ON THE CANVASS:There was little anger on show for Pat Rabbitte in Tallaght, but plenty of evidence of lives hurt by recession, writes KATHY SHERIDAN
IT’S ONLY fair to confess that the lure of a canvass with Pat Rabbitte has little to do with Labour Party policies. It’s really about that lip-smacking Rabbitte combination of a short fuse and fulminations that manifest themselves in wonderfully enunciated, grammatically precise English.
Potentially, then, anything can happen. Sadly, however, over several hours of a canvass around Tymon Park in Tallaght, the potential remains unrealised – even in the teeth of severe provocation.
A child who insists he’s her granddad. “That’s my granddad! That’s my granddad!” she yelps excitedly, clinging hard to one of his nicely suited knees.
“That’s a good one. You’ve been called a lot of things,” grins his canvasser in chief and local resident, Mick Duff. The candidate pleads not guilty but looks a tad morose.
“It’s the glasses. Her granddad wears glasses,” says the mother soothingly.
Child dislodged, we slink away, and are safely back on the road, when behind us, a small, high-pitched voice pierces the silence: “Bye bye granddad!”
Apart from the sudden drop in temperature and the woman with metal grilles across every window and door in her little house, who said (quite pleasantly), “Youze are all gangsters, all o’ ye, every last one of ye”, there was little else to disturb the peaceful afternoon runabout. But what happened to all the anger?
"People are extremelytolerant and polite," he says, coming close to fulminating about it. "Didn't Brian Lenihan say that his European colleagues said if it was any other country, the people would be out on the street."
Far from it. “You look every bit as handsome as you are on the telly,” swoons an admirer. “Will you be on tonight?” No, he wouldn’t, he said; he had “handed over the captain’s armband”.
The next one who asked the same question was told amiably that it would be “my first sub”, Eamon Gilmore. Which left her highly indignant. “And that Enda Kenny,” she snorted, “going over to see Angela Merkel – and him only a game coach.” The candidate was still laughing five minutes later.
But there is a serious edge to almost every encounter. The woman who admires his handsome visage on the telly has just got the news that her coeliac diet allowance has been scrapped. The disabled woman she cares for 24 hours a day comes to the door and talks haltingly and poignantly about the hurt it has caused.
A young mother of five assures him of her vote but can’t speak for her husband. He arrives in just then, a pleasant man, tired after a a long day, and takes Rabbitte aside to talk about the threat to his industry pay agreement and the effect of the USC: “I’m not sure I can do this any more,” he says wearily, comparing his annual wage to departing ministers’ pensions. “I wouldn’t earn in five years what they’re getting in one,” he says.
Rabbitte nods wryly: “I can’t even start to mount a defence of that . . . All I can say is, it’s over in the future.”
Near by, we encounter a little pixie dust in the form of Robbie Keane’s aunt. But Annette Nolan has more serious things on her mind than football. Her 24-year-old son suffers from cystic fibrosis and the family had put its faith in the long-promised unit in St Vincent’s. “It’s very hard for them . . . They’re only young and they’re put into wards with old men when they need to be in a room of their own,” she says worriedly.
The only overt sign of protest is stuck on Philip McMillan’s door, where he has hung a photograph of the skeletal husk of Anglo Irish Bank, taken by McMillan himself from across the Liffey. Superimposed on it are the words “Sold Out”, printed in the colours of the Republic.
“That’s for Fianna Fáil,” says McMillan, a carpenter who is trying to diversify into photography via an expensive media course.
Not far away, a man suggests that “Fianna Fáil probably have a good handle on the finances now. But I suppose they have to be punished for the bollocks they’ve made of it.” It’s obvious that he’s an FFer and his real problem is the notion of Fine Gael reaping the benefit.
"There's a bit of a conflict there all right," says Rabbitte as we walk away. "I mean if they really hada handle on it, they wouldn't have made the shiteof it that they have," he says with a pleasing emphasis on the appropriate words.
“Men are more opinionated but the women are more tuned in,” he suggests later, as we thaw out in the Penny Black pub. And while the despondency and disaffection are certainly there, he says, “the anger is abating and translating into genuine engagement . . . They’re immensely well-informed. People genuinely are asking, does anyone have a pathway out of it? We have to move on.”
One thing he’s sure of is that Fianna Fáil is collapsing rapidly. “At the beginning of the campaign, my view was that if PJ Mara was caught buggering Micheál Martin in Brown Thomas’s window, they would still get 25 per cent of the vote. But I’ve actually changed my mind. I now think that 15 per cent is a far more accurate measure.”
As Labour stands poised, possibly, on the brink of government, the issue that clearly exercises him most is antisocial behaviour. “Middle-class Ireland has no appreciation or understanding of what antisocial behaviour is like,” he says,
talking affectingly about people – “it could be a woman, a migrant, a disabled person, someone who is different” – being “tortured by little f****** who haven’t even reached the age of criminal responsibility”.
The law has to be changed, he says, “to make the little buggers clean up their own mess . . . And you need a higher priority to be given to community policing.”
This may be of more than academic import. He is, after all, the party’s spokesman on justice.
Is he excited about the possibility of government?
“Mmm. Pull the duvet over my head and hide – when I think of the mountain that any new government will have to climb. We just have to ensure there is fairness in any of the decisions that are made,” he says with a sigh.