Fianna Fáil's outgoing director of elections, PJ Mara, who has overseen the party's three general election campaigns of the past 10 years, has announced his retirement from active politics.
Mr Mara, a successful public relations consultant and businessman, has been one of the pre-eminent backroom figures in Irish politics in recent history, having acted in various advisory roles for Fianna Fáil and its senior members for more than 30 years.
A personal friend of Charles Haughey, he chauffeured the future Fianna Fáil leader around the country in the early 1970s on the so-called "chicken and chips" circuit as Mr Haughey attempted to rehabilitate his reputation in the wake of the Arms Trial. - Liam Reid
Thanks to the Irish transferable vote system, candidates who do badly in the first round of voting can end up getting elected over the heads of rivals who polled better. The election of Fianna Fáil's Cyprian Brady in Dublin Central is a good example. He won 939 first preference votes, only 2.7 per cent of those cast, and in a lowly ninth place with apparently little chance of being elected in this four-seater constituency.
But then Bertie Ahern's surplus came to his rescue. Mr Ahern, with 1.8 quotas, had a surplus of 5,806 votes to be distributed. Some 2,403 of these went to Mr Brady and put him on a winning path. - Joe Carroll