Sinn Fein is at 9%, down one; the Progressive Democrats 3%, down one; others 8%, unchanged. This is so boring that I don't really understand why I have lifted it from the front page . . . the front page! . . . of Friday's Irish Times. Oh, I know, it's because I couldn't find Friday's Irish Independent.

Government's satisfaction rating has recovered nicely after the December budget, exactly as it did last year. Fine Gael has dropped by 1%, which for some reason is seen as a disaster. I suppose we must see Fine Gael's vertiginous fall in the context of the white hot excitement of a pre-election year. No wonder I'm not sleeping.

Rabbitte has risen four points since he made a speech revealing to an unsuspecting media what ordinary people had been talking about for the previous two years. On the by-election stump in Navan last spring, which it was my pleasure to cover, one voter delivered almost exactly the same speech as the one subsequently delivered by Pat Rabbitte. She delivered it in similarly measured tones, even though this single woman had been made redundant from a local factory because eastern European workers had been brought in to replace her, and to be paid half her wages.

Verily, the mills of Irish politics grind slow, and there is a growing suspicion that even Irish politicians have lost interest in them.

Surely we would be much better off just abandoning this charade and handing it all over to Bertie for the duration of his natural life. Or perhaps we've done that already. It's kind of hard to tell.

Is it going to be a Fine Gael-Labour coalition? Or is it going to be a Fianna FailLabour coalition? Sorry, I nodded off there for a sec. But these questions are so tiring and pointless, why don't we just turn the houses of the Oireachtas into a hotel? The location is excellent and the parking spaces are already there.

The Dail cleverly provided free car-parking facilities for political journalists by ripping up the most beautiful lawn in the city. The civil servants' free car parking spaces . . . thousands of them . . . are located elsewhere. And we wonder about the traffic problems.

Phew, getting a bit controversial back there for a minute. I'll be voting next.

Actually I always vote, but voter apathy has now spread to those of us who bother to turn up at our local national schools and use those nice pencils which are tied to the booth with string. We can't really tell the difference between the political parties anymore, even if we put our glasses on.

Some day there'll be an accident. Not that any of us will notice.

On Friday, the Irish Times had a headline saying "Opposition really needs to come up with a 'Big Idea'". Which has to be the saddest thing you ever read. Even the inverted commas are depressing, as inverted commas so often are. For goodness sake, if the politicians don't do something damn quick the newspaper industry here is going to collapse. The real function of opinion polls is, after all, to sell more newspapers and with opinion polls like this latest one that well is going to run dry pretty soon.

The fact that Gerry Adams's satisfaction rating has remained virtually static is only interesting if you can remember who Gerry Adams was. Turning the Dail into a hotel is one 'Big Idea', I like to think, even though my more cynical fellow citizens will say that it is a hotel already.

And making Bertie Taoiseach for life is another one . . . although, again, there are those who maintain that that task is already accomplished.