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.