Slow News Day

Cowslips in the local verges.

This post might be a bit short but, hey, Elizabeth tells me that the 'voters' tend to like 'same old same old'; it makes them feel comfortable that nothing is going to rock their boat or upset their millpond calm. I will pepper it with a selection of vaguely relevant pictures and maybe you, the reader, will fail to notice that I am not actually saying very much.

Dad-duck is paying a lot of attention to the new ducklings. 

Readers will think from the previous post that we are now letting our sheep out of their secure field to graze the longer grass and herbage around the garden, secure in the knowledge that they are well behaved sheep and will not do a runner into the neighbour's 5-acre cattle pasture.

Another barrow of cut hawthorn for the
log store.

Um. Slight change there - I let them out single handed on a recent day and watched all 9 nip through a gap. I had to stay with them lest they vanish we knew not where but rapidly phone Elizabeth to appear at the gap with a bucket of grub and tempt them home. All safe and sound now but the extra strand of barbed wire I added to the hedge below the one they had dipped under only stopped 3 of the 4 ewes the next day. Our oldest ewe, Polly was shimmying under it like a pro. They are now 'grounded' for the fore-see-able but by now the grass is growing so fast in their field that they will barely notice.

Thus order of a dozen asparagus crowns arrived looking more
28 to me including the scrappy bits. Thank you very much,
English's Fruit Nursery of Co. Wexford. 

The weather has continued mainly mild, so we have been getting on with the serious gardening, even in the absence of any Help-X support. I have gathered up all my wind-felled hawthorn and stacked it into the log store. I love that in May my store is filling up rather than stripped bare.

Asparagus bed with 'marker' row of catch-crop carrots

An order for a dozen asparagus crowns (Connovers Colossal var.) arrived containing my dozen nice fat crowns but also 16 more bits and pieces which English's might have seen as scraps but they look very good to me, so they have all gone into the ground in their lovely clean, weeded, mulched railway sleeper bed. We are looking to crop our first spears this year from crowns planted 2 years ago. Unfortunately the first spear to appear this week was broken off either by me in planting the new plants, or a chicken helper. Never mind. There will be more.

2 cuckoos, each pursued by a starling. 

We are suddenly surrounded by cuckoos. I noted that there were four calling in my 05:00 dawn chorus in the previous post. Since then I have seen 2 chasing about each pursued by a small songbird (possible starling?) and, today, 2 just cruising through our airspace unmolested. I had the camera in my hands for the chased two.

We loved this clever marketing campaign by Lidl Ireland. It's
mainly for the kids, but they give you a free seed pack with every
€20 spent. A tiny peat-pot about an inch cube, a pellet of peat and
a small amount of seeds in a paper strip, plus instructions. Our six
so far are doing very well. 

I have been out and about lately, helping various neighbours. Yesterday this was helping to repair some fencing down by the local main drain/stream and involved me wading about in the stream bed, praying that the water would not be too deep for the wellies (I was close, but OK). The local beef lads use the stream as water for their bullocks, and they cut 'slip-ways' down to the stream using  a digger.

We are re-starting the keyhole bed on the
'sun-deck'

The stream bed is 6' below the grassland at this place, so this lets the cattle down to below the height of the fences. Our job was to scramble down the slipway to fence off the river end of the slipway, so that bullocks coming down to drink could not wander out into the stream and go strolling up- or down-stream, escaping into the neighbour's territory.

A hole in the head. 

Meanwhile, there I was dozing 75% asleep on my pillow one night when a dog (Deefer?) decided to walk across the pillows to another position. As she walked by she just nicked the middle of my forehead with a toenail. I was vaguely aware of the pain and the small trickle of blood but slept on. In the morning I had a superb 'Harry Potter' style Z-shaped streak of dried blood down into and across one eye. It stung and the dried blood made it difficult to open that eye, so I washed it off before thinking to photograph it.

Ox Tail Stew under construction.

