SUPPOSE they gave a referendum and nobody came? Suppose they gave a referendum and nobody knew about it, much less understood it?
Polling stations in Dublin yesterday suffered whatever is the opposite of a stampede. A centipede, perhaps? Or a 35 per centipede?
That 35 per cent figure kept surfacing in predictions of the final turnout in the referendum. "There's no buzz attached to it," said Mr Paul Murphy, presiding officer at the Harold's Cross primary school. It was 3.10 p.m. and polling was "slow". About 400 out of a potential 2,836 people had voted: "If we hit 30-35 per cent we'll be lucky."
The yard at St Agnes's Primary School in the working class district of Crumlin was deserted but for two young gardai. How are things going, lads? "Quiet."
Mr Michael Launders polling clerk, estimated that by the close of polling at 9 p.m. "you'd be lucky if you got 35 per cent".
Enter Mr Ben Briscoe TD (Fianna Fail), the only practising politician this reporter met. His estimate? "Around 30 per cent if the weather doesn't deteriorate." Just at that point, the drizzle: turned into serious rain.
On to Scoil Bhride on Ranelagh's Oakley Road. Six voting tables but no takers Mr Brendan O'Shea said women voters outnumbered men by "at least 10 to one". The former cabinet minister, Ms Gemma Hussey, had braved the elements. "I've been amazed at the number of normally well informed people who have asked me in the last couple of days, `What's this all about'?"
At the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook an election official, Ms Sadhbh Bhreathnach, said only 41 out of 291 people on the register had cast their vote by 4.30 p.m.
In the cosy heat in the national school on Ringsend's Cambridge Road it had just turned five and the presiding officer, Mr Regis O'Keeffe, said that "in round figures" some 500 had voted out of 3,362 on the list. "It's not a lot."
As they say down Ringsend way: "True for ya, true for ya."