IT WAS Children's Allowance day yesterday and outside the Post Office in Dundalk, in the sun and the breeze, there was a cheerful welter of children, bicycles, young fathers with earrings and babies on their arms, dogs, bent old ladies in frocks and vigorous-looking family women in flip-flops.
In the middle of the pavement, the Sinn Fein candidate and his helpers could hardly keep up with the camaraderie. "Good man, Owney," a man shouts from a van. "Good man, Shamie. It's fresh and well you're looking," Owen Hanratty shouts back. "There's 50 number ones for us in that family," - he says.
FIFTY?
"Oh yes. Shamie is one of 16 brothers and sisters." He's pulled away by an elderly lady. "There's six number ones in my lot for you, Owney, but I want a fish and chips out of it, d'ye hear?" She goes off laughing.
The men with the candidate - Paddy, who was elected himself in the year of the hunger strikes, when he was in Long Kesh: Fra, who served 21 years as an urban district Sinn Fein councillor; Peter, called Peter De Niro by everybody for his greying pony-tail ("I'm pulling in the youth vote") - know everyone on the streets and everyone knows them.
"Don't forget us," they call, to Dessie, Micksie, Paddy, Lily, Francis. Number ones are promised in amazing numbers. A fond "Sure I'll give you a scratch somewhere" is the Dundalk for a refusal. "Get away from me," one fierce-faced woman says. I'm voting Fine Gael." Then they all start laughing. "Ah, Owney," she beams, "sure I was only messing. The best of luck to you."
These Sinn Fein activists have been around since the mid-Sixties, and they're locals. This passer-by worked in a factory with Owen, that one teaches one of the men's kids, the other is in the residents association which another runs - "I've a house I own myself, with a name on it, not a number," he jokes (Sinn Fein being usually equated with council housing).
They have fought many elections but this is the first non-abstentionist one and the first after a period of ceasefire. They are sure they have a chance of the Dail if not now, then soon. "There were 21,000 eligible voters who didn't vote the last time and there's 8,000 young ones come on to the register since then. We're aiming at those votes."
"Give me directions," the quiet old man driving a car out to the afternoon's canvass says in a Belfast accent, "I'm a stranger in paradise." He turns out to be the legendary Joe Cahill.
"If I don't mention the '81 election," he remarks when talking about the changes in Dundalk, "it is because I was in prison in America."
Prisons. Tom Oliver's murder in Cooley. The message on a wall the canvass passed - "All Joyriders will be Kneecapped". Landmines. None of these came up on a canvass yesterday with Owen Hanratty.
"I'm the only candidate in this constituency who knows what its like to work your arse off all week and then pay half what you've earned in tax," he says.
His election platform seems to be a lot more anti-establishment than republican. The two sides to Sinn Fein are perhaps changing relationship.