Things that glow and bump in the night. Sinister workings inside black box bits of technology we don't understand or trust. The group who are supposed to get people agitated about these fears and whip them into a Liveline frenzy are we denizens of the Fourth Estate.

Our leaders . . . political, civic, corporate . . . are supposed to stand up and throw cold water onto scary stories that are, let's face it, infotainment. Politicians, even when they do it in a Donald Rumsfeldian haiku about "known unknowns", are supposed to be more level-headed.

It's a tough job, reassuring the public. If you're not on top of your brief you could be handed a free case of Joe Jacob-brand iodine tablets. But even in a democratic culture prone to sudden panics and easy scares, there is an onus on those who choose the noble and often thankless calling of public service to do just that.

Sadly, leadership is scarce.

RTE screens scaremonger bunk in the form of Fallout, but rather than lead a responsible discussion about nuclear power in its wake, An Taoiseach took the low road about the subject at the Engineers Ireland conference.

Far from even considering taking up his proper role, Bertie pushed back at the assembled science boffins, saying the merits of nuclear power are neither here nor there.

They might be completely sound. "But [it's] another [thing] to ever try to convince anybody." (Emphasis mine. ) So it's not worth discussing.

"Ever." Never mind that the programme RTE should have made is Blackout, where the country's energy supply is so insecure that one multinational company after another leaves Ireland, taking their taxes and jobs with them. It's a hell of a lot more likely than Sellafield exploding.

A slightly less radioactive (sorry) issue is e-voting, a running sore for a governing coalition that has otherwise done an exemplary job in promoting Ireland's international reputation as a tech-savvy place to do business.

Fears were whipped up about the security and integrity of the system, confirmed by an Independent Commission on Electronic Voting, which found that the system's reliability couldn't be totally verified.

Now reckoned to have cost 52m, last week the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Fine Gael's Michael Noonan, declared electronic voting to be "a dead duck".

This came after last weekend's Progressive Democrats conference passed a motion calling for a return to the good old-fashioned paper ballot.

Bertie and Mary Harney are said to have met on the issue and the plan is to wait for the report of the independent commission before deciding what to do with our expensive voting hardware, with 7,000 machines gathering dust at a storage cost of 700,000.

Reading the tealeaves, if the pro-tech PDs have taken to Luddism on e-voting, it's likely we'll be back to paper ballots.

This would be a huge mistake. The only group of people who benefit from the existing system of paper ballots are the tallymen, who retain their colourful role in Irish political life, and the media, who get to stretch an election into an extra day or two of coverage.

Joe Soap gets no added value. Indeed the country arguably will suffer, both in its international reputation and its ability to deal maturely with complex issues about technology.

What's annoying about this is that we have an electronic system for another, arguably equally vital, aspect of governance, that's got both a great track record in gaining public confidence and a real benefit for all of us. Electronic tax returns.

The Revenue Online Service (ROS) is this government's great success story on deploying technology to make government work more efficiently.

Taxpayers have embraced the system, filing more than 1.1 million returns on ROS, including 53% of on-time tax returns worth 8.3bn in payments.

In other words, we are happy to trust the security of our tax collection to an electronic system. With multiple safeguards involving digital certificates and passwords sent by post, with punters getting the added benefit of being able to work the system from home.

If we can overcome our fears about technology when it comes to our money, surely we can find a way to do it with our votes. It just takes leadership.