AS THAT GIANT paper mâché newt waddled its way from Capel St to Dublin Castle centre on Thursday night in honour of Science Week, everyone who bore witness was surely thinking the same thing.

“Why has no political party ever campaigned through the medium of a giant amphibian rampaging through the streets of Dublin city centre before?”

One would think that after decades and decades of posters ziptied to lampposts, surely there should be at least one brave, creative luminary amongst our political elite to suggest employing some kind of animatronic salamander with some stupid slogan like “A New Energy Le Chéile!” spray-painted on its side. Alas, here we are. 100 plus years of elections, and nary a salamander to be seen.

And it’s not as if these politicians aren’t willing to debase themselves. Simon Harris and Mary Lou McDonald both ended up jiving in a Monaghan gift shop this week simply because its owner has become a TikTok sensation over the last few years. Watching that particular footage, one can imagine the exasperated special advisors smoking cigarettes like sleazy 1950s movie producers and ordering their charges to get in there and shake their moneymaker in a Monaghan gift shop if they want to be Taoiseach.

Electioneering has never been about dignity, after all. Observing the events of the last week or so since the election has been called, it’s actually pretty unclear what exactly electioneering is about.

Unless the trend of the last hundred years is to be bucked, at least one of Ireland’s two permanent ruling parties will be returning to government after this month’s election. Having long-since shed the perception that they differ over any matter of real significance, the overwhelming likelihood is that they will return as unit, and if the split is even enough, perhaps even a return to the rotating Taoiseach system. And yet, despite all of this electioneering experience, the first week of Ireland’s #GE2024 campaign has been blighted on all sides by strange oversights, gaffes and unforced errors.

Whatever savviness that once seemed so inherent to Irish politics appears to have abandoned our most prominent parties in recent weeks. Claire Kerrane, for example, Sinn Féin’s spokesperson for integration, took to Facebook to make a rather muddled comment about the need for deportation to be considered “if you come to live in Ireland for whatever reason and you commit a crime”. 

“I think we should be looking at deportation more rather than free legal aid and prison, which some actually find quite comfortable,” she added. That’s not very spokesperson for integration of you, Deputy Kerrane.

Kerrane’s point was jumbled. She later deleted the comment, said she was not pushing for it to become party policy and stressed that she was not conflating people coming to Ireland and crime. It does, however, fit with Sinn Féin’s overall shift to the right on immigration – a shift that has yielded precisely zero polling dividends since it reared its head earlier this year.

Then there was Fianna Fáil’s snafu in which they implied in their manifesto that they were in favour of decriminalising drugs without specifying which drugs — a move which, while far from meritless, raised eyebrows, considering the source (a Fianna Fáil manifesto). The party quickly sprung into action and clarified that they only meant cannabis (a word which I resent typing, as by now we can surely all agree that no normal person actually uses it (the word, I mean, not the drug)). 

Even the Soc Dems are running a guy called Eoin Ó Broin in the same damn constituency as the original Eoin Ó Broin. This is a general election, guys, not some kind of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt situation. Take it seriously.

But the grand prize for utterly shambolic campaigning goes to Peter Burke and the rest of the Westmeath Fine Gaelers who gathered for his launch party, where the guest of honour happened to be one Michael O’Leary.

As Minister for Enterprise, it makes sense that Burke would be only delighted by an endorsement from one of Ireland’s top five most infamous businessmen (top five is still pretty impressive, we turn out a lot of infamous businessmen).

Unfortunately, it seems like Burke forgot that Michael O’Leary is Michael O’Leary, and so when the Ryanair boss got on the mic, rather than offering a fulsome and uncomplicated endorsement of Fine Gael, he instead used the platform to slag off every teacher in Ireland by suggesting that there are too many teachers serving as TDs, and that he “wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done”. 

It was mostly a cynical ploy connected to a jibe O’Leary had been making at the expense of former teacher Catherine Martin who, as a Green Party TD, O’Leary believes should be “weeded out”. As an airline chief, it makes some degree of sense that O’Leary would hate the Greens, though some might argue that the greenest thing about The Green Party these days is how much Michael O’Leary hates them. 

While O’Leary believes that nobody should vote for the Greens, he in the same breath says that their coalition partners Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have done “a great job” in the very same government. It’s a completely incoherent political philosophy, well worth ignoring, but first I’d like to make fun of it a little more.

There are 121,405 registered teachers in Ireland. Virtually every person in Ireland knows or respects or, indeed, loves a teacher (like a family member, I don’t mean that each of us has a teacher with whom we’ve had an affair). Going after teachers really only makes sense if your electorate is comprised solely of Bart Simpson and those frightfully drawn children from The Beano. That Fine Gael would so carelessly put at hazard the polling lead they have so painstakingly clawed back from Sinn Féin after years in second place does not inspire confidence in the competence of a party who is losing more than half of its sitting TDs to resignation. 

What was funnier than O’Leary’s own outrageous outburst was the attempts of Fine Gael to then distance themselves from it, like they weren’t the ones who’d been vying to use O’Leary’s seal of approval in the first place. Simon Harris himself called O’Leary’s comments “crass and ill-informed,” which feels like the worst case scenario after you’ve snagged what you presumably thought was a bit of an endorsement coup. Who’d have thought that the guy who came up with paying a €60 fine for having a cabin bag that doesn’t fit the airline size requirements even though it definitely does fit the size requirements could be so unpleasant? You live and you learn.

The events of the past week have almost done enough to overshadow the fact that Gerry Hutch (aka The Monk), fresh off the back of an arrest in Spain, is indeed officially running for the Dáil in the Dublin Central constituency. Not entirely overshadowed it, because how could you possibly overshadow that, but you get the feeling it would be a bigger story if all of the mainstream parties weren’t blowing it in their own unique and unforeseen ways. 

There are just under two weeks to go until the Irish people head to the polls and decide which of combination of hapless gift shop jive dancers end up leading the country for the next five years. On the evidence of the last few days, there will almost certainly be more mistakes between now and then to make us all wonder despairingly if this is really the best we can do.

But hey, if democracy finally gives out on us, we can always just put the big newt in charge.