Working women of ‘knockin shop’ helping Nolan to rise!

Comrade Billy Cameron, the Labour Party veteran, has soldiered through many election campaigns. The elder statesman on Galway City Council has been on so many campaign trails, he thought he’d seen it all. Until this week.

The bould Billy was out canvassing door-to-door for the party’s under-pressure TD, Derek Nolan.  The team were leaflet-dropping and knocking on doors in a residential area in the city centre when, he says, he stumbled upon a brothel.

“I had my hand on the knocker,” he says. “I mean buzzer.”

Comrade Cameron says that just before he pressed the door-bell, the front-door opened. “A punter was leaving. He was being escorted, pardon the pun, to the door by the hooker,” he says, blushing.

The man, in his 50s, went bright red and “scampered off down the road with his tail between his legs”. The woman, a pretty tanned brunette in her 20s, remained calm, he recalls.

“It was obvious what was after happening but I asked her if she had a vote . . . She took the leaflet and said she’d consider Derek,” he says.

Billy also points out that there was plenty of ‘action’ at one of the neighbours’ homes, too. “There’s a scatter of kids next door. It was a knockin’ shop itself – a legitimate one!”

Crime on the canvass

There was drama too on the doorsteps on the east side of the Galway West constituency when canvassers for Independent TD, Noel Grealish, leaflet-dropped in Claregalway and Cregboy.

At one door, a canvasser for a rival candidate took Grealish’s leaflets out of a letterbox and wrote “derogatory comments” about him and the homeowner.

Grealish is a big boy and can take it. But the homeowner found it quite distressing. All is not lost, however.

CCTV cameras outside the house clearly captured the identity of the person involved. “The Gardaí and the party’s national and local director of elections are being informed about the incident,” says Grealish.

Dirty tricks

More dirty tricks, this time in Westside.

Independent councillor, Mike Cubbard, claims a number of his posters were taken down off lampposts and dumped.

Cubbard wasn’t pointing fingers at who he suspects the culprit is. But he did moan on social media that his posters had been replaced by those of Labour’s Derek Nolan.

It forced butter-wouldn’t-melt Derek to deny the non-accusation accusation, which is a bit like responding to the question: ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’

Nolan said: “I have not and my team have not taken down any other candidates’ posters.”

A canvasser for Fianna Fáil, a party not averse to dirty tricks, had a theory: “His own lads could have taken them down – for sympathy.” Maybe we’ll never know.

Meanwhile, Cubbard’s posters aren’t the only things being targeted. Apparently, his ‘good name’ as a law-breaking, non-payer of water charges, is being tarnished, too.

“It’s a pity members of other parties are calling to people I grew up beside and telling blatant lies saying that I’ve paid Irish Water,” he sighed.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.