Drive to the shop for a pint of milk and every lamppost has Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern looking at you with beseeching eyes, Enda Kenny, the opposition leader, marking him poster for poster, Gerry Adams positioned at strategic bends alongside his local Clare candidate, the sultry-looking Anne Prior and all the others, the outgoing independent man James Breen, his clansman Pat Breen of Fine Gael, and all the others.

Turn on TV and there’s an election message from somebody, the papers are packed with election stories, it’s all go, all cut and thrust, all hustle and bustle and opinion polls predicting a knife-edge result.

And it’s all great craic too, of course, though nowhere near as good as it used to be.

The old after Mass meetings are gone, so there’s no hell’s fire from candidates standing atop chapel walls 30 yards away from the tabernacle within.

There are no big rallies in town squares with a fistfight or two on the outskirts, there are no torch lit processions or parades through party heartlands like there used to dramatically be, there are no bonfires and no really hot-blooded confrontations between either candidates or their supporters.

I’ve only seen a couple of defaced posters, and that is one index to how civilized and maybe even boring we’ve become. The battle is largely being fought over the airwaves, just like your elections over there.

The party leaders arrive in all the constituencies, yes, to support their local troops. But they are on such a tight clock that if you blink you miss them.

There are spin doctors everywhere. It is not like the good old bad old days at all.

I can remember seeing real fisticuffs on the roads outside the chapels of yesterday. I suppose I should be grateful that elemental kind of electioneering is over. Mea Culpa.

It was colorful passion too, and the election turnouts were correspondingly much higher than nowadays. Sadly most young people seem to have opted out of the game altogether, and are they not tomorrow’s citizens?

And the backdrop is, frankly, incredible. Imagine an election in the Republic featuring a meeting between Bertie Ahern and Ian Paisley on the green grassy slopes of the Boyne? It happened, everybody was smiling, and the pair of boyos together planted a walnut sapling.

(Chuckling evilly, brother Mickey phoned me from Kerry later. He researched the history of the walnut sapling. Walnut is one of the most toxic of all trees and its wood is favored by gunsmiths for stocks!)

The leaders on the stomp are so heavily made up, according to a lady reporter, that they could go on stage immediately! Pancake stuff.

And the opposition leaders are afraid to attack Teflon Bertie about his financial affairs (confused at best) because every time they attack him on such personal matters his ratings shoot up rather than down! Who would believe it? He is still the sharpest tool in the Fianna Fail war chest.

Again, let it be said my own wry view of developing proceedings is that all the pollsters are going about the business of getting it wrong. The Sinn Fein factor is the spanner in the works.

A professional pollster told me years ago that people being polled often gave the answers they expected the pollsters would like to hear. For example, persons who always read the cheap lurid tabloids would claim to be devoted Irish Times readers.

And the Sinn Fein factor, I confidently predict, is being far under-estimated in the polls to date. Riding on the back of the Stormont devolution and a lot of hard work down the past decade in the working-class suburbs of cities especially, Sinn Fein will prove to be a real surprise by the end of this month when the votes are counted.

Bertie has claimed that he won’t consider them as government partners after the polling is over, but I would not count on that. They will have a considerable rump on them by then, will Sinn Fein, mark my words, fat and sassy. Fianna Fail, as we all know, are totally carnivorous.

The football factor intrigues me on the lighter side. I think I mentioned this before, but this is an update.

The Mayo football manager John Maughan is a Fine Gael candidate, as is star footballer Graham Geraghty in Meath. The electoral fortunes of both will be significantly boosted by success on the football field in the championship just begun a couple of weekends ago.

Latest reports from the sporting pundits suggest that Geraghty is more likely to benefit from the fields of play than Maughan.

I have to leave ye now. I have more election workers on the doorstep.

Like all the others from the major parties I will treat them courteously and warmly, and tell them they won’t get a stroke from me because of their support for smoke-free pubs. I will tell them they have ruined the comfort of my life for the past three years.

They tell me that nobody among the 30% smoking population is making an issue of this old chestnut but my small self.

Okay. I’m an independent.