High Noonan

He has a ravishing set of new clothes from the people who outfitted the emperor. The suit includes this modulated voice and an aversion to aggro and sharp words. He is a walking Desiderata. Tom Humphries catches the BaldyBus to the midlands with Fine Gael leader Michael Noonan.

"So," says the jolly voice at Fine Gael HQ when we ring with a query about how to get near the leader, "do you want to go on the BaldyBus?" "Well, yes. Is this really Fine Gael?" "Sure. Now just show up in Mount Street at about quarter past eight and they'll be on the way soon enough after that . . ." "Mmm. Ok." And thus it is done. You have to learn to stop worrying and just love these people. At 8.15 a.m. the next day, there is no sign of the bus or Noonan. At 8.18, both hove into view. Noonan in a small, family saloon car, from which he emerges jolly and bespectacled. Behind him the bus, glinting in the morning sun.

The BaldyBus turns out to be a hermetically-sealed bubble of good taste. A four-wheeled version of the first class compartment in an aeroplane, with ample musk-green seats dotted about and large tables for the media to work on, thoughtfully kitted out with rubber table cloths to help prevent laptops from slipping. There are curtains of muted mustard, which set off the tasteful verdancy of the carpets and upholstery. There is a fridge brimming with cold drinks, which come in those dinky little airline-size cans. There are bowls filled with lemon bon-bons and there is a box of minty chewing gums for the dogbreaths of the media. Perhaps there was soothing, celestial music, perhaps it just seemed that way.

For a party going into battle against the reigning plutocracy, they haven't been hard on themselves.

Occupants are provided with little dogtags by which they may gain access or be identified if they are mowed down in a custard pie attack. Journalists surrender their mobile phone numbers. If the bus is moving off and the journalist is lost, drunk or both, a polite phone call will serve as reminder.

By contrast, we are told, life in the shadow of Bertie is one long nightmare. Bertie moves in mysterious ways and the convoy of hacks which follows him in the vans or vehicles of their own choosing catch just the briefest glimpses of him during the day. Sometimes he's here. More often he's there. There is nothing more substantial on offer than the odd soundbite. Bertie, apparently, would do your head in with his mullarkey.

The pace today is not whirlwind. Rather Michael Noonan shall be a gentle breeze blowing through the midlands. He rose at 7.30, not at some savagely Thatcheresque pre-dawn hour, and drove a short while later to pick up his driver. He only has one driver and so he takes the wheel quite a bit himself and in the mornings picking up his own driver, well it seems like the easiest thing to do.

Between them they drive behind the BaldyBus all the way to Kinnegad. Noonan's absence strips the bus of some of its glamour. Heading out through Enfield, one can easily imagine the disparity in coverage were an accident to occur. Right now we would merit: Fine Gael Bus Topples. Bon Bons Lost. Several Journalists Injured. With Noonan on board we'd be newsworthy. Fine Gael Bus Topples. Noonan Unharmed.

We stop off at Kinnegad for coffee and currant buns while the rain pours down outside. Local candidate Paul McGrath plays the role of host and cup filler. It's all so friendly and non-urgent that one is almost soothed. Later, we will have a fine lunch at the Bridge House in Tullamore with Charlie Flanagan and Olwyn Enright. And you thought Truman's whistlestop campaign of 1948 had changed the pace of electioneering forever.

In Kinnegad, Noonan sits comfortably as the moral head of a decent circle of supping journalists and party faithful. He chats about the campaign, what he's learning, what he's been saying. This is before Fine Gael has identified the need to take the custard pie out of Irish politics forever and the skies are blue.

"Health," he says, "then crime, coming in a lot stronger than I thought it would. And do you know what else? Insurance. For young people, for people with businesses. That's a big one." Everyone nods. Insurance. Sex-eee.

Noonan is a social animal though. Soon he is telling an amusing story about a friend of his who developed an interest in the rough and tumble world of Young Munster Rugby Club but every time he went along to see them the team lost. "Pretty soon," he says, "some of the boys had to take him aside in the bar and explain to him that he was a Jonah. If it was Munster, he'd have got away with it, but Young Munster. Heh heh. The boys had to tell him."

