A shot of him stares out from the front of the bins, alongside a caption identifying him as a Fine Gael candidate and a slogan which reads "Getting things done for people".

Ambiguous, that slogan. You wouldn't know whether they were good things or bad things. Or whether they were done at random or for a carefully selected target group.

One of the things he does for people who live in his constituency is pepper them with newsletters. They'd take the eye out of you, would Brody's newsletters, printed, as they are, in full colour, laid out as beautifully as Vogue, and replete with competitions inviting readers to win substantial prizes. No expense spared.

The great thing about being Brody Sweeney is that he doesn't have to waste time, as do most aspirant politicians, on fundraising. He has the funds himself.

Royalties on sandwiches are substantial and . . . so far, at least . . . don't land their recipients in front of a tribunal.

He's not alone in his pre-election advertising spend. Individual candidates and a couple of political parties are buying space at a rate inviting a reissue of that old Connie Francis number, 'Who's Sorry, Now?' The new version's wording would go:

"Who's spending now? / Who's spending now? /Who's buying ad space to build up a Wow?"

The short answer is: the PDs and Fine Gael.

Last week, it was Michael McDowell, beaming forcefully out from a green background in half-page newspaper ads.

Next week, who knows?

One advantage ads have is that the pictures are usually taken in studio, as opposed to in the great outdoors in the teeth of a gale, so the person looks good.

This is particularly the case with Michael McDowell, who looks energetically winsome in the PD ads, whereas, in unposed shots, he can look like a sand-blasted, rocket-fuelled Mussolini.

The better-in-studio rule does have its exceptions, of course. The demonstrably attractive Enda Kenny, in the FG pictures recently run in bus shelters and poster sites, had the look of a man in serious need of a pint and a steak.

The decision not to hold back on advertising until the election is called makes a lot of sense. For starters, expenditure, once an election is called, is constrained, whereas, this far in advance of the poll, no such constraints exist. In theory, this greatly favours the bigger, richer parties, although in practice, this time around, Fianna Fail hasn't got into the advertising business at all, no matter how flush it is with cash.

Once an election is called, a weird panic sets in. Every politician gets convinced that if they're not pictured in the paper or seen on TV two days before the election, voters won't remember who they are and will plump for another candidate who has figured in a recent picture.

Normally po-faced politicians suddenly develop a willingness to do anything a photographer asks. Ask them to hang upside down from a crane wearing the party logo on a sarong and they'll do it.

Which is largely pointless, since every other politician, at the same time, is evincing willingness to don a sarong and hook themselves to a handy crane, thus crowding the newspapers in the final week of an election crowded with photographs of politicians doing embarrassing things to themselves. They're also awash in panicdriven advertising. The newspaper reader, like Brody Sweeney, gets filled up with rubbish.

Advertising well in advance of an election, on the other hand, allows themes and faces to embed themselves in the consciousness of voters . . . a capacity of particular value to opposition parties, whose newcomers have little chance of using media to make themselves known to the electorate. Even opposition front benchers get stuck in reactive mode. The announcements by government ministers of initiatives, green papers or new grants inevitably draw cameras and journalists.

In the interests of balance, an opposition viewpoint may then be sought. But even then, a Darwinian survival-of-the-bestknown kicks in, so that party leaders, rather than designated spokespeople, may be preferred. This is complicated by media need to select the reaction-giver from three or four opposition parties, and the final problem is that the soundbite or quote from the selected spokesperson tends to appear in the latter half of the story.

Advertising by-passes all of those filtersystems and further obviates the nasty possibility of probing interrogation.

It's safe to predict that the coming months will see cross-party examples of the Brody Sweeney Syndrome: big-spend pre-election advertising.