I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the vast majority of election posters are information-free zones. You get a candidate’s name, a photo, a background and, sometimes, a party name. In a very few cases you get a vacuous slogan. What you don’t get is any information about policies.
I don’t know whether that means that candidates have no policies or that they have some but don’t want to tell you what they are, but either way it doesn’t provide much reason to vote for any of them. Accordingly, you may wish to avoid being detained by any of these candidates, whether they accost you in a public space or call to your door.
Gavin Daly, writing on IrelandAfterNAMA, has developed an anti-candidate spray for use against candidates in the European Parliament elections. All you have to do is read his post, then download and read the PDFs linked here and here and look at this. You don’t need to read them all, of course: just mug up a few choice sections and then ask your friendly eurocandidate some suitable question: for instance
Given the European Commission staff’s view of Irish progress on the S2 indicator under the No-change policy scenario, do you think that the Draft National Risk Assessment takes sufficient account of the long-term CoA?
That should have them waving goodbye almost immediately. But we need something similar for local election candidates.
Irish waterways history 
I find that asking them have they signed the Atheist Ireland Secular Statement has the same effect!
Here’s the link. bjg