Finally, in 'breaking news' we hear tonight that the 'struggling writer in his garret' described in a recent post, Mr Dan, who was writing up a Masters thesis in Economics (actually supply chain resilience) in our spare room has passed his exams. That's all we know for now. He was chasing a 'Distinction' but our source does not say whether he got that. Well done Dan.

Twins for Polly and 'The Beast' Blows Through

Polly and the Twins. Only hours old here. 

Sometimes it all goes perfectly and you are delighted and relieved to have made the decisions you have made. In my previous post we were hustling the ewe 'Polly' indoors safe from the threatened weather and from our fox. I wasn't convinced she'd 'pop' that day, but I'd seen her pawing the ground, which is a good sign of imminent lambing. She wasn't very happy to be penned indoors but she settled down with her bucket of water, one of grub and a wad of hay.

The first born ewe-lamb in the morning.

I checked on her for the last time at 10:30 pm but there were no signs of action, so I took myself off to bed thinking we'd be 'go' the next day. She has always lambed down during daylight in previous years. Well, not this time. Liz was taking her last visit to the bathroom at midnight and could hear, from the Tígín beneath her window, a loud bleating which could only have one meaning. She raced down, checked the pen and took a photo of #1 lamb who was licked clean and on her feet, trying to suckle. She came to find me, woke me and showed me her phone. Woop woop! I sprinted down in my dressing gown (as you do) for a check and, finding all well, left her for 2 hours to see if she'd drop a twin.

At 2 a.m. or so I went back out and found she had now passed the 2nd twin and that, too, was on its feet, so may well have been born within half an hour of the first. That's how Polly usually does these things.  My memory always plays tricks on me in these situations - the newborns look so tiny and thin compared to our hulking great thug of a thriving ram-lamb born to Lily, now 5 weeks old. I was so pleased we had brought Polly in - the thought of those two thin little mites being born into the teeth of that snow and wind. I thought they'd have only lasted minutes or been lifted easily by the fox.

A kiss from the new lamb?

Long story short on these little ladies - we are all thriving and growing plump on Mum's milk. The wind since their birth has meant that they are still indoors and have not even seen the grass yet. It's all going very well.

Fox trap as a flat pack. 

In that same post, I was also chasing our fox trap, which I'd had on order from MacEoin's. We'd had a fox near-miss in which I'd let the dogs loose to chase the lad across the fields and we'd not seen the fox since, but it could only be a matter of time. The chase of MacEoin's got me a reply that they were dispatching their traps on the Tuesday, so we will receive ours on the Wednesday (28th).

Don't scratch my floor! Trap assembled in the Dining Room.

It turns up by the brilliant DPD courier at about 2 pm so the local flat-pack team goes to work and assembles it within half an hour. We bait it with dog food (it's all we had) and put it down in the veg patch where the fox killed the previous hen.

Come on Foxy. You know you want that
dog food. What could possibly go wrong?

While we are assembling it, our much forecast storm finally arrives, with flurries of tiny, very frozen snow. The forecast had Roscommon and our NW corner missing all the bad stuff - the worst of the snow and wind, and that has proved to be the case, so I shouldn't be complaining too loudly. My friends in the badly hit corner of the island have been posting impressive pictures of drifts, tractors struggling to get about, sheep getting rescued from out-fields, snow men and all that malarkey. We've had a good centimetre and drifts up to...oooh..... maybe 5 cm?

It is the wind that has got to me - a week plus of continuously strong, bitterly cold easterlies, frozen mornings including one where the wind froze the pipes inside out bathroom. This was where they run against the concrete block wall of the extension OUTSIDE the insulating panels / dry lining. That morning we had no loo-flush or hand basin cold supply (warm was OK) so I had to import our saved big Jerry-can of water for the flushing and go up into the loft to check that all the tank and pipes up in that restricted space were flowing freely. They were. The outside tap also regularly freezes, so my livestock rounds currently including carrying warm water to all the drinkers and buckets. The winds have been giving our temporary tarpaulin roof for the chook house quite a buffeting coming, as they do, from our least protected direction. The tarp is chafing badly and I will definitely need to do that new roof job this summer. My nerves will not stand another winter waiting for that to rip open in a gust.

