The ravelin of Limerick

The Board knows that much of his election commentary has been based on historical analogies. With less than two weeks until voting day, he has no intention of stopping now.

Deal with it.

On June 23 1565, Fort St Elmo on Malta fell to the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the island.

For weeks the starving, wretched garrison of 100 knights and 500 soldiers lived with horrific artillery shelling and ceaseless sniper fire, but still fought back wave after wave of assaults on their tiny ramparts, inflicting nearly 4000 casualties on the enemy.

These Christian soldiers were young men, devout men, men who knew that they would die but also knew that every hour they stole and every Turk they killed would be priceless in the defence of Malta, the ravelin of Christian Europe.

They died - every last one of them - but Malta would eventually hold.

On June 6 2009, a murderous siege of another sort will come to a slightly less bloody end.

Limerick City South is the biggest of the city's electoral wards. Last year, ward three and ward four were squished together and ended up with one less seat for their trouble. Lovely.

The result? A brutal, overcrowded smog pit of a ward, with 19 candidates scrambling for seven seats and at least one sitting councillor facing a rap from the righteous boot of the people.

Who will survive? Who will stride gloriously across City Hall on the shoulders of his/her cronies? Who will demand the recount that will force the tally into the early hours, pushing The Board's colleague The Agitator and Leader of Men, who is covering City South, into a state of apoplexy?

The Board fretted so much in trying to call City East (which The Agitator dismissed as "the easiest f****** ward in the country to predict"), that he won't even contemplate guessing where City South's seven seats of magical glory will end up.

Praise be, therefore, that the Leader's shiny City/County Council election supplement is out tomorrow, free inside the main County and City editions.

The Agitator assures me he hasn't hidden behind The Board's house style of vague assumption and has instead made a hard, cold prediction.

He'd be a braver sort than me, it seems.