KEVIN MYERS AT LARGE: On the very day the election was called, the RAF flew a victory roll over Tallaght in expectation of Seán Crowe's election to the Dáil - though this is being slightly economical with the truth. It was, in fact, the Irish Republican Air Force which hauled a Vote Seán Crowe banner above Tallaght, getting the Sinn Féin campaign off the ground even as its competitors were still in their deck-chairs digesting the tannoy's "Scramble chaps".
The swift IRAF response is not the only indicator of the election outcome. Tallaght is prime republican territory, rather resembling Andersonstown in design and remoteness from a city which - either through bone-headed stupidity or criminal class-hatred - was happy to see the last of its inhabitants. Tens of thousands of people were dumped miles from the city centre, without shops or pubs or proper policing or a hospital or decent transport for some 20 years. The real wonder is that the residents never walked into Dublin - the buses are an insult, and take forever - and burned Dáil Éireann down. And I'd have supplied the paraffin.
Yet Tallaght defeats stereotypes. Today it largely consists of neat little houses, with well-minded gardens. Tesco in The Square stocks Dom Perignon '94, at €100 a bottle, and supermarkets seldom use shelf-space merely to taunt the poor. But Tesco caters for them too, as the presence of vast amounts of cheap Dutch lager suggests. If you've ever licked a saucepan you'll know what it tastes like, its appeal being that it costs €2 per ton - expensive I know, but you also get a second ton free.
Its consumers probably come from an exercise in studied state-criminality called Killinarden. This vast estate has no road-names, merely large boards at the head of each street, listing the house-numbers; and the houses themselves are variously mud-coloured, presumably to camouflage their assault on civic decency from passengers on the Dublin airport flight-path overhead.
The local shopping centre is derelict and boarded up, so the nearest shops are half an hour's walk away. Cars are as rare as dromedaries in Killinarden. I didn't see a single bus there, but I did see the same wet, poorly-clothed people still shuddering at a bus-stop 20 minutes after I'd first passed them.
The rear of the one functioning shop, the post office, is festooned with barbed wire fencing: Stalag Oifig an Phoist.
Seán Crowe is an honest man. The movement he belongs to is perfectly deplorable, but considering the conditions of so many residents, we're lucky that someone of his personal calibre is the primary expression of their anger.
The graffiti on the derelict shopping centre spells out the alternative: not IRAF but RIRA.