Leo Varadkar tried but failed to hold a secret canvass on the campaign trail with controversial by-election candidate Verona Murphy in Wexford on Monday.
Normally when the Taoiseach rolls into town to help out a budding Dáil politician, he’s welcomed with great fanfare.
But this time there was no public announcement in an attempt to keep the visit under wraps and away from the press.
Of course this didn’t prevent the intrepid media from tracking the Fine Gael team down to the middle of Wexford town where the Taoiseach walked the streets with Ms Murphy.
Ms Murphy was thrust into the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons when many accused her of racism over some of her comments in media interviews.
Among the worst that caused most offence was a suggestion from Ms Murphy in the Wexford People that young asylum seekers as young as three or four could be linked to terrorist group Isis.
She went further and said that we might need to “de-programme” the young kids if we were to offer them refuge here in Ireland.
But the controversy didn’t come up on the short canvass around the shops and streets of Wexford.
And neither Ms Murphy nor Ms Varadkar would take any questions on the issue, despite numerous attempts to get them to talk.
One reason perhaps is that the meet ‘n’ greet didn’t really last that long, a little over half an hour.
Mr Varadkar then packed up his team into their waiting cars and he was off, leaving Ms Murphy to battle the rest of her campaign without the Taoiseach by her side.
