'Galway West Plate' FG win was the 'tightest' in country - that's official !

The world and its mother has spent the past week poring over newspapers and results in a bid to analyse for racing form – so, in keeping with the tradition The Deputy has been looking up the records, to find that the luckiest winner in the country in the General Election was in Galway West.

That fact is revealed in a huge new guide to the February election which was published in recent weeks, the RTE This Week in Politics results book – which shows that Galway’s new TD Sean Kyne (FG), had the narrowest winning margin in the entire country.

Correspondingly, Galway City Councillor Catherine Connolly (Independent) had the smallest losing margin in all of the more than 40 constituencies in the country – pipped at the post by Kyne by just 17 votes.

In what I choose to call the Galway West Plate (where the first five past the post get a Dáil seat and umpteen thousands added) her losing margin was much smaller than other tight contests such as in Wicklow (112), Cavan-Monaghan, and Dublin, which all featured in the national top 10.

The figures show that, when Connolly and Kyne were left in the running in the final stretch – the difference was Kyne 9,112, Connolly 9,095. It had been an incredible run by Connolly, a regular for some years now in the Galway West Plate, but she had been beaten by a nose by the FG newcomer.

In fact Kyne had been a late addition to ‘the field’, having been added after a convention in which the two runners selected for FG were Senator Fidelma Healy-Eames and Councillor Brian Walsh, while the stable connections at the selection convention had turned down long-time stalwart and multiple Galway West winner Padraic McCormack.

The FG stable bosses in Dublin chose to add newcomers Kyne and Hildegarde Naughton with Kyne cashing in on a catastrophic drop in support for Fianna Fáil in Connemara and throughout the constituency – which saw support melt away for that great ould FF stayer Frank Fahey, while that other stayer Eamon Ó Cuív held on to place, despite a drop in his popularity with the punters.

Kyne was the winner from a ‘second TD for Connemara’ plot which was hatched out in Fine Gael Headquarters. The connections felt that the votes were there to elect a second TD from within Connemara (apart from Ó Cuív), but one of the results was that the four-runner strategy (Walsh, Kyne, Healy-Eames and Naughton), possibly scuttled the chances of Healy-Eames . . . or at least the Healy-Eames connections felt that way about it.

It all creates a very challenging situation for newcomer Kyne. By the way, I should say he drew the biggest applause of the night at the Fine Gael convention in the Salthill Hotel where he made a rousing speech stitching the outgoing FF-Green Government’s awful performance into the record, on a night when the FG convention seemed a downbeat affair which was tense because of the doubt as to whether long-service TD McCormack was about to be shafted by the delegates.

The challenge to Kyne now is that, if Connolly is the narrowest loser in the country in the last election, then the winner of that fifth seat in Galway, Kyne, is the holder of the most marginal Dáil seat in the country.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.