In his animation he says "bize". The bize had to tell him. Generally on this campaign his speech seems slower and more deliberate, his voice deeper with the hard Limerick edge removed from it. Noonan has a surprisingly small knot of people around him, no squadron of flunkies and an apparent absence of handlers, but their touch is on Michael Noonan. He has a ravishing set of new clothes from the people who outfitted the emperor. The suit includes this modulated voice and an aversion to aggro and sharp words. He is a walking Desiderata.

People around the campaign swear this is a natural development, part of the considered leadership style and maybe it is but a well-groomed, muzzled Noonan newly reborn in the politesse of his party doesn't seem like the best tool for cracking this election.

Later, having joined the bus, he speaks about the campaign. How does he keep a sense of himself and who he is when there is so much information coming at him as to who he might be or should be? He senses a little contention and relishes it.

Leans across the seat and into it.

"Listen," he says, "I'm in politics quite a while. You see it rising and falling. Sometimes very quickly. You're up and then you're down. You have to have a sense of things, of what's right. My sense is that I'm on an upswing at the moment.

"I think I'm a good campaigner. I get a buzz out of campaigning, always. I think this is about what message is out there. As for myself, once I get up in the morning and I'm driven out the door by the same ideals I always had, then that's who I am.

"That's the person. People know what they get with me. What keeps me going? My profession is to be a politician, to work on votes, to make changes or build a new Ireland. To do that, you need to have your knees under a cabinet table."

Kinnegad is a dot in the rear-view mirror now. Mullingar is the first real campaign stop of the day and Noonan is heading for the place which he and his party consider to be the perfect symbol of governmental failings on the issue of health.

The local hospital. Four floors of one wing here have lain empty for five years. Empty, save for Fine Gael voices.

Through the lobby they amble. Noonan meets and greets with a fine style. It's mid-morning and he is bracing with his handshakes and bonhomie.

"How are ya? I'm Michael." "Good man, Mick." "Hello there. I'm Michael." "Fair play, Mick." He does the rounds of the Cheers restaurant and hospital coffee shop. He disappears upstairs out of view of the media, who are left to wonder if the sick folk he is seeing are too poorly to be disturbed by an entourage or too well to make the necessary point. He hits the staff canteen and makes quite a hit with the dinner ladies. Say what you like about Michael Noonan, he's quick with a comeback when the slagging starts and soon everyone is chuckling. Finally, we are all ushered towards the pièce de résistance - Mullingar's showpiece of waste.

"He's going to open it, is he?" says one nurse.

Not quite.

He stands at the podium in this unfinished, unplastered room which has become a spartan shrine for his party. Midland Regional Hospital, or that part of it which is still a building site five years after, he, Michael Noonan, topped it off, is a symbol of the state we're in. Health is the theme du jour. He fills the morning air with words such as "inefficient" "unfair" and "monumental failure". The sun pours in through a long row of narrow windows behind him. He holds his hands in the prescribed fashion for politicians these days, that is, joined together prayerfully in front of him, one thumb rotating impatiently around the other while he speaks and tries not to look too aggressive. You can tell that he longs to jab the air, bang his fist, point his finger but this is Noonan Lite and this is the most important part of the day.

There are 30 other people here, some whispering nurses, some journalists checking their mobiles for text messages, a few camera crews, the local candidates and some officials from the health department.

Nobody is really listening to Michael Noonan but that is not the point. Michael Noonan in Mullingar will be the main election news item later in the day. Fianna Fáil feathers will be ruffled. Tomorrow morning, Micheál Martin will accuse Noonan of having "some brass neck". So, Michael Noonan presses on. He runs through the list of remedies which he offers and having duly inserted himself into the news cycle and under the Fianna Fáil skin, he wraps up and goes to spend the rest of the day pressing flesh.

It's a short drive to Oliver Plunkett Street, where Paul McGrath's campaign headquarters must be officially opened. Party hacks stand in the rain under a canopy of blue and green umbrellas. They wear stickers saying "Ooh Aah . . .", "Put Paul in the Dáil". Noonan declares what was once a Londis to now be a campaign HQ and is back on the bus before the rain stops.

