Celebration allows McCormack chance to reflect on 40 years of public service
Date Published: {J}
Taoiseach Enda Kenny will lead the tributes next week in Galway to retired TD Padraic McCormack, who gave almost 40 years of service in public life as councillor, Senator, Dail Deputy and as Mayor of both Galway City and County.
The reports are that the gala dinner, planned for the Salthill Hotel on November 4, is already a sell out with Health Minister, Dr James Reilly, among the guests and McCormack to be flanked by major western backers such as Ministers for State Michael Ring, John Perry and Dinny McGinley.
McCormack held the one seat in Galway West for Fine Gael for over 20 years after the inglorious departure of John Donnellan and Fintan Coogan who had won two seats in 1982 and looked like they should hold onto them forever in a five-seater. However, that was before Bobby Molloy left Fianna Fail to found the PDs and changed the face of Galway politics for decades to come.
McCormack reached the high point of his career with his service as chairman of the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party from 2007-11 and he was also a prominent member of Public Accounts Committee of the Dail.
He and his wife Eilish will be the main guests at the dinner in the Salthill Hotel, where Taoiseach Kenny, who is now the leader of the biggest ever Fine Gael Party, will make a special presentation to them on behalf of the party nationally and locally.
The dinner is being organised locally by the likes of Chief Whip Paul Kehoe, TD’s Brian Walsh, Sean Kyne, Senator Fidelma Healy Eames, Coincillor Padraig Conneely while lending a hand out in East Galway will be new TDs Paul Connaughton and Junior Minister Ciaran Cannon, as well as Senator Michael Mullins.
It will be a night of huge celebrations - but the party afficionados will be hoping that it will banish for good, the memories of the Fine Gael convention just before the General Election when McCormack surprisingly was not selected to contest the election.
This especially annoyed the McCormack connections because, as chairman of the Parliamentary Party, there had been a hop tip that McCormack would wind up with one of the plum jobs of politics, the Ceann Comhairle or Leas Ceann Comhairle, two sinecures which bring with them six figure salaries, and state cars, plus offices in Leinster House.
Interestingly one of these posts, that of Leas Ceann Comhairle went to long serving Fianna Fail TD Michael Kitt, who has been in the Oireachtas since 1975 and because of the cuts in state cars, is reported to have been the only politician with a free car at Galway Races this Summer.
For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.