Does anyone honestly believe that sinn fein are the only ones using the electoral register?

Let me kill some illusions for you right now - I've had access to excerpts of it myself through campaigns I've worked on, and I promise you I'm more scrupulous about data than most.

And when I was using excerpts it was under NDA, strict controls, and with minimised usage by a party who are entirely built on transparency.

Now, that party didn't have as many candidates or campaign managers as some others.

So let's do some quick maths together, using Limerick In LE19. 6 wards. Minimum 5 FG/FF candidates in each. And each with a campaign manager, if not a regionalised director of elections for the ward, and one for the county as well. So 60-70 Conservative pols.

And that's just Limerick, and I'm not allowing the possibility of anyone further down the structure of a large campaign- canvass leads for example, those gowls with the clipboards- to.have further segments specific to an estate they're canvassing on any given night.

So what is the register distributed for? Yes we've established that political parties get to make their lives easier by knowing who theoretically lives where.

OK, but how exactly does that benefit anyone *other* than political parties?

Reader, it does not. And guess what! You can't opt out of being on it. And that's not even getting into the grossly invasive marked register, which shows not only where you live but whether you voted.

But forget that a moment, let's return to data usage. My understanding is that were supposed to be outraged that sinn fein used this list that's available and used by every party. So much so in fact

That when clockwork blueshirt mouthpiece, varadkar biographer and occasional journalist Philip Ryan originally posted the story, everyone replied with "....yes, and?"

So his editor ran it a second time a week later. Propped now by tubbers.

Lads FF and FG are responsible for the entire political system in Ireland. All of it. The broken register, the barely controlled flow of personal data therein, the boundary mess, the whole damned thing.

And supposed to be outraged that they're losing the game they invented?

It's like listening to English rugby fans, hearing the faux outrage from blueshirts about the other side using their own tricks.

By the way, those register excerpts?

It's up to each and every recipient, who by the way can be literally anyone a party sees fit, to decide when and how to delete their copy.

Sleep tight, privacy fans.

There are so few things on which I can actually speak from.experience but 5 years of elections and 15 in sales have me convinced of this:

Party political use of the register is nothing more than a list of leads to be cold called.