ON THE CANVASS:WITHIN A minute of Joan Collins beginning her canvass, she meets a man with a square, grey-speckled beard and glasses who is leaning against his car, writes HARRY McGEE
“Are you the woman who gave out to Bertie outside the Dáil?” he booms. She nods. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, you were well able to stand up to him.”
As she passes, he points her out to the passenger in the car.
“Look, that’s the woman who gave out to Bertie!”
Collins’s big moment came when former taoiseach Bertie Ahern was giving a valedictory interview to RTÉ outside the gates of the Dáil.
She butted in and began to harangue Ahern about his pension and about his legacy.
“He annoyed me so much that he was walking away with €370,000, where other people were absolutely on the breadline,” she says.
Her encounter with Ahern has won her a notoriety that has come up a lot on her canvass, and has done her profile no harm.
Collins is a Dublin city councillor and the United Left Alliance candidate in Dublin South Central. She also belongs to People Before Profit, which is another alliance of left-wing groups. Its critics say that PBP is just a cover for the unreconstructed Socialist Workers Party. But Collins has never been a member of the SWP.
Today a group of about 20 people accompany Collins through a high-speed canvass of Drimnagh and Walkinstown.
They include her mother, Tess Collins, a pensioner with an indefatigable appetite for canvassing.
The rest are made up of local Collins supporters plus a smattering of – on a superficial assessment – earnest socialist types.
The local director, Pat Dunne, addresses the troops as they round into Hughes Road.
“The message is that People Before Profit offer an alternative. We have a candidate. You also have to remember there is the tactical point of Joan being in the fight for the fifth seat with Michael Mulcahy [of Fianna Fáil]. Labour will get two, Fine Gael will get its one, Sinn Féin will get one and the last seat will be a fight between Joan and Mulcahy.
“We want a slow canvass. If it takes five minutes on a doorstep, so be it,” Dunne shouts after the canvassers.
Collins would cut an unusual figure in the Dáil if elected – she sports a nose stud and three earrings on each ear and favours denim attire.
Originally from Coolock, she has lived in the constituency for 25 years. She is a postal worker who first got involved in the union, before getting into politics through bin and water charge campaigns. She is understated, calm, and very issue-oriented.
The canvass is uneventful. There are parents who worry about their children emigrating, a health worker who is paying more on his mortgage than he is earning. Others are worried about the loss of the nearby children’s hospital. Some complain about the universal social charge and anti-social behaviour.
A photographer, Aidan Weldon, opens his door, but won’t commit. He is disillusioned.
“I have had enough of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. None of them will get my vote. As far as I am concerned the whole country has let the country down. The only person who has made sense has been Diarmaid Ferriter of UCD,” he said.
Collins says she too has met hostility on the doorsteps.
“People will say they do not support me or will close the door and say ‘get lost’. They are so fed up of the whole lot of us.”
Her policy, and that of the ULA, is to scrap the IMF-EU deal, burn the bondholders and establish a “people’s bank” using the funds from the pension fund.
Beyond that, she wants a “new movement, a radical movement”.
It would mean the ULA morphing into a single party, bringing all the disparate left-wing groups and parties together. But in the immediate future, she hopes she can edge Mulcahy out of the seat.