Pushing on the Open Door. By Gene Kerriagn

By the time it was over the office at 20 Summerhill Parade was smothering in paper. It's a community centre office around which revolve the various strivings of activists who have for years been trying to organise a fight back against the waves of economic and social problems flooding the neighbourhood. The avalanche of paper was started when Tony Gregory handed Charlie Haughey a two-page document on the Tuesday after the election.

The glasses will have to go. Let them see the sexy eyelashes. Then, maybe, a pipe. Not one of those curving professorial types. A straight pipe. Assertive. Smouldering. Or, maybe, black Russian cigarettes would be better. Yeah, and a gold lighter.

School's out early today. It's five to three on a Wednesday afternoon in the National Concert Hall. The RTESO has just finished rehearsing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." As the wind and percussion players gather together their instruments and prepare to leave, the string players sit patiently waiting to finish the day's work. The last programme piece to be rehearsed, "Divertmento For Strings" by Irish composer Seoirse Bodley, is, as the title would suggest, for string only. By Paddy Agnew

Yank comes into O'Donoghue's at lunchtime. "A Paddy and a Carlssberg Special." Stands about two feet back from the bar. "Eh, make that a cold Carlsberg Special, huh?" Ike jacket, check shirt, levis, moustache, thinning blonde hair. A big man, hard, mid-thirties, face like a map of Saigon.  By Gene Kerrigan

Monday 1st.
I watch the swans dying outside the Cfdistillery of which Mr. John Lynch is a director. I suppose he assumed that they -serene, tragic, and balletic - had to be children of serene tragic balletic C. J. Haughey, awaiting the call of their spirits from this stormy world.

It has to be that the press conference is for Fianna Fail. Down the corriidor in the Burlington they're getting ready for the Fine Gael show in an hour's time - but all they have on the tables down there is coffee. Here the amber shimmers through the glasses like a warm· sun rising on a win ter's morning. Like Charlie says, things ain't so bad that we can't afford a little splash. by Gene Kerrigan

"And sometimes the computer talks to this machine Hhere, the VT 90." Barry Cowan is recording a quick tour around the RTE Election Centre, a short piece to be used at the start of the election programme. By Fintan O'Toole

It's the old people you'd feel sorry for. There they were thinking that Willie Bermingham had got himself a whole new crew of volunteers. Twice in seven months - old people who haven't had a knock on the door since 1977 and last year they were up and down to the door like yo-yes, people standing there with big smiles and askk-ing is there anything you'd like, missus.

A new genre of humour, more vivid, cynical and even cruel has been slouching onto the Irish stage. By Gene Kerrigan

Timing has a lot to do with whether stand up comedy is good - and tonight the timing is dreadful. Eight, they said, then half past, and nine is long gone and it's half past nine before Billy Magra goes on stage and starts with the humour. The reason for the bad timing was more bad timing - the show was set for Monday night, and that's when Not The Nine O'Clock News is on BBC 2. And a lot of the folks who might go to a gig like this are Not fans.

Monday 1st: 
I summon Mr. Haughey to Cork to account for his recent doings. I had instructed him that under no circumstances was he to provoke this suffragist tomfoolery until I should have left to take the waters. Now, I shall have to propose a change of arrangements to Mrs. Langtry, and she, I fear, will not be much pleased.