A comforting sight for the house owner during 'The Beast' cold
snap. The top half of the roof is thawing, so you know the attic
is safe from freezing. 

This freezing indoors thing reminds me that this house is a bit oddly set out. It is not really actual "two storey" but what they call "one and three quarters" round here. The vertical walls stop at the top of the upstairs windows and the interior 'sides of the room carry on up inside the roof rafters for another 4 feet, so the horizontal ceiling is only a narrow strip up in the apex. The attic is in this tiny triangle, the 3 feet or so from ceiling to ridge and about 6 feet wide at the base. With the big water tank wedged in there, it is very difficult to move about if you are of any decent size. If we needed a plumber we'd have to find one with a child apprentice!

It's a long way up to the tiny loft hatch. 

I pass most winters with the loft hatch pushed open to ensure a regular flow of warm air from the spare bedroom up into the attic space, which is ludicrous from a thermal efficiency point of view but saves me worrying about frozen and burst pipes. If we did this again I think I'd insulate right to the apex and have the tank and pipes inside the warm 'cocoon'. I run outside on frosty mornings and check to see if the top half of my roof is white or black (thawed). Weird, even paranoid, maybe. It works for me.

Bundled up like Barge-skipper for fox watch.
Trapper hat, scarf, 'mighty' coat and gloves.

But back to that fox. 'Fox-Watch' has now become a regular part of our duties. He seems to come at around 4 pm which, in warm weather, is now a good hour and a half before bird lock-up, so not only do I try to do as many outdoor, visible, noisy tasks as possible during the day, but there is a whole fox-watch shift that starts at 4 pm.

The pond well frozen.

I take the dogs out to the front lawn for their off-lead run about at 4-ish and hover near the NW corner which gives me a good view across the 'allotment' and pond (and now the trap). Then I drop dogs back in and feed them before coming back out to supervise the last few minutes of the birds. This has been a mercifully short 'shift' during The Beast, with all the birds happy to get in out of the wind and snow by 4:40 pm or so.

Mrs C decides on a '4-cat' duvet day. 

That worked well up to today, and there had been no more fox attacks since the dogs chased the fella (or girl) away. But today, I spotted that the next ewe on our list is starting to 'bag up'. This is Rosie, our first home-bred 'kept' lady and a first time Mum. So, fun and games this afternoon running into 4 pm, trying to run the flock into the yard where we could separate off Rosie and persuade her into the pen I'd built next door to the Polly family. Part way into this job I'd heard the Guinea Fowl alarm calls and raced out there praying fervent "Ah, not NOW, Mr Fox!" prayers. I could see nothing. This happened twice. I should have known by now to trust these birds.

In the buffeting East wind, the tarpaulin over the chicken house
is starting to chafe badly. 

With no apparent fox we got on with the sheep-wrangling and we are mid sheep-chaos, with loose sheep chasing about and not yet back in their field, when the Guineas shout again. Mr Fox has struck, grabbing a Buff Orpington hen from right up by our compost heaps and fleeing as Elizabeth is struggling to release my sheep-proof barriers. By the time we secure the sheep, it is too late to follow and I'm disappointed that the lad did not go into the fox trap.

Dublin 'Coddle'. A stew of sausages,
bacon, onions and spuds. A real
Winter warmer. 

Ah well. I leave you on another blog post with a bursting ewe we hope about to lamb safely indoors and a fox who has pushed up the score again. The Beast from the East is almost done, with the winds now dying back here and us due to warm up a bit a thaw out over the weekend. I think that'll do for this one.

It's an Ill Wind....

#TheBeastFromTheEast That is the new name given by the trendy Twitter 'meteorologists' for this blast of cold air coming clockwise round a high pressure system sitting over Scandinavia. Yes, we've enjoyed "weather bombs" and even "Sting Jets" and all manner of hell-and-high-water that hadn't been invented when I was studying Meteorology, but now we have a 'beast'.

