For the best part of every five years, the doorstep is merely a threshold. But right now, it is the crucial interface between the people and their representatives, and thus it is open to dog's abuse and the most barefaced lying seen since the last election.

We hear enough about the doorstep. The first rule of the doorstep is that it is the candidate's friend. No matter how bad things look, irrespective of all the straws laughing in the wind, the doorstep is on your side.

Let's say there is a bad poll. Our candidate finds that his rating is south of that of the fella from the Monster Raving Looney party.

"What, " he is asked, microphone bristling the hairs on his nostrils, "makes you so unpopular?"

"Well, Charlie, far from being unpopular, I have to tell you that the poll result certainly does not reflect the reaction I am getting on the doorstep." Ah, the doorstep, where all your dreams come true, if only to get that goddamn reporter off your back.

So it was with Fine Gael in 2002, right up until the results of the slaughter began filtering through.

Until that point, Michael Noonan swore blind that the doorstep was with him.

Look at the recent travails of poor Bertie Ahern and all that associated cash. Who was the most important player in the whole affair?

The doorstep. If the matter wasn't being raised by Mr, Miss or Mrs Doorstep, then it wasn't a matter at all, merely a figment of the media's highly developed imagination. The doorstep is the font of all wisdom when the people are gearing up to decide.

The doorstep can, at this time, be a weather vane, conveying portents of doom through frozen smiles, or heralding a fair wind by the widening of bright eyes. The doorstep is the great leveller.

It is the father of spin. You can have your focus groups, your political consultants, your tracking polls and your dirty rotten tricks. All are naught compared to invoking the response of the doorstep.

What is raised on the doorstep? That depends on who is relating the conversation with the doorstep. And since the doorstep itself ain't telling, then we must rely on the politician's version of events.

Back to Bertie's cash. All Fianna Fail people say it didn't darken the doorstep. When Enda Kenny was asked whether the issue was coming up on the doorstep, he paused before delivering a considered reply. "It's coming up in all sorts of situations, " he said, careful not to invoke the sacred doorstep, lest it release a gush of sympathy for Ahern.

So it goes. If you are in the government, the doorstep says one thing. For the opposition, the doorstep speaks out of another side of its mouth. Last week, education minister Mary Hanafin told a radio programme that it was mainly local issues that were coming up on the doorstep. That's the class of doorstep a minister enjoys shooting the breeze with because she can't be blamed for the mundane stuff.

The opposition keep saying that health, crime and an appetite for change are what they are getting on the doorstep. Mr Doorstep makes no bones about it: 'I have an appetite for change, ' to the opposition, from sunup to sundown all the way to polling day.

The greatest thing of all about the doorstep is the feeling of power it oozes. For most of the year, the mountain behind the doorstep must visit Mohammed in his poky constituency office. But at this high water mark, the doorstep hosts the sitdown and in it the power of the occasion resides.

It is approached with caution, trepidation even, rather than the indifferent footwear to which it is customarily attuned. It attracts respect and fear in equal measure.

For it holds in its grasp the purest form of power known to man. Let's hear it for the doorstep.