“Where’s your mammy?” Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams asks party candidate Cllr Paul Donnelly as he enters the organisation’s crowded office in Mulhuddart in the Dublin West constituency.
Bridie Donnelly looks thrilled as Mr Adams shakes both of her hands before setting off on a rapid canvass which sees Mulhuddart and Finglas in neighbouring Dublin North-West wrapped up in an hour and a half.
No mention of Thomas “Slab” Murphy’s tax offences in these parts, but plenty of giggles from starstruck schoolgirls and thumbs-up from passing motorists who honk their carhorns supportively.
Rose Healy is one of many local women who say they have always wanted to meet Mr Adams and request a selfie with him, “a good man who does a lot for people like us”.
High praise
She also has high praise for Mr Donnelly. “If you go to Paul with a crisis, he’ll come back to you. You see posters for Joan Burton and the like. They never come near you,” she says.
As well as the Tánaiste and Labour leader Ms Burton, four-seat Dublin West is also the constituency of Minister for Health Leo Varadkar. Socialist Joe Higgins is not contesting again and Ruth Coppinger is running under the AAA-PBP banner. Mr Donnelly topped the poll here in the 2014 byelection but transfers pushed Ms Coppinger ahead.
“We just weren’t transfer-friendly, but we are now. I think this is our year. It was very tough to get a Sinn Féin man elected out here. This was never a republican area, but it is now,” one canvasser says.
“This is a rich man’s Government that’s in power. This is a working-class area. Labour should have minded the working class, but they didn’t.”
Next stop is Finglas village, where Mr Adams is asked “What are you going to do for us, Gerry?” by Linda McGrath.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks.
“A hell of a lot!” is the jovial response from Ms McGrath, a wheelchair user who rails against politicians who have “robbed this country”.
Mr Adams agrees that “we need to get rid of them”.
Photographs
At a taxi rank, Mr Adams shakes hands and poses for photographs with the drivers, all the while murmuring: “Fair play, fair play to you, you’re doing ok? Thank you now.”
Sitting Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis distributes leaflets asking constituents to give him a number one vote and a second preference to his running mate, Cllr Cathleen Carney Boud.
Ms Carney Boud’s leaflets reverse the order. The party is bullish about its chances of taking two seats here in Dublin North-West, although it would be a tall order in this three-seater, which is also currently represented by Róisín Shortall of the Social Democrats and Labour’s John Lyons.
A pep talk outside the Sinn Féin office in Finglas completes the canvass, where Mr Adams tells supporters he can detect “a hunger to get change”.