The bog land to the North of us looks a bit bleak on a
frosty morning

We know this eastern flavour of wind well, of course, especially its NE variant, having spent 20-odd years living on the NE Kent coast in Faversham, where it'd come charging across Nagden Marshes. Elizabeth used to call it her "favourite" wind and we were pleased that our house faced into it so that the terrace out back was relatively protected by the bulk of the place. Before that, I lived in the Lincolnshire Fens which are also NE facing and with way fewer houses to hide behind.

There it came howling across the North Sea picking up a bit of instability and moisture in preparation for snow and drifts. The locals joked that it was a "lazy" wind looking at you all expectantly, waiting for you to ask them to explain the 'lazy'. "Too lazy to go round you - it goes straight through ye!" How we laughed.

Polly is looking most promising for my next lamber. Is she
waiting, like her Sister, for the worst possible weather? 

It's an ill wind, though, that blows nobody any good. It may be cold and send you running back to coats, gloves, hats and scarves for the livestock jobs, but in my reckoning it is beautifully drying. The weather maps are cloud-free lately and we've had no rain for days. All my puddles are gone and the small patches of bare mud that remain are sticky rather than wellies-sloppy. Crocs are once again the footwear of choice. I am not sure how dry we will stay. The wind is currently SE and not yet backed through pure East to NE but the forecast has weather warning of snow in the East and South East of the island. We may get some.

Two late-hatch poults came of age and decided to be roosters.
Bad move lads. They are now rather scrawny frozen
oven-ready carcasses. 

Meanwhile, the ewe 'Polly' seems to be lining up to be my next lambing event. She is working her way through the signs - #1 "I want to be alone" and now #2, starting to bag up. She is not ready for sign #3, declining breakfast, though and not really due till more like March 5th (though you never can tell). So she gave me a fright this morning when she was not in the queue for crunch.

I could not see her at all and worried that I'd have to go seek her out in the curves and dips of the field in case she had a problem. But no. By the time I'd gone to get the bucket of grub, she had rocked up and was baa-ing hungrily. No lambs yet then, Poll-Woll. The other two ewes (Rosie and Myfanwy - all these ladies are named after female characters from 'Under Milk Wood') are keeping me waiting. They look broad enough in the beam to be pregnant and Rosie is maybe, just maybe, starting to bag up but if they are, they are playing their cards close to their woolly chests.

Book of the Month!

Finally, I have discovered a new author of those year-round, starting to small-holder type books I love. This by an American lady, Jenna Woginrich who has jacked in the 9-5 office job and bought a small farm in the 'sticks' (Hudson River valley, Washington County). I love this book. Jenna has a lovely 'voice' and a very pleasing way of explaining what she's at (not laboured at all, she assumes a good level of knowledge already). Also a lovely way of expressing the joy, freedom and excitement of the lifestyle and her delight at actually being able to have the livestock and do the tasks. "I milked a goat! Me!" The book is also superbly illustrated (by one Emma Dibben). It is pure joy to own and to read. If I had a 'Book of the Month' thing going, this one would be a definite winner.

Whirlpool's Oven Men

Dead oven heater element. Melted split circled.

Let's hear it, then, for the fitters who work for 'Whirlpool' and come out and fix the Nation's IKEA built-in ovens. Cynics may say that at €155 a call-out (incl parts and half back if they can't repair it and declare it a write-off) they OUGHT to be pretty good but we will hear none of that. The guy came within 2 days of my first shout, texted me to say when he'd arrive and arrived then. He had the suspected element in his van and was in and out within 20 minutes. He was polite, friendly and very professional. I'm calling that a success.

We have been celebrating our return to oven-ness by baking a sponge (Liz) and a sourdough loaf (me). The oven is doing exactly what it is meant to do. I only had to "buy" loaves for the three days.

