The two-hour slot on the Saturday morning will be marshalled by the various party handlers. Pre-written scripts will be read by general election candidates. The suits and skirts will be well pressed, the hair done, the make-up professionally applied.

But for all the effort, these aspiring politicians will be watched by a tiny audience. Later in the evening, the various party leaders will have an opportunity to impress. But none will dazzle. The days of the big conference speech are long gone. Pat Rabbitte can deliver a script - and Michael McDowell is new to this business - but the others can hardly find their own voice boxes, not to mind grab the attention of the nation.

So the format doesn't work for the parties, for the viewers or for the broadcaster? The obvious solution is to change the format. But to do so would require RT�? to spend more money than it already does on this live outside broadcast. An unwillingness to do so exposes the station's difficult predicament, caught in a bind between being a public service broadcaster and also a commercial TV operation. RT�? has no interest in overhauling its dull and uninspiring coverage of party conferences. I say this as someone with first-hand involvement, having replaced Brian Farrell as the current affairs presenter assigned to these gatherings.

The prevailing - and private - view would be to end the live coverage altogether. The biggest concern for many in RT�? is the loss of audience share in the competitive prime-time 8.30pm Saturday evening slot. Viewers do not tune in for the leaders' speeches and the station then struggles over the remainder of the evening to recapture the type of audience share it would normally win on a Saturday evening.

Live coverage of the morning session should be dropped, with much greater effort made with the leader's speech programme. Politics should not be cast to the margins of the RT�? schedule. After all, it is programming such as this that the licence fee is supposed to fund. Political parties need to be able to get their message across to the public. Another idea would be to re-examine the current law which bans political advertising on radio and television. In addition to the traditional party political broadcasts at election times, all registered groupings should be allocated a share of daily advertising space on national and local radio stations.

These slots would be given free and the parties would merely have to adhere to the advertising code in terms of content. The promotion of individual candidates would be prohibited, to force the parties to engage with policy issues. The independents would also be entitled to their say, with a lottery for the slots among them.

LABOUR Senator Brendan Ryan (LEFT) has introduced a novel bribe in a quest to drum up attention for his reelection campaign to Seanad �?ireann. He's asked voters to return by post an information card which seeks their views on which issues he should prioritise. The voters have to pay for the price of a stamp but for every card returned Ryan will donate 50 cent to the Simon Community. It seems a good deal. In his latest newsletter, the Cork politician offers considerable honesty about his quarter of a century of political activity. When he started out he says he was "an unreconstructed leftie?" but now, after 25 years he's "only a little bit tired". A candidate on the NUI university panel, he makes a good case for another term.

Lies, damn lies and press releases: question everything you read THESE are not the best of times for Fine Gael, what with Friday's TNS/MRBI opinion poll following the outcome in the recent Millward Brown/IMS survey for this newspaper.

Still, the Blueshirts showed last week that they can still write a decent press release.

"Inpatient admissions down but Bertie says they're up: T'seach must be suffering delusions, " read the headline in a statement issued by FG's deputy leader Richard Bruton last Wednesday.

"I don't know where the Taoiseach is living if he believes inpatient admissions are rising. In his own Northside District inpatient admissions are down 6% - 3,405 fewer admissions in the past four years, " Bruton added.

There will be plenty of massaging of figures and statistics - by all sides - in the weeks ahead.

The lesson for the voters is to believe nothing and to question everything. At least in four months' time, the election will be over.

A small consolation.