LEADERS on both sides in the election campaign have begun to direct attention to the people, as well as the policies, they have on offer. Some say this is because the electorate has difficulty choosing between policies, though that may be as much the fault of the media, with their frequently trivial coverage, as of the parties.
Others argue that personal ability, style and experience count for almost as much as content in modern politics. This is a world in which, as the cliche has it, it's the perception that counts.
But the political portraits are at least as dull as the snaps from the family album and, in certain circumstances, every bit as embarrassing. The portraits I have in mind are those shot at Aras an Uachtarain just after the President has handed the seals of office to Cabinet members.
There they are, old friends and older enemies, dark suited as a rule, not knowing whether to risk a smile and never daring to look at each other for fear of being caught in the act. Years later, as they turn the pages of Nealon's Guide, readers will pause at the political equivalent of the uncle now rumoured to be somewhere in Australia. Occupation unknown.
The eastern European parties had a way with those who had fallen from favour: they were airbrushed from the portraits and vanished from the pages of the official histories.
MILAN Kundera pokes fun at the practice in his brilliantly subversive collection The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, When his disgraced leader vanishes, the technicians get to work on the portrait. By the time they've done, all that's left of the Unnamcable is his hat, the significance of which is bound to be pondered by succeeding generations of academics.
Fine Gael organisers must be wishing that a hat was all they had to remember Michael Lowry by; or that, if not when he resigned from the Cabinet, at least with the dissolution of the Dail he'd headed for the outback.
That way they'd have been spared the distraction of embarrassing questions at every hand's turn about what's to happen if Mr Lowry is reelected and if his support were needed to reelect the government.
The Lowry affair has seriously damaged Fine Gael and politics generally; the related Haughey affair has the potential for much greater damage to politics and to Fianna Fail.
Bertie Ahern has been praised of late not only for the pace of his presidential progress but for ridding FF of its troublesome past, or those parts of the past that were liable to prove embarrassing in this campaign.
He has not only acknowledged old failings: by his refusal to tolerate any hint of questionable activity among the party's public representatives, he has shown what confessors once demanded, a firm purpose of amendment.
But Mr Ahern isn't the first FF leader to have tried separating the party from its past. Jack Lynch didn't need to: his predecessors were Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass and he had an electoral record superior to either.
However, when Charles Haughey succeeded Mr Lynch in 1979, he set about stamping his authority on a divided party and began by behaving as if Mr Lynch had never been its leader.
Mr Lynch (the most popular politician since Daniel O'Connell, according to Liam Cosgrave) was barely mentioned. His opponents, who had referred to him with derision as Honest Jack when he was in office, ceased to speak of him at all.
Mary Harney now criticises the parties of the left but fails to remember how much more closely the Fianna Fail of which she was a leading if dissident member resembled the Stalinists in their singleparty states.
It's not that FF under Mr Haughey was imbued with ideas of the left, rather that it called for unquestioning loyalty to the leader and punished resistance with expulsion.
She can hardly have forgotten the response to the honourable fight put up by her colleague, Des O'Malley: he was expelled for abstaining in a Dail division on contraception, conduct defined as unbecoming to suit the purposes of the time.
The trouble for Mr Ahern is that, if it's unlikely Ms Harney has forgotten, he certainly hasn't. As he lines up his front bench for the final week of the campaign and the spotlight plays on the competing teams, he cannot but feel uneasy.
The shadow that falls on the Government's side is that of Mr Lowry. But most of his financial affairs appear to have been in the public domain for months. He is expected to cooperate with the McCracken tribunal.
And the Government is wholly committed to implementing the Electoral Act, part of which is already in force, ensuring a radical change in, the relationship between business and politics which has led to deep public cynicism of late.
THE shadow that falls on the opposition is that of Mr Haughey. His financial affairs arc not, and never have been, in the public domain. It's not clear whether he will cooperate with the McCracken tribunal.
And in Government, a Fianna Fail Progressive Democrats coalition would neither implement the provision for State funding of parties nor impose a limit on spending in elections.
Mr Ahern may attempt to airbrush Mr Haughey from the family portrait, but those who served with him - and presumably obeyed his injunction never to ask about his wealth or his role in the Arms Crisis of 1970 - are still active and eager to resume office.
Ray Burke, Seamus Brennan, Michael O'Kennedy, Joe Walsh, Charlie McCreevy - the old firm led by Bertie himself, the most cunning, the most devious, the most ruthless of them all, if Mr Haughey, is to be believed.
Their director of elections is another of Mr Haughey's close associates, the once and maybe future government press secretary P.J. Mara, well known for his work as a lobbyist and adviser to several companies and public organisations during the past five years.
He says he isn't paid by the party and claims there is no conflict of interest between his roles as director of elections for FF and adviser to Independent Newspapers, the biggest newspaper group in the State.
The company publishes about two thirds of the Irish newspapers sold daily and over 90 per cent of those sold on Sundays.