Dogs get a run around in the East Field at sunrise

Where there is livestock, so they say, there is dead stock and also, just as often we hear "you can't win them all" I am sad to report the loss of one of Stumpy's 4 second-brood chicks. This one never looked like she'd thrive; you develop an eye for these things and can quickly spot that the baby is just a tiny bit smaller, slower, less 'bright' and less active around the feeding lessons. You worry for them and sometimes they pull through but often a 'non do-er' just gets left behind and fades away.

This little Buff-Orp chick seemed also to cling much more closely to Stumpy's feet and was often in the way when she clumsily (she only has one good leg) demonstrated scratching at the ground. We saw her kicked flying many times and once she seemed to get tangled in Mum's flying feet, so was smacked back and forth with each 'scratch'. Ah well. Today I was not surprised to find her lying out on the cold concrete, barely able to keep her eyes open as Mum and the three thriving siblings moved off to find food elsewhere. I picked her up and held her in my hand for a while to see if it was just cold/shock but then passed her to Nurse Lizzie and the sick-bay. Sadly, she only lasted a few more minutes, but at least she died warm and cuddled, not stretched out in the cold.

Pedro paying close attention to Polly.

In the sheep department we have better news. Yesterday morning I spotted Pedro the Ram playing close attention to our old dark-grey ewe, Polly and a few minutes later was mounting her repeatedly. This is the first time I'd actually seen the act so I hope you'll forgive the photo. If all this outdoor sex offends you, then click on by! That gives Polly a likely due date of 5th March. We have no idea whether Pedro has done the deed on ewes Myfanwy and Rosie but it's all looking a bit promising. One small fly in the ointment - the ewes might be a bit 'fat'.

A first for me, seeing the ram doing the deed. The fence rail
nicely censors the rude bits!

The Party Line is that ewes are much more fertile if they are a bit skinny and are commonly "flushed" on poor mountainy land for a fortnight or more just prior to the ram being introduced. Well, I have no Mayo mountains on my patch, so my sheep have had to make do on good Roscommon grass and if they are a tad rotund then there isn't a lot I can do about that. As we go through Winter the grass will fade and they should be at the correct weight come lambing.

Taking a break. Pic by AB

Meanwhile, little to report though we are quite busy, with all three of us (we and the Help-X lad, AB) doing plenty of jobs. It is just that most of those tasks are the hum-drum everyday life. In AB's and my case it's all about clearing up for Autumn, mainly pulling un-ending stinging nettles and dragging out piles of old prunings and branches for onward processing. Of course there is also cooking and shopping and the usual round of helping friends and neighbours.

AB's take on that clichéed Irish-Rush-Hour postcard scene.
We caught up with these escaped ladies on the way back from
Sue and Rob's place. AB was laughing out loud. 

I will do us all a favour and keep this post nice and short. Have a nice weekend.

Soldier borrowed AB's bed. 

Never Ending

Some local horses make the 365 album

With the coming and going of Hallowe'en (and All Souls' Day, I guess) we realised that we are now three quarters of the way through the 'Lisacul 365' photographic project. This year-in-the-life photographic record of all things within the 18 townlands, started on 1st Feb (that pic Liz took of our St Brigid's Cross seems a long way ago now) and runs through till 31st Jan 2017. It has (touch wood) not missed a day yet and has accumulated around 1000 pictures at this 9-month stage. There are roughly 85 more days to go.

A common sight locally. Abandoned farm buildings now
used (if at all) as barns. 

Regular readers will know that I function as 'back-stop' or 'safety net' committed to take at least 1 (normally 3) pic(s) each day so that on the days when none of the other 20 regular contributors take any, the show must go on. Hence as well as the 1000 pictures stored by Liz on the project website (awaiting final choice of THE ONE for each date), I have my own 1000-shot collection which overlaps to a degree.

