Good news -- Dubliner Jenny O'Connell lost her sight as a child through illness. She never saw her husband or her children until a few days ago.

An operation in a Dublin hospital implanted a synthetic lens into one of her eyes, and she saw the world for the first time in 46 years this Maytime. 

Good news -- the GAA championships have started, and once again we will be seeing real football and the unmatched skills of our own game of hurling. The recession recedes already.  

Good news -- election fever begins to drive up political temperatures through the whole island. Your election fever has subsiding now, but ours is only building. Nobody loves elections more than we do.

Our politicians hate them and shudder when the telephone poles and light standards begin to bend beneath the weight of appealing posterage. There are very serious economic and social problems behind them, of course, but there is also a high level of stimulation and even craic embedded in the electoral process. We love it all. 

Driving into Shannon beneath the first crop of posters, who do I not see beaming down at me but the Leitrim face of Senator Paschal Mooney, and he's a long way from Drumshanbo and Leitrim.

I'm surprised for a moment until I realize that due to new electoral boundaries Clare is now part of the extended Connacht/Ulster constituency in the European Parliament elections that are running concurrently with the local elections.

There and then I think of the classic documentary film "Mise Eire" about the early years of this state. That’s the one with the Sean O'Riada soundtrack and some of the earliest newsreel footage made in Ireland.

And there's a lovely clean connection between that and the big color 2009 poster of Paschal Mooney. And with the local elections too. And with the craic that has always enlivened our hustings. 

You see, there is a jerky black and white clip in "Mise Eire," and it shows de Valera at the height of his towering height and pomp campaigning in a general election in Drumshanbo away back in another era.

There is a huge turnout in the Republican county of Leitrim for the Fianna Fail leader, and the jerking lens is filled with movement and passion and the earthy images of the big political gatherings of that time.

And at one stage a perky little sprig of a boy jerks across the screen from left to right (I'm sure the cameraman cursed him), and it is many years ago now since the most effective local councilor I ever met played that clip for me and proudly stated he was that boy.

And that man was Joseph Mary Mooney of Drumshanbo, late and flamboyant father of the current Fianna Fail candidate. 

I have departed from Fianna Fail reluctantly in the last five years. For years I was a loyal supporter and member of the party.

I was what they call a "plumper." I voted for their candidates on our proportional representation system of descending preferences, and then stopped. I voted for nobody else.

Gradual disillusionment in the post-Haughey years made me unhappy about them, but I was still their plumper until the smoking ban in the workplace/pub gave me the excuse to angrily depart. What a petty reason that appears to be, but I had needed an excuse to leave them and this one served me well.

In the last general election I gave them no vote at all, and of course that was the election in which not a single one of my selected candidates were elected. Such is life. 

So, votes and voters being highly individual and volatile yokes, but history being history, I will break my vow this summer and I will give my top Euro vote to Senator Mooney of Fianna Fail. It will not really be for Paschal at all, though he is a fellow journalist and broadcast and we've met several times down the years.

It will really be for the truly great Joseph Mary Mooney, who was named after the revolutionary Joseph Mary Plunkett, and who was by far the most effective and hardworking local councilor I've seen in action in rural Ireland, achieving great things for his community against huge odds.  

We are cynical about our county councilors, and in many cases rightly so. In recent years, especially in matters of planning and especially in the greater Dublin area, a number of them have been exposed as pocket-liners.

In rural areas they normally slavishly follow their party lines, are ill-equipped to deal with the subtle skills of their own bureaucrats, and are generally unimpressive enough. 

What is worse is that on many occasions the big parties like Fianna Fail and Fine Gael draw their apprentice TDs (members of Parliament) from the pliant ranks of their county councilors. The overwhelming majority of these, if elected, are only equipped to serve on the back benches of the back bench.

Sadly, some are promoted to ministerial jobs well above their level, and it is for this reason that our parliamentarians, for the most part, are not of anything near the necessary political level to impress when hard times hit the nation. 

Joseph Mary was a glittering exception. He came from the poorest county in the country. They call it the Cinderella County. There was more emigration from Leitrim than about anywhere else.

There were few factories in his time, little work, poor agricultural land. The small towns like his Drumshanbo were hard hit.

Somehow, however, this gingery little man transformed life for his own community and his region generally through being a top-class operator. It started from the roots up.

Ireland has a Tidy Towns competition. He organized the local community so that the little town glowed with flowers and paint and was always a prizewinner.

At council level he availed of every possible scheme for improvement and development. Drumshanbo had a fine swimming pool decades before much larger towns had one. 

There was a national festival called An Tostal which folded after a few years everywhere except in Drumshanbo. 

There were always festivals and attractions for the tourists and fishermen visiting the region. Joseph Mary was always at the heart of it.

Better still, he was a respected correspondent for all the Dublin newspapers, and almost all his stories mentioned his little town at least twice. He was great.

As for the craic element I mentioned, I remember that once Jack Lynch came to town when he was taoiseach (prime minister), and Joseph Mary had a mynah bird in a gold cage in his parlor that had been trained to say "I back Jack!"

Given the small population of the county, this mighty little man never had enough votes to be elected a TD, but he was always elected to the county council, just like his own father Andrew in his day and later, come to think of it, both his wife Eva and his son who is now the senator on the telegraph poles.

Do I sound like an admirer of Joseph Mary? Yes I am. And it is for that reason I will break my anti-Fianna Fail vow and vote for Paschal. 

Meanwhile, there is time for a lot of electoral entertainment both at local and European level, and that too is the name of the game. 

Paschal is already in the wars over the imposition of “The Cope” Gallagher from Donegal on his party ticket, and there will be a lot of other "strokes" pulled before the election on June 5 is over. 

And the recession already seems further away.