Pitching for former colleagues in Fine Gael, sure, but the Greens? Then again. Pair the current demographic profiles of the PDs and the Greens and they look like fraternal twins. Urban, south of Dublin, cosmopolitan outlook, relatively affluent.

Then McDowell pitched for Sinn Fein voters. Cue furrowed brows.

This is weird, right? It is, unless you realise that McDowell and Sinn Fein are actually battling for the same marginal voters.

Chew on that for a moment.

What is far and away the most salient political issue in Ireland? It's immigration.

Around 10% of Ireland's population, including yours truly, is now non-native. According to a poll released in this newspaper last weekend, 80% of voters want increased restrictions on immigration. Threein-five believe that Irish culture and values are being diluted by all the new arrivals. Nearly one-in-three doesn't accept that continued economic growth depends on further immigration.

The sheer numbers involved are breathtaking. That they have been more or less absorbed with such minimal backlash . . . the odd random attack on a non-white person in Bray or Temple Bar is horrific but not endemic and is generally met with appropriate opprobrium . . . is a testament to the liberality of the modern, or more accurately, affluent Irish.

Then again, ethnic violence isn't generally started by the wealthy. Not a lot of pogroms in Switzerland. It generally involves marginalised young men living through a period of economic volatility . . . either they're getting poor fast or their neighbours are getting rich fast while they stagnate.

Either way, someone has to be blamed. There are relatively few such marginalised young men in Ireland . . . though they all seemed to gather around me on O'Connell Street during the Orange riot last February.

But violence is the tip of an emotional iceberg. The other 95% is below the surface.

Anger, resentment and fear are there.

There are plenty of people in Ireland who feel disconnected from the stunning affluence of the PD/Greens crescent along the Dart line. They're not poor, but they don't winter in Malta either. They are the Angry Asbolanders, trapped in badly planned inner suburbs.

They crowded the Green Isle hotel in their hundreds on a weeknight in July 2005 to beg Mary Harney and Michael McDowell to stop worrying about the rights of criminals and pay attention to the victims. There are likeminded pockets all around the country.

Picture a single mother, worried about her kids and her elderly father.

She wants her kids to believe that if they work hard and play by the rules, they can succeed.

Those kids have to walk past a burnt-out joyrider's car on the way to school. A no-nonsense tough line on lawand-order has a lot of appeal.

She's also worried, vaguely, about immigration. The foreigners she knows are nice enough. But though she can buy her kids more than her parents could buy for her, all of it . . . jobs, pensions . . . just seems so much less secure. And that insecurity coincided with the arrival of the foreigners. Now she reads that some of them are sponging off the system.

There's Michael McDowell, planning to deport them if they get out of line.

This should be a voter that the PDs can convert from attending a meeting in the Green Isle hotel to support on polling day. She's also exactly the same kind of voter that Sinn Fein needs to win if it is to grow. There are smart people in Sinn Fein who know this . . . in the bizarre calculus of Irish politics, they are now competing with McDowell for the same marginal voters, who, for whatever reasons, crossed the emotional threshold of leaving their grandparents' Civil War party.

The continuing strength of the Civil War parties, which have no ideology, merely different skill levels of centrist populism, remains a mystery to me. But they also have the effect of keeping the Angry Asbolander vote diluted. If they . . . culturally conservative, anxious about immigration, crime and the future . . . rallied behind a single banner of whatever shade of green, the face of Irish politics in five years could be transformed as dramatically as the Irish economy was over the last 10.

You have to think that's what McDowell's betting, anyway.

rdelevan@tribune. ie