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Monday, February 26, 2007

Show or Substance - Noel Whelan

I picked up Noel Whelan's Show or Substance over the weekend. It was more for research than anything else as I'm not completely at ease with being armed with the tools to assess the various party's take on the issues from someone who was so recently a FF candidate and is obviously still very much an advisor to them.

It is hard to tell if he is meant to collecting together the policy positions of all the parties and comparing them especially when no policy for either the PDs or FF is posted separately. Of course, this is natural enough since both are in government they do not have separate policies at this point. Instead, we get the policies of the parties compared to the government's take on things. And there is no real highlighting of inconsistencies, perhaps I was hoping for some better presentation beyond the novel style text, even some bulletin points making it easier for Seamus Public to compare what is said would help.

I'm not finished but I would for the moment note there are a number of factual errors such as the glaring one given the Whelan's professed expertise is the coverage of elections that SF won a council seat in Limerick East in 2004. SF didn't win any city or council seats in Limerick in 2004.

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