Polls are a political early warning system — so do away with them now!

I WISH our Red C would open up and swallow our shower of misbegotten messiahs whole. When will we Irish ever learn? If you want to get rid of a government you don't keep rubbishing it in the polls â€â€ you build them up until false confidence prompts a more noticeable than usual mistake. I call it the duck lure technique. The poor duck hears a call inviting him to a romantic interlude in the rushes. His heart rules his head and up he flies into the path of both barrels.[private] So the next time a pollster stops you in the street â€â€ I know, I know, they never stopped me either but just in case â€â€ you should give a ringing endorsement to our coalition of the damned. Everything is hunky dory with the economy, you couldn't ask for more from the ministers and Brian Cowen is more popular than Daniel O'Donnell in a Tuam kitchen. If we get it right, the headlines will read 'Cowen â€â€ the Greatest Return Since Lazarus', 'Greens on Target for Majority Government' and 'Cancel Election - No Point Say Opposition'. Cowen and Co will be so giddy with excitement, they'll call a snap election. And then, just like the randy duck, they get both barrels. No point in scaring them off with poor poll results, they'll just draw back into their shells and wait for better weather. Mind you, Fianna Fail may be harder to kill off than you might think. One of the party's stalwarts has come up with a survival plan that's straight from a sci-fi horror movie. The party should invade the body of Fine Gael, and live in that cocoon, until the time is right for it to consume its host and unleash havoc on the nation once again. At least that's how I interpreted the proposal of Dublin South East TD Chris Andrews for a merger between the two parties. Deputy Andrews feels it's time, wait for it, to move on from Civil War politics. Now there's a unique proposal. He's not yet sure what the merged party would be called. Maybe â€ËœThe Fat Chance Party' or â€ËœFine Fail'. 'FG are not getting the traction in the polls because people see little difference between FF and FG. A merger makes sense to me,' he tweeted. 'This is just off-the-wall stuff. We thought we'd seen them desperate but we've never seen them this desperate,' the Irish Independent quoted an unnamed Fine Gael source's response to the proposal. It must be the weekend for off-the-wall proposals. Michael Soden, who now sits on the Government's Central Bank Commission, is proposing in a new book, no less, that maybe our union with the EU is coming to an end and suggests we should consider becoming the 51st American state. At least Playboy would be cheaper. It's not that I think it's such a bad idea â€â€ after all, an orphan nation such as ourselves should be glad if anyone, Congo, Afghanistan, North Korea, was willing to take us in. The thing is, who would want us? I think Obama might have enough on his hands right now without adopting an economic basket case and adding to his woes. The people I feel sorry for are those who might oppose such a move. Yes, even in Ireland you can still find a handful who will oppose. But where do they protest? There's no point in wasting a good protest on the Dail. Decisions are no longer made there. But how do you organize a protest in Berlin and will Ryanair charge a fortune for excess placards? They could try the IMF headquarters but even James Bond would have trouble locating that. What have we left? The polls, the polls as Quasimodo might say. â€Â¢ â€Â¢ â€Â¢ The Germans have a different way of doing things. Even in their pubs OUR German bankers, and bankrollers, don't trust us and who could blame them. I'm afraid I have to own up to some responsibility for this state of affairs as I served as a very poor ambassador, for Irish fiscal responsibility, when I lived there for a time in my youth. It was not like O'Sullivan's shebeen in the song Slattery's Mounted Foot, which, believe it or not, I learned off by heart in primary school and can still recite to this day. What are they teaching children at all these days? Anyway, to the song. The relevant verse is: Well, first we reconnoitered 'round O'Sullivan's Shebeen â€â€ It used to be a chop house but we called it the canteen; And there we saw a notice which the bravest heart unnerved: 'All liquor must be settled for before the drink is served. When I lived for a period in Frankfurt, there was no question of settling for the liquor before it was served. Frankfurt pubs operated on an honesty system. Yes, you read right. An honesty system in a pub. Every time you got a beer, the barman or bar fraulein would put a mark on your beer mat. If I recall rightly, they were called deckles. Anyway, the Frankfurters seemed perfectly comfortable with the system. They happily drank their beer and honestly and compliantly, like good Germans, presented their beer mats at the end of the night to a staff member who totted up the biro marks and presented the bill. But not Paddy. Oh, no. This was like an open goal to us. Rather than admire the Germans for their honesty and efficiency, we instead had to work out a way of fiddling the system. The end result is, we'd stagger up to the counter at the end of a good night's drinking and slap down a beer mat with a couple of lonely ticks we'd put there ourselves, having first disposed of the official tab, of course. Another wheeze was premised on the local fondness for beer mat fights. Someone would sky a beer mat across the bar and pretty soon the air would be full of beer-sodden projectiles. Naturally, the Germans would hold on to the one with their tab on it but at the first whiff of mat rattling, Paddy would launch a preemptive strike and fire his tab into space. In fact I can distinctly recall provoking a beer mat fight just to get rid of a particularly well-marked chit after generously buying a round. The funny thing was, we didn't need to do it. We were all making good money on the sites. The beer was cheap by any standards and our hosts were welcoming and  friendly. But there was just something in our DNA that made the temptation irresistible. Some instinct drew us towards a fiddle. The need to get one over, to be the smart fellows, the cute hoors, overrode any latent sense of honesty or integrity. And here comes Paddy again. We went on a national piss-up while the Germans remained sober and sensible. So what do we do? Well the theory is much the same. We take no responsibility for our consumption and when the bill arrives, we try and lob it into the air and let the Germans pick up the bill. But it seems they may remember the likes of me from the old days and have no intention of letting us get away with paying for two beers, when we've obviously had two buckets full. That's the Germans for you - all parsimony and prudence and just no craic at all. Now where's that IOU? â€Â¢ â€Â¢ â€Â¢ Quote of the Week 'They have taken a pay cut and then have to pay their levies. It's not easy.' â€â€ Senator Donie Cassidy (on €85,000) bemoaning the lot of part-time Senators[/private]