Cliched travel articles tend to begin by describing a place as “a land of contrasts”. But when it comes to Dublin Central, on the precipice of a high-stakes byelection and the constituency I call home, that feels appropriate.

This is a place where you may live in something approaching a tenement or in a luxury penthouse. Mostly, you probably live in a terraced house, flat or apartment. It is a place where gleaming offices line the Liffey and less gleaming lines of people wait for food from the Muslim Sisters of Éire at the GPO or outside the Capuchin Day Centre on Bow Street.

Dublin Central holds many things at once, including the architecture of corporate wealth and the street life of destitution. It is home to generations of working-class families and the gentrifiers that displace them.

I have never been more canvassed in my life. Eoin Ó Broin of Sinn Féin arrived one day, Ray McAdam (Fine Gael), Janet Horner (Green Party), People Before Profit knocked twice, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil canvassers have done double shifts at my door.

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One Fianna Fáil canvasser told me a reason for the housing crisis in the area was because so much money was being spent on the MetroLink. Obviously, that wasn’t the party’s only........

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