Can Fine Gael wipe smirk from FF faces over the final week?

Michael D. Higgins is no stranger to waiting about at election time and hoping that the transfers come through from other candidates as an election count drags on.

He has been in contests now since the early ‘eighties so that, when some pollster comes along and says he is in with a chance of election, he calls on all those years of experiences varying from good, to bad, to indifferent.

Mostly, because he is a popular choice for transfers from voters, the experience has been good .... though there was an election some years ago where the patience of even Higgins was tried as Higgins in West Galway came up with just over seven per cent of the first preferences and many instantly wrote him off as a spent force and someone would could not climb back from such a low starting base.

But behind him in the first preference totals were people representing ratepayers, the PAYE sector, Travellers and any other combination of beliefs and persuasions. Would the votes come out eventually for Michael D. was the question ...... and within hours, it began to be answered in the affirmative, a few hundred here, a few hundred there, and, all the time, Higgins surviving, dragging himself up the totals. It worked magnificently – if memory serves, Higgins got the second seat in five-seater West Galway.

But there are considerations – for instance, should Sean Gallagher go ten or twelve per cent ahead of Higgins in the first preferences, then, though Higgins continues to attract transfers, you can be darn sure that Gallagher will also be getting his share. That big gap in first preferences, if it occurs, could prove fatal to Higgins’ chances.

It’s against this background that the Fine Gael vote of Gay Mitchell could come into play – already there are people at the top prepared to concede that Mitchell is no longer a contender ..... but could the old Fine Gael-Labour inter-party vote be brought into play by pretty much a direct transfer deal across to Higgins in the later counts? 

The ordinary rank-and-file Fine Gael TDs were sickened last week to see those Fianna Fail smirks around Leinster House at the thought of a man like Gallagher, with all of his background FF connections, possibly slipping into the Presidency.

From talking to the likes of West Galway Fine Gael TD Brian Walsh there is an accurate awareness on the FG backbenches of just how those smirks will grow on the FF benches if Gallagher becomes the unofficial FF candidate after the election. Can’t you just hear the lines ..... ‘Jaysuz, our fellow did okay after all.’ That would be a red rag to a Fine Gael bull.

It would be quite a feather in the cap of FF Leader Micheal Martin TD, though he utterly mishandled the whole issue of the nomination with that ludicrous move to recruit Gay Byrne, and without consulting his Parliamentary Party, not least people like Eamon O Cuiv and Brian Crowley, both of whom had at least a passing interest in standing. Certainly, O Cuiv and Crowley would have a bone to pick with him and there are still rumblings in the background that they still intend to ‘pick that bone’ with him yet.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.