Michael McDowell is fighting for his political life and it's not a pretty sight. Kathy Sheridan watches as the PDs' Rottweiler snorts and growls his way across Dublin South East
Just wondering, Michael, about this business of going bald-headed for Fianna Fáil - the Ceausescu gibe, the shimmying up lamp-posts to tell the nation they can't be let out on their own - when you've been so, um, cosy with the same people for years now?
Oops. Red rag to Rottweiler. He stops in his tracks. "I'm in real competition with them. This is a very, very vigorous contest in which you have to shoulder people off the ball to score goals. This is not a fancy-dress competition."
Crikey. Has no one else asked you about this? "No. No one has been saying that kind of thing to me. Only Fianna Fáil at their briefings." Selfish b . . . . . ds.
The job now is to put clear blue water between the PDs and that lot. "Honest politics, real results" is the slogan. McDowell - "a passionate believer in clean capable political service," it says on the pamphlet. You better believe it.
One woman with a set look on her face says she's undecided. "Trust in politicians is an issue for me now." His response is brief and businesslike: "Well, for myself, I've never betrayed the public trust." No winsome smile, no attempt to cajole.
It's the same story with the woman who says she won't be voting for him because she "didn't like the referendum - it showed no understanding of humanity". Back on the street, he says there are people saying rosaries for him on account of the same referendum.
Michael McDowell is fighting for his political life and he still can't bring himself to turn on the smarm. Even the snippy dogs of fabulously affluent Orwell Road seem curiously muted as he bounds over the crunchy gravel, past the sporty Mercs and fragrant Labradors and on to the doorsteps on a bank holiday canvass.
He's canvassing in the middle of the FA Cup final; he doesn't even ask about the score when people finally drag themselves to the door.
A well-known arts figure with a particular interest in children says the PDs will not be getting his No 1 because he has a problem with taxation; he's not being asked to pay enough. Services have suffered, the PDs are over-reliant on market forces and tax reductions have created a culture of greed, he says.
"That may be a good middle-class position," responds the old charmer, "but if you had been living out in Neilstown where 80 per cent of households had no breadwinners and people who had jobs were worse off at work than on the dole - that's the kind of policy that reduced this country to its knees. I believe in cutting tax if it gets 400,000 people working and that's what it has done."
Alas, poor arts man, your engagement got you nowhere. But you knew that anyway; that's the beauty of McDowell, there is no pretence. "I see that culture of greed thing as vacuous," snorts McDowell, as we canter down the street. "What I see is an Ireland that's got up off its knees after 20 to 30 years of self-doubt, ideological cant and under-performance."
It's his bugbear, that left-wing ideology. "I despise it. They're far more concerned about how the cake is divided than whether there is any cake." Anyway, the PDs have a way of extracting tax so you'd hardly notice.
"Capital gains tax produced £160 million in 1997. We cut the rate from 40 per cent to 20 per cent and last year it produced £860 million. And the Labour Party wants to restore the rate from 20 to 42 per cent. Now that's ideology."
But back to that other lot. They are fighting this election on the basis that everything is "hunky-dory," and that doesn't suit the PDs at all. Health is a big issue, so is the economy - "not that people are scrutinising the manifestos but there are concerns about jobs" - and they're also angry about Campus Ireland. Very angry.
Then out of the blue, two genteel elderly women answer the door and come very close to flinging their arms around him."One time we were without water, you were the only one to take us seriously."
His canvassing team turns up other tales about how he helped a woman to get a pram and had late-night advice about her tree for another. But hear this. Michael McDowell does not "fix" things; he helps people to go about fixing things for themselves.
The real question though is how he can face into all this mullarkey again, five years after that devastating 11-count 27-vote defeat to John Gormley. "I believe in the political process," he replies.
"Obviously there are huge temptations, family-wise, to be back in the Law Library. But the 400,000 people who are working in 2002 who were not working in 1997, they are the people I constantly have in mind."
Anyway, his wife, Niamh Brennan, is no naif. "When Michael was elected in 1987, he took Joe Doyle's seat and I saw Joe and Peggy's upset that night. And I remember thinking that the only way out of this business is the red card. That's the reality."