These names, in case you were one of the people who didn't know what Newstalk was on about when they were approached in the street last week, are the leaders of the parties who will contest the election. For some reason, the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins wasn't included, although his party could, on a good day, win as many seats as the PDs in the election. (Three is the figure I'm thinking of here . . . Higgins and Clare Daly in Dublin, Mick Barry in Cork).

In any event, Newstalk kicked off its poll of the huddled masses on Friday morning, asking 100 people to give their one word opinion on our leaders. Many people didn't get the concept and offered many more words than one, including the woman who revealed that she had heard of Bertie Ahern.

Pat Rabbitte came out with the most positives from the poll, while Enda Kenny and Michael McDowell scored the highest negatives. One person suggested that McDowell was Satan in disguise, a terrible reflection on Satan, I think you'll agree. The Taoiseach also picked up quite a few negatives. The word chancer was used more than once, although the word legend cropped up too.

Entertaining as this poll made the journey to work on Friday morning, it was also completely useless and unscientific as a guide to what might happen in 39 days' time, if 31 May is indeed election day. Approaching random strangers in the street and asking them for their opinions is about as reliable a way to gauge what might happen in the election as employing an astrologer, a psychic, or some other chancer to predict what will happen. But Newstalk can hardly be criticised for coming up with its own daft polling method, when everybody else seems to be at it.

RTE, for example, is apparently still clinging to the belief that its three shows featuring the spoofer Frank Luntz were a worthwhile way to spend license fee and taxpayers' money. What actually happened was that The Week In Politics, once a serious and intelligent television programme, was handed over to a Yankee showman and turned into a circus.

By no stretch of anybody's imagination could it be said to be a reliable or scientific exercise.

It's not just our national broadcasters who are indulging themselves in daft polling. In recent times, telephone polls have become the favoured method of generating news stories for at least one national newspaper. This effectively involves interrupting people during Coronation Street to ask them what they think about some issue of great importance to the nation, or at least to the journalists in the newspaper. With amazing consistency, these polls find that the people of Ireland believe the same things as the journalists in the newspaper.

Here in the Tribune Towers, we've been a bit behind the times in getting involved in daft polling, preferring to use established companies like IMS Millward Brown to do a proper job.

However, I'm working on a new kind of poll at the moment, which involves showing voters pictures of the party leaders while simultaneously bursting a balloon and playing the music of Bette Midler. I've still to iron out a few details, but so far the results are intriguing. You wouldn't believe how much people go off Gerry Adams when a balloon suddenly explodes in their ear. Hardly anyone thinks that the PDs are the wind beneath their wings. I'll get back to you when I've perfected the methodology.

This rush to poll people other than in the tried and tested manner seems to be based on a desperate need to solicit the views of what is often called the man on the street. One of the characteristics of the man on the street is that he is often a woman;

another is that he, or she, is viewed as fountain of all wisdom in the world. Hence the recent opening up of news programmes to the views of its listeners.

Hardly any news programme on Irish daytime radio . . .Morning Ireland is the only one that comes to mind . . . is free of the input of the man on the street. No topic of importance can be said to have been covered properly unless it's been given a good going over by the man on the street. The Late Late Show is defaced every Friday night by the ramblings of clearly deranged individuals skipping across the screen.

TV3 and Sky News invite listeners to give their opinions on topical issues and then present them as poll findings Lest we be accused of snobbery, this is not an argument against people having opinions, or for the notion that some people should be seen but never heard. It's more a concern that these views are promoted and accepted as the views of the country as a whole, when, in fact, they are merely the opinions of the angry mob which makes up the majority of those who go to the bother of contacting radio and television stations.

So Newstalk would do well not to put much store in its pursuit of the opinions of the man on the street. In any case, judging by the overuse of the word muppeh (that's Dublin for muppet) to describe some of the party leaders, Friday's poll was carried out only on the streets of the capital, definitely not the place to gauge what the people of Ireland think.

Hopefully, Newstalk will do its next poll in Cork, where there will at least be the possibility somebody calling the Taoiseach a total langer.

That would be entertaining, but let's not carried away with the idea that it would mean anything.