Well, are you counting down the days to the presidential election, now that the dust has settled and the deadline for nominations has ended?

Did I hear a collective ‘meh’?

Did I hear a sarcastic voice at the back suggesting they would rather count down the days to their next tooth extraction?

Yes, I’m afraid the race for the Áras (we’re 27 days from polling day, by the way) has turned into the kind of damb squib that gives slightly wet squibs a bad name.

You’re familiar with one critic’s description of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”?

Well, this is a presidential race where nothing of interest happened, time after time after time.

What was your personal lowlight? The ‘in-out, in-out shake it all about’ Fine Gael dance as their initial candidate Mairead McGuinness pulled out, to be replaced by an identikit blueskirt in Heather Humphreys?

Or perhaps it was Micheál Martin’s slow bicycle race strategy, as he waited for the other contenders to declare first so the field was clear for Fianna Fáil’s candidate. When the Corkman finally got the wheels in motion, his chain promptly came off when he handed the garland to a Dublin sports coach.

The sense of underwhelm down here on Leeside was palpable.

No offence to Jim Gavin, but he didn’t even have the decency to appear in a few series of Ireland’s Fittest Family to raise his profile nationally before fully entering public life.

My personal lowlight of the phoney nominations war was when Sinn Féin ended months of dilly-dallying by dramatically announcing they would make a “game-changer” decision on their........

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