Shaggy Ink Cap

By now I have pictured most of the area - I have shot scenery, farm buildings, ruins, flowers, trees, animals, birds and other 'bio-diversity', people where I could, highways and bye-ways, the weather, sunsets and sunrises. night time pictures, food and drink, events and seasonal stuff. It seems never ending. I am not trying to impress anyone here (go look at the pics and then decide), rather explaining why I am running out of steam a bit and will be relieved when it is all over. I can see myself putting the camera down on 31st Jan 2017, determined to give it a rest for a while.

These babies blundered into the 365 project when they escaped
their field and went for a stroll on the tarmac. Their Mum was
giving them hell from the field to my left but they hadn't a bother
on them. 

We will all be immensely proud, of course, of having stuck it out and 'landed' the thing but now that we are through the 'autumn colours' blaze of photo-genicity, I am looking down the barrel of 80+ days of grey skies, rain-swept muddy fields, no new plants, baby chicks or lambs. I am feeling a bit uninspired. Still, no-one said it was easy and, if it was, then we'd all be less proud of it.

Pond frozen for the first time this winter
on Monday 7th Nov

Also in the 'Going on for ages and now finally nearly done' Dept is THAT election in America. Liz has, you will know, always been a fan but I am only this time finding myself drawn into the drama and intrigue, listening to pod-casts and punditry on the Internet. Well, they all went to the polls today and I am reverting to my less-interested 'tell me in the morning' mode while Liz is about to pull one of her all-nighters, simultaneously watching news feeds, Twitter hash-tags, Facebook and her own private chat-forum groups. Tomorrow has, of course, already been taken off work as a holiday.

Snookered today by having to wait while the People exercise their democratic right, she was reduced to ironing, going to Knitting Club and Drama Group and, very nicely, feeding K-Dub and I tea and buns whenever we took a break from 'doing' the new kitchen wall. When she returns from drama-ing (about 11 pm) the polls will have closed in US-time and things might be starting to move for her night-owl surfing. By my next post, presumably, it will all have been decided, the winner 'crowned' President and the loser, just maybe, conceded with good grace.

Tell-tale blue turf smoke. 

Meanwhile, Monday saw us with a first frosty morning of this winter and the pond frozen over. I am not 100% sure, but I think that ram-lamb Silas, may have been having a little go with our Jacob-cross ewe, Polly. I think she has the faintest waft of smokey blue colour across her rump. What we need is a great wet slapped dollop of the stuff so that we would know for sure, but this might be an early teen-age fumbling. Polly's wool is quite dark anyway and can appear a blue-ish grey in some lights, so you'd not swear that it was raddle-grease on her but we remain hopeful.

Keeping us Waiting

Twin lambs tonight for Polly, both boys.

More good news and relief in the sheep department after the curing of Lily by vet Aoife. This time it is Polly's turn to supply the story and she had us sweating on it a bit. I knew she was 'on' when she refused breakfast and spent the day displaying 3 other good clues of imminent lamb-exit; going off on her own for a lie down away from the 'flock', 'pawing' at the ground with a front hoof and looking very uncomfortable so that she restlessly sat down, stood up, moved around and sat down again.

I had agreed to head out for Sligo to help K-Dub to tip a van load (64 panels) of plaster board sheets and walk them all indoors, plus some bags of bonding, beading and other bits. I judged (correctly, I am pleased to say) that Polly would easily go 2 hours without needing help so I flew over there at 9 and headed back at 11 when the unloading was done. When I got back I found that there had been no progress and Polly was still sitting out in the far corner of the field but had been worryingly joined by the 3rd ewe (Myfanwy) who was sitting in a copy-cat stance and, to my mind, seemed very pink about the vulva. Were to have two lambings today?

A close inspection of Myf's back end told me that this was a false alarm and she was not yet bagged up at all, so maybe she was enjoying the wind-up potential. Polly then, kept me on tenter-hooks all day and only started to 'move' (passing a mucus plug and some amniotic sac) at around 5pm. This was so long after breakfast that Charlotte (who we keep standing-by on these occasions) advised an extra careful watch as she may have been in labour "all day". I contacted the vet, Aoife, to confirm that she would be available if needed and she was a bit more relaxed about the 'all day'; happy to think of "things" starting only at 5 pm.

