THE call came through on Thursday afternoon. A London-based journalist with a leading international news organisation was on the line. He was very diligently doing some preparatory research in advance of the Irish general election and he wanted a quick briefing from me as to what the big issues would be come next May.

It should have been a routine question to put to a political correspondent of a national newspaper, yet it managed to turn me into a quivering mass of jelly. After much stammering, scratching of my head, filibustering and generally talking nonsense, I had to finally admit that, as of now, I wasn't really sure what the major issues would be come general election time.

All of the talk at the moment, I explained, was which party would go into government with which. Would Labour go in with Fianna Fáil? Would the Greens link up with Fianna Fáil and, possibly, the PDs? Would the PDs be part of ABBA (the anybody but Bertie alliance)? Would Fianna Fáil form a government that was supported by Sinn Féin? Etc, etc.

The journalist patiently listening on the other end of the phone was far too polite to point out that this was surely a case of putting the cart before the horse;

that surely the emphasis should be on the key areas that would determine how people would cast their vote and not on what might happen after the election if any one of 10 different scenarios emerged. But the point could not have been lost on him, nor was it on me.

Of course, the political parties, and no doubt many readers, will dispute my suggest- ion that there are no big issues. What about, just for starters, health, crime, childcare, transport, the environment and immigration? Yes, all these issues are important to people, but will the general election actually be decided by them? Very doubtful.

With virtually every opinion poll, we are told that health is the people's number one priority, but it almost never seems to impact come general election time. A couple of constituencies have elected hospital candidates and in 1989, a perception that Fianna Fáil failed to understand anger over cutbacks in the health services definitely cost the party seats and its chance of an overall majority.

But since then, it's difficult to see how it has influenced elections. In the last general election, the Labour party published a well-thought-out policy promising universal health insurance. It wasn't perfect - the notion of free GP care regardless of a person's wealth is a bad use of resources - but it was a genuinely radical approach to tackling the twotier nature of the Irish health system. Yet it hardly got a look-in at the election, aside from mutterings from Fianna Fáil that it might lead to the scaling down of local hospitals.

Crime did have an impact in the 1997 general election when Fianna Fáil's zero tolerance policy got a lot of publicity but, with zero tolerance now but a distant memory of an almost quaint bygone age, does anybody still believe that any of the parties have a magic wand to tackle crime? Fine Gael have been telling us that Enda Kenny will "make the criminals pay for their crimes" but, aside from the oh so daft 'boot camp' idea, detail on exactly how those criminals will be made pay has been pretty thin on the ground.

It would wrong to say that political parties don't come up with policies.

Come general election time, all the parties will produce pages upon pages of policies, some of which will be pretty innovative. The problem is that nobody really pays very much attention to them.

The media are as much to blame as anybody. We are bored by the detail in policies and, rightly or wrongly, believe readers or viewers aren't interested.

After the last general election, a politician revealed privately to this columnist that his party knew nobody in the media was paying close attention to its policy pronouncements when a glaring problem with one of its key policy documents went wholly undetected.

General issues such as the economy and immigration will of course prove influential in the run-up to the election, but the reality of Irish general elections is that people tend to vote for a person rather than a party. As Albert Reynolds once pointed out, the next general election will effectively be 43 separate elections.

While of course those individual elections are impacted by national swings - witness the collapse of Fine Gael in 2002 or the "Spring tide" of 10 years earlier - it's generally the work done on the ground by a politician that will secure his or her election.

That has spawned the monster where the state spends over Euro5m a year on salaries of staff to deal with the constituency work of government ministers. Ministers can apparently issue up to a thousand letters and emails a week on behalf of constituents. It's a fair bet that a good percentage of that communication is utterly pointless but unless the letters and emails are sent, the politician probably won't be re-elected. We can't have it both ways. If we only vote for politicians that prime the parish pump, we have to expect that such controversies will arise.

And, more worryingly, we also have to accept that real policy choices will never be central to our general elections.