Tech-savvy candidates make it personal

THERE was a time when the kit for an aspiring TD consisted of a soapbox, a megaphone, a couple of posters and a wrist as strong as a girder from shaking so many hands.

Nowadays, it’s different. Candidates in this election are using every marketing trick in the book and every piece of new-fangled technology to get their names, faces and messages out there.

Eugene Regan, a Fine Gael candidate in Dún Laoghaire, spent a staggering €45,000 for his local election campaign in 2004 and expects to spend more now. In Meath East, Labour’s Dominic Hannigan and his FF rival Thomas Byrne both have video blogs; the insatiable Jerry Buttimer in Cork South Central even has his own profile on Bebo (the social website used mostly by teenagers).

It’s all a sign of a society shifting from the communal to the personal, where it’s all about you.

Another step in that direction was taken yesterday when Fine Gael’s standard bearer in Dublin South, Lucinda Creighton, launched her own personal manifesto.

Yes, you have it. Not the Fine Gael one. Not the one the Mullingar Accord has come up with. But Ms Creighton’s own manifesto.

Flicking through the glossy document, you notice it’s mostly her party’s national policies with a couple of local commitments, mainly in relation to health and education.

But she claimed that besides being the first candidate manifesto, it was the first one available on a CD-Rom that also contained the first interactive computer game (hardly XBox 360 — it featured a mallet with which you could help break the ruling coalition’s politics).

At the launch yesterday at the appropriately zeitgeisty filmbase in Temple Bar, Ms Creighton did accept that printing 40,000 brochures and a couple of thousand CD-Roms was expensive.

But candidates will use anything that will give them an edge in one of the most marginal of marginal constituencies in the country, where none of the seats are safe.

You never know, maybe it will go full circle and one of them may be driven to produce a soapbox and a megaphone from the boot.