggies against graffiti covered breezeblock walls.
One of the good things about an election is that it temporarily invites us to imagine each other. The country in its diversity is conjured up, through the media, during an election campaign. Journalists also go, out and around during an election.
A certain insight becomes available, based not on deep knowledge but on the process of comparison - on seeing and hearing the contrasts within the one society.
I've been out in the last 10 days in very different areas. I've walked along behind a candidate where the houses are tended and bright and the family car sits comfortably at the kerb outside each garden wall. I've also walked along in less privileged places, up garden paths between squares of dandelions and abandoned supermarket trolleys, to porches where someone has tried to smash the glass beside the frontdoor lock and dirty curtains are drawn against the window and you can hear movements from inside but no one answers the door.
I was taught a few years ago - by a parish priest who took me to task for a would be compassionate but patronising and ignorant article about an infamous estate - not to judge such places by how they look. Who am I to know what they seem like to people who have lived their history there, who know what has been made of such places since they were raw? How would I know what an awful looking house might mean as a home?
Still, I know one thing. The peaceful and flowery middle class streets with their owner occupied houses and clean cars are the dream. That's what the generality of people want. That's where the beleaguered public housing tenants would choose to be, away from vandalism and the depredations of teenage boys and litter strewn open spaces and bleak bus stops where the powers that be won't risk even a shelter for their passengers.
There are winners and losers in this society. It is as simple as that. The sun shines on us all impartially. But in this republic there are A lives and B lives. Through no merit of their own, some people have made it onto the back of the Celtic Tiger.
Others - tens of thousands of our fellow-citizens - through no fault of their own find themselves in the communities which supply the prisons and sustain the drug barons. Owning a house means having a stake. When you're merely a tenant, the other things fall away, too: belief in education, space for religious practice, energy for self motivated self improvement. We lucky ones would be the same if our trappings were stripped from us. No, we would be more resentful and less resourceful.
A REPRESENTATIVE from every comfortable road in the country should be forced to travel by bus - like the natives do - to one of the huge reservations in which we have put away our poor. There never are any visitors to these estates, except the functionaries of the state and, at election times, a few politicians.
And even these arrive in cars whereas the experience of underprivileged is full of waiting: waiting for the bus, waiting to see the supplementary welfare officer, waiting for the contract cleaning manager's van.
They would see with their own eyes that the design of these big estates says to those who live in them that they are not valuable people. To be a tenant rather than a house owner is to live with this low valuation. The houses are identical as prison cells. The roads are regulation width. Walls are made of coarse breezeblock. There are no wooden or plaster or painted surfaces, just as there are no clusters or curves or hollows.
This is prison camp design and it is what you get if you're unlucky in Ireland. You look around and you say to yourself, why isn't public transport in and out of here free? Why aren't the rules relaxed so that people can start home based businesses? Why aren't the pubs community owned? Why aren't there satellites of schools and colleges travelling around this place? Why aren't parts of the social welfare system incentive based? Where is the local EU wide employment and training office? And much more.
The only people with power to change the rules about all those things are the politicians. Private enterprise won't construct the network of policy changes in education and training, housing, transport, health, savings and loans facilities, to name a few areas, which are needed to give the next generation - the babies in the buggies - the chance that was given to some generation in the past of each one of the privileged.
It is not that any bloc of politicians had ever shown any real zest for this task. It is not that a single one of them with the power to make it happen has ever proposed that we make the excluded the focus of a government's legislative and economic programme. Far from it. But nothing but a government can do it. The people them selves can't. Charity can't. The Civil Service can't. Europe can't. Only a government, which consciously sets out to save those of our people whose potential is wasted, can save them.
That is what I care about in this election. Not the North, not EMU, not personalities, not sleaze. This will be the first election of my life to take place in a we're on the pig's back atmosphere. I will vote for the parties that seem to me most likely to know and care about the citizens that, have no place at the table, and who wish to divert some of the present optimism towards them.
Which exactly these parties are is a matter for each individual's analysis: it is not just a question of which is propoor but about which have the capacity to promote radical change. If the fate of the poor doesn't count to the general electorate in this, the Prosperity Election, then in what election will it ever count? Or will it never matter?