The Angelus tolls as we pull out of Mullingar. Then the midday news. Five items leading. And then the weather. Not a mention of Fine Gael. You sidle in beside him and ask is he worried about that. "Ah not at all. It's the lag. By one o'clock we'll be leading or thereabout. It'd be worse to be mentioned fifth in a list of five things. That went well back there. It was a good issue. I wish it could be all about meeting people, about walking into the room and talking to people but today I'll meet maybe 300 people. It would take a lot of word of mouth to win an election on people saying: 'I met your man Noonan today and he's not such a bad fella'. Those few minutes every day when you get the media to bring you into every house, that's what sets the agenda, that's the battlefield. That's what that was about."

And, sure enough, the lunchtime news led with the Mullingar story.

Although it's 21 years since he was in a classroom, he still has a teacherly way about him. You ask him about the campaign, the difficulties, and he likes to ask something back and tilt his head and see if you know the answer or if you want to challenge it.

"Do you know what's surprising," he says, "the amount of people who ask about orthodontics. That's coming up again and again. You could go a day without being asked about a national issue, but orthodontics? Same story everywhere, child, waiting list, can't get orthodontic treatment. It costs an arm and a leg. Ten years ago it was an optional extra. Now it's regarded as neglect of your child if you don't get that. That's something that's on people's minds."

He's noticed Irish people never stop defining themselves as parents, even if the youngest child is a bank manager in Dublin. And all Irish politics is local. Some places he goes and all day long it'll be "potholes and cutting the thorn bushes on the byroads. Local. Local. Local. You can't discount that factor, ever".

But he keeps knocking on doors and striding through canteens and going into factories. He has a feel for what plays to each audience. In workplaces, say, childcare is a huge issue. People leaving the house at seven and getting back 12 hours later. Other places, you don't talk about that.

Does it ever get to him, this business of pressing himself upon people? "Sometimes, yeah, I feel embarrassed but I don't mind that. It's worse if I feel like it's an intrusion. Back there, back in the hospital canteen, like this morning, I hesitated. Mid-morning. You don't know what family tragedy you're walking in on when you walk up to somebody. It's not a normal visiting time in a hospital. That could be embarrassing and insensitive, so I weigh people up first."

Does he think he's good at it? "Ah listen, there's no TD that isn't good on the ground. They wouldn't be there otherwise. All this stuff about not being able to deal with it and others being great at it. I got 10,500 votes, last time. I must be alright. Fellas pretend. There's lads I see in Dublin that would be half-sour all the time, not bothered talking to anyone, haven't two words. I meet them in their constituency and they're different people, they can't be kept off the street. Everyone in this business is good at that. The only thing we fear is bad weather."

In Tullamore he takes lunch and then does a walkabout in the shopping centre. It's quiet in there and the voices echo about the place as the Fine Gael entourage moves through the main drag. "Hello, I'm Michael". "Is that Mick Noonan?" It's not Beatlemania but there is no hostility, at worst just a sense that people are dozing through this election campaign.

One man sitting on a bench flees before Noonan can stretch a hand out towards him but otherwise the couple of dozen people who are ambushed surrender gamely.

Noonan buys a ticket for a raffle to help the Tullamore Boxing Club, which could win him any number of prizes ranging from a bedroom set to a ton of briquettes.

This is a theme of his, the community and the clubs, not the briquettes. He'd abandon the Bertie Bowl. He'd put the money into clubs and community infrastructure. "Because this is all about the quality of the lives we need. The country is organised into communities, yet we have a total breakdown in urban areas and this draining of spirit in rural areas. The ideological pitch of the current Government is individual advancement to the detriment of community. Somebody has to stop this Taoiseach and ask him the hard questions about that."

And soon the bus is moving again. Bon bons aplenty. Hands to be shaken and babies to be kissed. The evening won't finish till the bus hits Carrick-on-Shannon and the day's news cycle is dead and buried.

"You keep going," he says, "because it's the job. Because it's what you have to do in order to change the things you want to change. Simple really."