FOUR SNIPS WITH PLIERS AND EOGHAN WAS GONE...

A WHITE Toyota car pulled up where the homeless man received life-changing injuries.

A man got out with a long pliers and walked to the bridge.

All morning long, people had been complaining on social media and on radio shows about the election poster for Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy that was overlooking the site where a council truck struck a homeless man’s tent, lifting it up and crushing him as he slept inside.

The pliers arrived while Joe Duffy was still talking about the election poster on air and noting how quickly Fine Gael had put up the posters on Tuesday.

The man made four cuts. Snip. Snip. Eoghan Murphy’s poster began to sway. Snip. Snip. It fell to the side and into his hand. He grabbed it and walked back to the car.

I walked out on to the road as he was walking to the car. ‘Is this because of what happened?’ I asked. ‘Well, it’s out of respect,’ he said. He opened the boot of the car and in went Eoghan Murphy, who is unlikely to reappear for the rest of the election at this prime site, on the corner of Leeson Street and the Grand Canal.

The man waited a moment to make a call and then drove off.

A short time later, the Housing Minister tweeted his condolences for the homeless man and mentioned that his poster had been removed from the site.

Across the road, the homeless man’s possessions still lay on the ground, on a muddy slope by the canal, right under the view of passersby on Leeson Street Bridge.

There was still a dirty pillow stuck in the mud, a quilt without a cover, an orange tent peg holder, and a Dunnes bag with the cover for a chicken salad inside.

Beside it was a L’Oreal Pour Homme hair gel – texture: ‘Strong’ – while a man’s belt and a

We know very little of his life in Ireland

blanket lay hanging down the muddy embankment itself, along with a single runner.

Behind them, by the rampart of the bridge, lay a light blue Redwood sleeping bag, now soaking wet, and a broken blue umbrella.

It was all that was left here of the man, who came from Africa and found himself living for months by a canal, just feet away from a park bench statue of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who often celebrated the canal’s ability to link the country together.

‘O commemorate me with no hero-courageous tomb, just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by,’ he once wrote.

It was a welcome – to come and join him on the canal.

Yesterday, people walked by or stopped at the bridge, and some put their hands in the mouth as the viewed the wreckage of his life. One person left a pink bouquet of flowers sellotaped to a tree.

We know very little of his life – only that he was struggling with life in Ireland, and that he had refused to leave the canal.

What united him with Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy yesterday was his lack of presence on the canal.

Both were supposed to be there today – the election candidate and the homeless man both disappeared within hours of each other.

Eoghan was placed quietly into the back of a Toyota, and the homeless man was taken to hospital in an ambulance, his dirty, wet, muddy hair gel, blanket and chicken salad a reminder of his final hours with the Housing Minister looking on above the Grand Canal.