Maman Poulet

I often read the New York Times wedding announcements, sometimes they have lesbian and gay weddings announced, increasingly so since same sex marriage became legal in Canada. This weekend there was an announcement from a couple who have been together 42 years and who got married last Tuesday in Canada. Whilst their marriage has little legal status in the US, it was obviously important to them to do the deed – important enough for one of the couple to bring 3 personal assistants with her so that she could travel.

Well I hope Thea Spyer and Edith Windsor have many more happy years together. I’m sure they have done everything they can legally to grant rights to each other, and sometime before it’s too late the law changes in the US so that their relationship can be fully granted equal status.

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It was great to see Dr. Garrett Fitzgerald and others teaching Frank Luntz about the Irish electoral system. As you’ll know I was not a fan of the American ‘guru’ and his take on Irish politics, never mind the way in which he tried to put words into the mouths of those participating in the focus groups. It’s a pity he did not do this type of research before he did the focus group programmes. Even over the weekend on radio after being at the counts he came across as particularly pompous and naive.

There is something very beautiful about the Irish electoral system – very painful for many I know, but democratic to the heart. As Dr. Fitzgerald told Frank about the good thing that is non electronic voting I cheered. I spent all day Friday blogging the count and enjoying the fruits of the tallypersons labours but in previous elections I have been at counts with my clipboard sniffing those ballot papers and enjoying the analysis of the previous weeks and years work of the candidate and his team.

In this case I too am a luddite, let’s keep the pencil and paper, the laptops at the back of the room are fine – particularly when wired up and emailing me with the tallies as they progress!. But the leaning over the barriers with the sticker on your back to denote your side observing the democratic process has to remain or we’ll never really understand why someone voted the way they did or where the vote was etc. and we may never truely trust it if we cannot see it, feel it and smell it.

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I’m listening to the re-enactments of the Mahon Tribunal today and in particular to the statement of the Taoiseach’s lawyer. He called Tom Gilmartin a puppet and said his statements were mendacious. Off I trotted to the dictionary!  Ah such a posh word for calling someone a liar. Well we’ll see who’s giving mendacious statements then will we.  Talk about trying to create a fog…spinning lawyers!

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I did this all on my own! No not made the actual design but the installation. I’m going to go widget mad for a while too I think.

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I had the pleasure of meeting PT yesterday, he joined myself and Damien in the Irishelection.com war room and later at the Teachers Club. In the space of the afternoon he put this video together – he also blogged on IE whilst tallies rained in on us and political careers ended and began. Lovely guy, very talented altogether and hopefully the end of this election is only the beginning of Political Thicko’s commentary on Irish life.

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Moment of the day, getting this text (from one of our very many sources who made Irishelection.com’s coverage rock) and checking it and then forwarding it on. We had it several minutes before RTE did. It’s been like that all day Goodnight!

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So will we get our first out gay TD elected tomorrow??

How long will we wait for someone to call for someone to resign/retire?

All this and more on Irishelection.com where I have moved for the past few weeks. The new site looks great – the new gadgets are bloody amazing – I really really like mysay.com - I think this Irish created technology is going to go big tomorrow (it was probably big before this, I’m just a bit slow!)

Tomorrow night in the Teachers Club you’ll find a lot of bloggers having a bit of count watching craic. Please come along!

And now to sleep for a few hours before the fun begins. But before I go, and before it all ends – many thanks and much appreciation to Cian, Simon, Damien and everyone else for all their work, debate and craic that I have had watching and thinking and for all that will no doubt follow in the days to come.

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Cian at IrishElection.com tells about blogging the count, mysaying the count, and god knows what else which is taking place on Friday. So if you are going to be in or within a sniff of a count and want to get involved in webbing the election with rumours, tallies and gossip go here, read it, and sign up!

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• Ah it’s been busy, and I’ve had no broadband at home for 9 days. It’s not been pretty.

• Meanwhile Mary Lou McDonald is doing apparitions… I kid you not and might even bring you the photo of the flag flying outside the house around the corner where all it needs is a halo and wings to go with the white suit.

• Read the Canvasser - I wouldn’t know what one of them is.

• Last night I saw Labour’s Battle Bus…heading for the mug of Gerry Adams on the SF HQ on Parnell Square.

• I’m still doing a few round ups every few days on IE – and if it means dangling the laptop out the window to cadge some wireless I’m getting it done. Now later today if you hear of any unfortunate incidents involving a NTL employee in Dublin 1 you’ll know it was me that did it.

• A car nearly backed into me whilst in the mothership yesterday evening. I thumped the car and he stopped…just.

• Blogorrah deletes comments – especially ones which point out that they get the gender of Olywn Enright wrong. No problem lads we’re here to serve, we know it must be difficult from New York and all, but deleting the comments?

• This time next week the tallies will be coming in and we’ll be having fun fun fun….ok well we hope we’ll be having fun fun fun!!

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Sniff, this is very good, makes me want to have babies, well almost!

The Green Party’s Party Political Broadcast – is that Ireland? Are’nt they all lovely childer? Wouldn’t you want to vote for them too! The stars would probably do a better job than some of the adults! (Wouldn’t be hard!)  I bet some of them would like to see their Mammies home in time to put them to bed and read them a story as well as their Daddies though…
Back to work -

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