KATHY SHERIDAN on the canvass with Eoin Ryan: It's all exceptionally cordial and good-humoured, given the hour and the drizzle
IT IS 7.55am, 30 minutes into a rush-hour canvass around the Merrion Centre and Vincent’s hospital and not a cross word has been uttered. Of course, this is quintessential D4 territory where one could drown in a tepid sea of cordiality.
Maybe drivers are giving the sympathy vote to the damp little party braving the relentless drizzle. Or maybe it’s because the candidate happens to be quintessential D4 himself and lives just a bit down the road to the right. Whatever, the response is startlingly benign – for an incumbent from a party supposed to be in calamitous freefall.
In a traffic canvass, the drivers are in control, relatively anonymous and under no obligation to make nice. Anyone who wants to vent has only to lower the window, yell, and screech off in a manner guaranteed to splatter the miscreants. Or they could just refuse to open the window. Instead, almost to a man and woman, they roll it down, take the candidate’s proffered hand and smile indulgently as he delivers an easy-going “Good morning. Eoin Ryan. Your Dublin MEP” schtick with a leaflet (blue, rather small FF logo) and a pen. If the lights force them on, he gets an unnecessarily perky wave.
It’s not meant to be like this, according to last week’s Irish Times poll.
With Dublin reduced to a three-seater, historically low support for FF and a shoot-out for the last seat predicted to ping between Ryan (on 11 per cent in the poll) and Mary Lou McDonald (14 per cent), there should be tension, theatrics, bared teeth.
Actually, it’s all exceptionally cordial and good-humoured given the hour and the drizzle. As Ryan’s yellow-T-shirted helpers – Claire Donlon, Gemma Hogan, Sinead McAuliffe and Emer, her mum – spread out along the traffic, a well-worn Volkswagen Golf (clever, that) slams to a halt and a pair of elegant, high-heeled legs make a languid appearance from the passenger side.
“Up McGuinness,” bellows the legs’ owner, the incumbent FG MEP and poll front-runner. She does a mock grab for the FF leaflets while Ryan and his handler, Ciaran Bolger, mock bundle her back into the Golf.
“You’re losin’ weight, Eoin – anorexia is raising its ugly head,” she teases as Bolger unfurls a large FF umbrella and invites her into the “Fianna Fáil tent”.
After a few minutes of slapstick, she disappears towards Wicklow with a line from that gentle old classic: “Get your tongue out of my mouth, I’m kissin’ you goodbye.”
It might not have been meaningful but it was an engagement. A traffic canvass is all about exposure, with limited to no engagement. What there is of it can only last the few seconds between red and green lights, so few voters consider it worth their while to kick off on a rant.
It’s possible that the perky waves actually mean, “just you wait, sucker”. A nurse in a little 95 D car confesses that she’s smiling only because she has just come off a night shift at Vincent’s: “I just want to go up the road. To be honest I don’t give a s***.”
Significantly, the only passionate dissent comes from a pedestrian, Tim Hanley, a 26-year-old enraged by how the Government has “marginalised people unable to stand up for themselves . . . You Fianna Fáilers should be ashamed of yourselves . . . You’re scum,” he protests loudly, in what he later admits sheepishly is far from his mild-mannered self.
Meanwhile, a courteous Land Rover driver is telling Ryan that after 10 years away, he is back in Ireland setting up a company and will “find it hard to vote for Fianna Fáil”. But, he says, he might well vote for Ryan.
This is probably quite common. The suspicion is that Ryan the personality rises above the party label, which may explain why opinion polls routinely understate his support. The patrician D4 head forms an entertaining double act with Bolger, his handler, an ebullient Liberties-born-and-bred Dub – “So they can’t call him a snob,” says Bolger. Ryan’s vote “has always been under the radar”, he argues, “if they smell he’s in trouble, they’ll come out to vote for him”.
Neither of them glosses over some serious anti-FF sentiment on the hustings but they claim to have detected a softening of attitudes in recent days. “I began to detect a definite change last Thursday and Friday,” says Ryan. “There is anger definitely, especially in middle-class areas, no question about that. But a lot of people have already let off steam and realise that we just have to get through this.”
They also quibble with the suggestion that voters might plump for Mary Lou to keep FF out, arguing it’s just as likely to operate in reverse. A driver tells Ryan she liked the way he dealt with Mary Lou on Questions Answers. “Anything to keep her out . . . You’ll get three votes in my house.”
The entente cordiale is complete when another Land Rover driver stops by with a large Munster rugby flag proudly draped on the front seat – and declares he will rise to cheering for Leinster on the day that’s in it. Where else but in D4?