Seemingly…

Harry McGee reports in today’s Irish Times that the Fine Gael Website is going to be taken down and replaced with one page with a video message from Enda Kenny. (So this is what he has been doing over the holiers?)

The party will shut down its main website – containing hundreds of pages – and replace it with a website consisting of a single page containing a video message from party leader Enda Kenny and an invitation to voters to share their views on policy and the future of Ireland.

The party said it was “a genuine attempt to start to change the way politics in Ireland works”, using methods modelled on those of former British prime minister Tony Blair and of Barack Obama during his US presidential campaign.

Fine Gael was portraying the move as the first time that interactive technology had been used to such an extent in an Irish election, it said. The views of voters would be incorporated into the party’s policies.

Is this what the American campaign expert Ravi Singh advised on his recent visit to Dublin which you would have read about around these parts last month? We also found out some of the market research underway for the campaign.

One hopes the video message will be better than this one. And that there will be parodies within oh a day or so.  How long till someone claims Enda has gone viral?

Included in this exercise is the invitation to the public to send in their ideas and complaints – Haven’t we had this so many times before – Your Country Your Call and the Ideas Campaign being just two previous run outs.

Psst.  Enda Kenny is not Barack Obama. Our election system is not the same as America.  The website and the campaign are going to be very different.  Please can we stop comparing whatever is going to be produced to that used in US Election 2008?   Or else we will have to compare Enda to Obama and it might not be pretty.

Update

I found the video

Enda Kenny from Fine Gael on Vimeo.

Initial thoughts on the concept rather than the video – Fine Gael have no policy now and have to ask voters? So if they criticise other party’s policies or the lack of them they don’t have a leg to stand on. Leadership Leadership Leadership. I have said it before and no doubt I will say it again. The country needs leading and to see it has leaders.