FG going to need a poll to sort out contenders for their election ticket

One of the constituencies which will stick out like a sore thumb in Fine Gael plans for the next General Election will be Galway West – where Enda Kenny will be insisting on the candidates delivering a second Dail seat, as part of Fine Gael plans to lead the next government.

Last time I spoke to him briefly on the issue, Kenny didn’t want to discuss it in detail, but he made it quite clear that Galway West – which has returned only one seat out of five in the past 28 years – would be expected to bring in a second Fine Gael Dail Deputy.

Just for the moment, it appears there won’t be any particular hurry now on sorting out the Fine Gael ticket in Galway West ...... well, things have gone very quiet indeed in the weeks since the Budget, and the consensus appears to be that, unless there is some very unexpected development, then this line-up of Fianna Fail, the Green Party, with the support of a key number of Independents, could be in power for the long haul .... right up to 2012, if they can possibly manage it.

There has been an extraordinary Fine Gael quiet since the Budget – we can only surmise that FG, who would have agreed with the overall spending cuts figure of €4billion, want to ‘keep the head down’ so that Fianna Fail will take the full brunt of cuts in areas like public salaries, child allowances, carer allowances, payments to the blind. In other words, that FF pay the price for the economic catastrophe which befell the country during their watch.

However, I’ve been writing this column since 1977 and one of the things I have learnt is, ‘don’t write off Fianna Fail.’ Could they yet escape the anger, or will it simmer on against them?

What Fianna Fail and the Green Party will be hoping is that, as time passes – and if the economy were to start to improve – FF and The Greens might just see some rebound in their dreadful poll ratings. Certainly, they will want to get back from the awful pasting they took in the Local and the European Elections last June – when the Fianna Fail vote fell 10% to 25%, a level of support at which seats in both Galway West (Eamon O Cuiv and Frank Fahey) and Galway East (Noel Treacy and Michael Kitt), could be potentially vulnerable.

But, while Fine Gael can now boast that they are the biggest party in the country – 338 local councillors to 213 for FF – Galway West is a major contradiction of that trend. In the 2007 General Election, FG only got 20 per cent of the first preferences. It was an increase of over 3%, but with a level of support like that, Enda Kenny could kiss goodbye to his hopes of gaining a seat in Galway.

The last time FG won two seats out of five in Galway West, Garret FitzGerald was leading the party, John Donnellan and Fintan Coogan were the FG front runners, and they won two seats with 34% of the first preferences in 1982.

By 1987, everything had changed. The outgoing FG-Labour Government which had been led by Garret FitzGerald, was unpopular ...... and there had been a sea change in Galway West where Bobby Molloy had left FF to join the Progressive Democrats. Not alone did Molloy take a hunk of the FF vote with him, he also sliced into the FG vote on the basis of his personal popularity. The FG vote fell over 16% to 18.2% and has never really recovered from there in the intervening 28 years.

West Galway is unusually competitive in that there are TDs from FF, FG, Labour and an Independent (Noel Grealish – former PD) returned. But a performance such as that of 2007, would be next to worthless to Enda Kenny in the next General Election. In a five-seater constituency, a quota is just over 16%, so to be even in the hunt for that second seat, Fine Gael would need at 30% to be in with a shout. 

For more read page 14 of this week's Connacht Tribune.