3 Days to go

We’ve entered the final stretch and parties were busy yesterday with events of one sort or another. Today and tomorrow are the last days of camapaign coverage in the broadcast media. (Keep an eye to Irishelection.com on Thursday for some special ‘No Moratorium Online’ coverage!)

Myself and Alexia Golez attended the Green Party press event in Dublin to hear about the party’s Vision for Dublin including creating a LIffey Valley National Park, ending rezoning and  extra time to cross pedestrian crossings and of course creating  more  allotments and community gardens.

Alexia has the videos of the press event with Ciaran Cuffe, Deirdre de Búrca, David Geary and party leader John Gormley in the Italian Quarter. There were questions on transfers and the lack of them, the intervention of Mary Harney into the campaign, and the possibility of no MEP from a Government party in Dublin.

Fine Gael were up a pole near Stephen’s Green. Enda Kenny joined Pashcal Donohue and George Lee launching new posters for the last few days of the campaign. Fine Gael of course didn’t bother telling everyone about these events, still don’t have a RSS feed on their website and whilst they are using Youtube with original content to some extent their online campaign has been very poor.

There is no surprise really in this lack of engagement given the website debacle. Some candidates and party members are extremely frustrated with the lack of interest from party HQ, I don’t see the haze lifting anytime soon. There’s plenty of time for post mortems (and award ceremonies!) later.

As for Fianna Fáil well they have blogs on the party website and use twitter to tell people what’s happening (after it happens mainly).

And then there is the party Flickr account. Who needs to blame bloggers for frivolity and lack of editorial processes when someone in the FF press office uploads these from yesterday’s event in Dublin?

I think Labour had the day off Press events and their related online prescence yesterday – I saw a few press releases including one for Alan Kelly getting another sporting endorsement this time from Eamon Coughlan.

We’ll be back later with a round up – let us know if you’ve got something for us!