Wetting the babies' heads. One dark and one light. It seemed
only fair.

Well, I am happy to report that "things" did indeed crack on a-pace from that point and Polly whooshed out both twins while we had nipped in for supper at 18:30. Both were out, up and suckling by 19:00 and I decided to leave them where they were for washing and bonding for half an hour before we gathered the family indoors. It was pitch dark but I could keep an eye using my rather dim head-torch and my presence would stop any sneaky foxes creeping up on Polly to steal the newborns. At one point Soldier the cat wandered over all curious and got himself charged and nearly stomped on for his pains by the ewe, so I suspect even a fox might have thought twice. Ah well, they are safe in the Tígín now, warm and dry on new straw and it has all gone quiet so I hope that signifies bellies nicely full of colostrum (and some 'crunch' and a welcome drink of water for Mum).

Rosie - one of Lily's lambs. These ladies are nearly 2 weeks old
now.

A new experience today for me, that of voting properly in an Irish General Election using the 'single transferable vote' system. My British readers may not know that here we do not use the 'put an X in the box', winner-takes-all, one MP per constituency method. Instead the constituencies can put more than one 'TD' into the parliament (up to 5, I think) so our voting sheets can have dozens of candidates on them and you vote by stating 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc preferences by putting numbers in the boxes; all the boxes if you like.

I will not try to explain the counting system here (though I do sort of understand it) but suffice to say that the winners get enough '1st preference' votes to make a quota, or hope to make quota by having themself as people's 2nd preference, or 3rd or whatever. Yes, I know. It actually works very well and is quite user friendly. I voted as far as my 6th preference. I am wary of trying to pretend to be expert in this and I usually avoid politics in this blog but here goes.

My problem is not the complexity of it all, but trying to work out who stands for what. In the UK you 'knew' that Labour stood for the working classes, the Tories for the management and affluent farmers, and the Libs were somewhere in between. Nothing so clear cut here. The two BIG parties, Fine Gael (FG) and Fianna Fáil (FF) are almost identical and the local wisdom is that you choose between them depending on how you stood in the Irish Civil War in the 20's. Were you 'pro-treaty' (i.e. were you in favour of accepting independence but with the 6 Northern Ireland counties partitioned off and left as British) or were you anti (i.e. you wanted the whole island to be independent).

A 'boreen'. One of this week's Lisacul 365 pics.

This was hugely contentious and split the country, communities, villages and even households, with father 'fighting' son and brother battling brother. A lot of that emnity and tension simmers on so it is a tricky subject to discuss but results in people voting for FF because "my Father did before me and my Grandfather before that" etc. I have asked many people and none of them can tell me, an incomer, why I should favour FG or possibly FF. One tongue-in-cheek view has it that they are all corrupt anyway but we like them that way and we ask them how they can help US specifically before we decide. More recently people seem to vote more on who last messed up the economy or depending upon who was 'on watch' when that hospital got closed.

Ash Bark

Throw into this mix the many and various minor parties and a wealth of independent (non-party) candidates to blur the lines even more and you have a confusing situation for a newcomer. There was one saving grace this time - a new website (MatchCandidate.IE) which asked you 30+ questions about all manner of contentious issues (the new water charges, legalising abortion, healthcare and so on) but then also asked all the candidates the same questions. The site compares your answers with the answers of the potential TDs and finds a best match (and next best etc). You can then drill down to find out WHERE you matched and decide from that whether to assign your 1,2,3 etc.

Anyway, suffice to say, I went armed with a list of 6 likely choices and only adjusted my list a bit at the crucial stage, pen in hand, in the booth. By now (22:12 pm) it is all over bar the counting (and then the negotiations between the parties which 'nearly won' to form a coalition (we rarely get anyone with an overall majority)). The count starts tomorrow at 09:00. History will tell you the rest. I am going back to being a non-political shepherd and off for a last check on Polly and the new babies