î Cu’v at the vanguard of battle to rebuild party of his grandfather

Maybe it’s fitting that, in the battle to rebuild Fianna Fáil after the electoral wipe-out, one of the figures to emerge from the rubble should be Eamon Ó Cuív, the grandson of the party founder Eamon De Valera.

In his home patch in West Galway, Fianna Fáil lost long standing Deputy, Frank Fahey, with a drop in the party first preferences of 16 per cent, but Ó Cuív, despite a drop in his personal vote to 7,000, was again first elected.

In the subsequent shemozzle in FF over who should lead, he ran Micheál Martin a close second and as a result has ended up with a number of extremely important functions within the party - not the least of them being the Taking of Standing Orders in the Dáil on Thursday afternoon, where Ó Cuív has grown in stature. He has shaken off the “country and western” atmosphere that seemed to surround him from the time he first broke through into Dáil politics in 1992.

Perhaps this atmosphere was started by the uncanny resemblance to his late grandfather, but in recent months, when Ó Cuív got stuck into issues like the threat to small schools in the West and turf cutting bans in western bogs, the new rules on septic tanks, he has proven to be something of a hit at public meetings throughout the West.

The latest of these was in County Hall on Monday, where he found himself ‘leader’ of a group of 100 protestors who stormed a Council meeting over the proposed septic tank charges, and in Gullane’s in Ballinasloe last week where FF party sources said 200 people turned up and were highly impressed with Ó Cuív’s treatment of western issues such as the septic tanks registration proposals, a threat to the future of smaller rural schools and the threat of turf cutting in raised bogs in key areas of Galway.

When it comes to mastery of the detail of scenes such as permits for septic tanks, followed by inspection of the tanks and then charges for maintenance of those tanks to European Union standards, Ó Cuív is unsurpassed - he has the figures, he does the research, and it is obvious that the people in County Hall and in Gullane’s that night were impressed.

FF party sources say that one woman was so impressed by FF and Ó Cuív that she wanted to know how she could join the party and possibly stand in the 2014 local elections ... the crucial battle for FF in its bid to get back from 19 Dáil seats, the kind of total that it would have dismissed 2 years ago as impossible for a party that has been in government for 70 years.

Ó Cuív will have a crucial role in getting those candidates into the field and winning seats ... “all politics are local” is one of the famous quotes from Tip O’Neill and already we are getting a taste of it in places like East Galway where the future of Portiuncula Hospital was centre stage last week to talks involving local campaigners, politicians and health officials, despite repeated pledges before the general Election that Portiuncula and its services were “safe”.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.