The unremitting misery of the canvass trail... if you’re on the Government side

YOU’VE seen the posters.

And very professional they are, too, even though they were crafted by amateurs.

They don’t have pictures or logos or colour. But then they’re not selling candidates or policies or parties. They’re just required to deliver one simple message: “Fianna Fáil and Green Party candidates not wanted here.”

They’ve been cropping up in towns and cities around the country. Large and small, the posters are. Some are tied to front gates, some stuck behind picture windows.

They’re irresistible to press photographers eager to illustrate stories about how the Government is in trouble. They’re comforting to canvassers from Fine Gael and Labour. They’re dispiriting to canvassers from the Government parties.

In theory then, the people – many of them public servants – who have produced these posters are the equivalent of the egg-thrower at the AIB meeting; the ultimate vindicator of the infuriated. They’re doing what a huge number of people would like to do.

If the objective of the poster-creators was self-expression, they’ve achieved that – in spades.

If they wanted to damage the Government parties in the local, European and by-elections, however, they’re way off target. They don’t realise that what their posters are doing is saving Government canvassers’ time.

No doubt some of the old hands within Fianna Fáil have already pointed this out to their teams. Those old hands would make it clear that malicious voters – ready to choke the Government for income levies or any of the other measures currently reducing us to bread and dripping – will take a number of approaches, of which postered instructions to take yourself off their premises are by a mile the most benign.

Voters who are mad as hell but clued into the electoral system will be much more subtle about it, knowing that a poster simply allows a team of canvassers to cross you off their list of possibles without having to take stick from you.

Subtly subversive voters are much cleverer about it. Not only do they not bar canvassers by poster, they actively entice them to engage. Nor do they deliver the response we’ve seen on TV in shopping centres, where the voter clenches their hand in rejection of a) a handshake or b) a leaflet, before stating, “I’m not going to vote for you”.

All that’s too easy and obvious.

The seasoned voter (particularly if they’ve canvassed themselves) knows the way to entrap canvassers is to be warm and welcoming and questioning. Not to reveal their voting intention, but – particularly in relation to the European Parliament elections – to drag the team into a long discussion of some abstruse directive of which they may never have heard.

Old political affiliates know the duty of the committed party member is to keep the representative of the other party on the doorstep, wasting their time, as long as humanly possible. In the old days, such old stagers would actually invite naive candidates from the other side into the house for a cup of tea. It’s so tempting, when you’re exhausted, cold and wet, to agree to step inside and wrap yourself around a jolt of hot, sweet tea.

Canvassers who’ve gone through the wringer, or been trained, know that even if their tongues are hanging out for a cuppa, they must keep moving. You make your point. You ask for the vote. Just as you don’t yield to the temptation to drink tea, neither do you yield to the ever-present temptation to publicly crush, defeat and grind a debater’s heel into a voter who gets argumentative, because that, too, is time wasting. Good candidates civilly acknowledge criticisms, indicate they’ve taken them on board, and, notwithstanding the attack, ask for a vote.

One of the wisest old election heads around belongs to the Labour Party’s Ruairi Quinn who, on yesterday’s Today FM Sunday Show, made one of those observations that tend to be swept to one side in a fast-moving programme. He said that the voter who actually meets a candidate is more likely to vote for that candidate.

Quinn’s comment is profoundly true. The fact is that a voter, faced with a candidate when they open their front door, may eat the face off that candidate. They may tear narrow strips off the candidate. They may damn the candidate and the candidate’s seed, breed and generation. They may get mauve in the face as they loudly wish personal and party destruction on the individual and all he or she stands for.

But despite all that, if the candidate is polite and patient and doesn’t become abusive in the face of abuse, there’s a good chance the voter may actually put a consolation-prize tick somewhere on the ballot paper for them on election day.

In any election, the power, in a doorstep encounter, lies with the owner of the doorstep. In this particular election, more of them will be eager to express themselves. Which means that Government candidates and canvassers face three weeks of hell. Hell over and above the norm.

Normally, canvassers encounter potholes and poodles, broken curbs and bothersome toddlers. They have to avoid stepping on a cherished flower bed and are warned against taking short cuts like stepping over a fence between two gardens. (Homeowners don’t like it and you could do yourself a strategic injury.)

Rumour-runners arrive up to them in mid-canvass to pass on (usually negative) gossip results of unofficial opinion polls (usually terrifying) details of a dirty trick done by the running mate or a message of protest from the running mate about a dirty trick played on him or her. They get voters quoting from radio programmes they haven’t heard, because they’re out on the stump.

They’re followed by colour writers and cameras, each so hungry for A Telling Moment that they can jump-start a candidate into falling over his own feet or putting them in his mouth. They never know what attitude is going to meet them once the door opens. (With the exception of George Lee, who seems sure, four times out of five, of being clutched to a bosom pulsating with approval.)

This time around, he and the majority of the Fine Gael canvassers are on a roll.

Canvassers for either of the Government parties, in sharp contrast, face pretty unremitting misery as infuriated public servants, householders paying off negative equity and individuals clasping recent P45s vent their spleen on their callers.

You may not give Government candidates or canvassers much, but you have to give them credit for having the courage to go out, night after night, to take public punishment.

Because it would be so much easier and safer to stay at home.