Campaigners meet match with Moore Street traders

“WHEN’s it on anyway?” A young girl pushing a buggy near Dublin’s Moore Street asked as an election leaflet is shoved into her hand. “It’s Friday,” Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald told her. “That’s tomorrow you know?”

With her hardened face covered in thick make-up, the young mother looked like she had more to worry about than who will be elected.

The TV debates, the manifestos, the polls, the launches and the spats that have consumed the country for the past three weeks had passed her by. “Tomorrow, is it?” she said in surprise.

But the traders in Dublin’s Moore Street had seen enough of it by now. “Thanks be to God it’ll be nearly over,” said one lady leaning against her fruit cart “Sure it it’ll be a bit of excitement,” said another.

In the shadow of the GPO, the Moore Street market has always had a special place in general election campaigns.

The salt of the earth butchers, the old lady apple and orange traders and the hard working fish mongers provide a perfect prop for politicians — many of whom have met their match with the straight-talking “true Dubs”.

In the last election, they turned their back on Bertie Ahern, heckling him about “brown envelopes” and called him a “f***ing dirt bag” during his high-profile canvass as Taoiseach.

Mary Lou McDonald, whose party headquarters are just around the corner, is more at home here than any other politician and her leaflets were even given out by a fish stall during the Lisbon Treaty campaign.

“Good luck Mary!”, “You’ll show the lot of them, Mary!”, she was warmly greeted yesterday. “You showed that Vincent Browne. You gave him a run for his money!” One woman even promised 10 votes for Mary from her house.

But the political-weary traders of Moore Street were not affording their once darling the same hero status she got in the last campaign. “Once you do what you promise now, Mary!” one lady warned peering above the gold rim of her glasses.

“I’m for Maureen O’Sullivan,” another trader said boldly. “Because of all Tony Gregory done.”

Mary Lou is contesting Dublin Central for the second time and remembers the bitter disappointment of losing out in 2007.

“We’re in with a good chance here, but we’ll be slugging it out, probably for the last seat so it’s going to be tough for us,” she said.

As she departed Moore Street for the last time of the 2011 campaign, one lady was looking forward to seeing the back of politicians. Rearranging the signs on her fruit stall, she muttered: “Please God that’ll be the last of them for a while anyway.”