That the public warm to Enda Kenny once they get a look at him. That voters care in a general way about crime, health and road safety.

In a general way. There's the rub. Caring about something in a general way doesn't influence the way people vote.

Take road safety. The high level of media coverage of this issue in recent times has trained the public in all the right responses. "Personal responsibility." "Enforcement." "Never mind the policy, feel the implementation."

Put a microphone in front of them in the street, and out they'll pour, those views, together with calls for the broiling of Martin Cullen and the slicing of Gaybo.

Of course, if Uncle Gabriel threw his helmet at it right now and if Martin Cullen stored the issue alongside the voting machines, it wouldn't make a ha'porth of difference to the way people vote in the upcoming election. Road safety is not a local hospital-type issue which would skew the voting in a particular constituency. But it comes up in the opinion polls, because it's expected to come up in the opinion polls. Because people feel they should have an opinion on such an important issue. Which goes to prove that the themes explored in most national opinion polls are largely irrelevant. It's no more than "temperature polling", a way of measuring obvious change in the temperature surrounding each political party.

Then there's constituency polling, which mostly serves to inform head office that the candidate in whom they vested high hopes because he or she licked up to them is regarded, on the ground, as roughly the equivalent of the juvenile sea squirt. That's the little underwater guy whose only purpose in life is to find a handy rock to live on. Once it finds its rock, it doesn't need its brain any more, so it eats it.

The big expenditure in the coming months will be on focus groups. A special place in hell is reserved for whoever invented the focus group, that cosseted nest of opinionated idlers possessed of increasing power and damn all responsibility.

Focus groups carry the badge of being 'qualitative' rather than merely 'quantitative'. Meaning you get to hear more detailed drivel from smaller numbers of the uninsightful for longer periods of time.

Oh, and you get quotes from SUV-driving Mother-of-Three about how difficult it is to get her kids to the creche, the ballet lessons and the soccer because of the traffic congestion. The quotes won't sound anything like what SUV-driving Motherof-Three actually says about the things she really cares about when she's in full conversational flight, because in a focus group, she's mainly focused on impressing the knickers off the other nonentities in the group.

Significantly, Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign featured not a single focus group. "The group dynamic doesn't sufficiently duplicate reality, " one of his advisers said. "People tend to say a lot of socially desirable stuff."

In Ireland, that "socially desirable stuff" includes the virtuous observation that elections should be about policy, not personal attack. Find me a virtuous observer who, the minute the election is called, goes on the web and does a comparative study of the policy programmes elucidated by every political party, and I'll show you a virtuous observer who a) has no life, b) has no job, c) has no friends and d) may be a unique mutation worth extensive study.

Michael McDowell doesn't need focus groups to tell him what to do, coming up to a general election. He feels it in his waters and has started acting on it already.

He has a bunch of nerds in some wellstocked cellar someplace, going through speeches and TV appearances made by opposition people going back to 1916 and some of them about 1916 and he will come thundering back to the House in September, his back pockets bulging with instances to derail the rhetorical train of each opposition speaker.

Running through all of those derailers will be one deadly theme: Risk. The government parties know that, as oil prices rise and the ESB says "sorry lads, we have to pass this on", the newly propertied and prosperous begin to circle the Mercs.

Crudely put, the question in their mind is "If this lot of reasonably bright people, with a load of experience under their belt, can't get the bureaucracy we now live in right, what's the advantage in turning that bureaucracy over to another lot of reasonably bright people with no experience, even of each other?"

James Carville, according to legend, stuck a reminder sign up in Clinton's campaign HQ: 'It's the Economy, Stupid'.

Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens should stick signs up in their offices, right now, to ensure they don't lose sight of the battleground on which the election will be fought: It's the Risk, Stupid.