It’s not just questions about illegal substances that make time stand still around Leo Varadkar.

Organic meat stalls have the same effect.

Faced with an array of fine cuts from a low-pesticide, high-welfare farm, the question of which to choose was too much.

He wanted two steaks but there was only one left. That’s what you get when you turn up an hour from closing at the People’s Park market in Dún Laoghaire, which all locals seem legally required to visit each Sunday in order to keep up their residency papers.

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“Is he buying up the place?” mused Frances Fitzgerald, home from MEP duty and in buoyant form, albeit concerned about the hold-up.

This was only Leo’s first stop on the afternoon’s canvass and at this rate, his entourage would be forced to bed down for the night on benches in the park before he made his mind up. If there was any room left by the regulars, that was.

He was offered some lamb chops, but they just made him look more perplexed.

“Are they too small for you?” asked Mary Mitchell O’Connor, “farmer’s daughter and proud of it”, one of the three local candidates the Taoiseach was supporting on the day’s walkabout.

Eventually, he settled for a selection of cuts “and some chops for Mary” and the walkabout proper got under way.

By now the gathering, with the Taoiseach, three candidates and separate teams of canvassers, was causing quite the blockage on the Victorian pathways that were designed for polite strolling, not hordes of hungry citizens celebrating the renewal of their residency papers by going stall to stall, guzzling large quantities of artisan foods from all corners of the globe while steering off-roader buggies filled with small children.

A man struggling to get his child and contraption through the mob was thwarted at every move. “If you just keep pushing, you’ll get through,” a canvasser, picking up on his exasperation, reassured him.

That could be the campaign motto from here on as Fine Gael enters that second difficult week of campaigning with yet more polls telling it it’s doomed.

Leo was having none of it. “They always go after the man with the ball,” a friend had told him. He recounted this to some supporters, insisting he wasn’t bothered by the attacks on his leadership.

“It should be tough,” he told another man, who stopped to offer him sympathies on the testing times he was enduring. “No one has an automatic right to be elected. There are some people measuring up curtains and appointing advisers. They’re going to get a shock,” he said.

He liked that line so much, he used it again in his brief press conference in the brisk open air where he reminded all assembled that the offending polls were taken before Fianna Fáil published its “Swiss cheese manifesto” and before the TV debate in which he made mincemeat, or was it lamb-chops, of Micheál Martin. Or would have if he hadn’t just narrowly beaten him, or drawn with him, depending on how kind the pundits’ verdict was.

He drew on the curtains analogy and then returned to the sporting field. “At half-time we’re probably three points down but politics is hurling not soccer and we’re going to pull this one back,” he announced to cheers.

The rest of the questions were predictable and the answers equally so. No to Sinn Féin, no to dumping Eoghan Murphy. “I’m happy with all the ministers,” he insisted. “Some ministers have harder jobs than others,” he added. “It’s not right to target people personally.”

It was also a no to the Green Party’s promise of banning homework for primary school children. So there goes all the under-12 votes.

And then, fortified by a falafel wrap, a hot toddy (non-alcoholic), much talk about jam (the fruity, not the political, kind) and a Teddy’s ice-cream (also a requirement of residency in the borough), it was off to Dundrum.

In Dundrum, everyone is apparently under 12, communicates via smartphone even with people standing beside them and is fluent in higher-level shopping.

Leo was in fine form, shaking hands with starstruck schoolgirls who immediately WhatsApped their mates, OMG-ing their breathless greetings.

A woman with eight children (not all hers, it turned out) asked for a photo and the kids obligingly shouted ‘Number One!’ on command as they smiled. And then one shouted Shane Ross! And time stood still again.

The woman, slightly mortified, finally broke the silence. “Sorry, I work for Shane Ross,” she explained. Quick as a flash, Leo quipped: “That’s OK. I worked with him for a while, too.”

He might just be getting the hang of this.

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