Campaign Gist: The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer

Day 7's Campaign Gist and we suddenly wake, blinking, into a new world.

Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre
The Doldrums are behind us, the next polls are out and the metallic tastes of panic and power are co-existing in almost everyone's mouth. The efforts at command and control, frayed from a first week full of unpredictable and unignorable events, are shredding under the pressure of feedback.

Suddenly, we have a whole line up of extra TV debates coming up, and the spending promises are falling upon us like dandruff on a school vice-principal's jacket. In line for a €10m sports grant for rugby in Galway, home to multiple imperilled FG TDs?

The Taoiseach makes it €20m, just to be on the safe side.

Sinn Féin demand equal time for their leader in the RTE debate, and, as they're in a statistical dead heat in the polls with the Taoiseach's party, lots of people start to say- 'seems sort of fair'.

Liveline surfaces the problem that people leave their jobs at 65, but the Government has moved pension payments to 67 and plan to force the retired people to pretend to look for work for the intervening two years for thousands less than their pension. And pensioners vote. All the parties promise to fix this, but only the Government is going to get the blame.

Then there was this:

Gold.