MingÕs penalty point fiasco tilts the balance towards Fianna F‡il revival

Politics as a phenomenon is as fixed and unmoving as the wings of a hummingbird. Moments after you arrive at a solid conclusion about something, everything disintegrates before your eyes. The only constants are flux, uncertainty and change.

When the constituency changes were announced last autumn, what looked certain to my eyes was that a Mayo candidate following the votes lost from his constituency to Galway West would not get elected; and a Galway East candidate following the votes into Galway-Roscommon would also have an uphill (read impossible) struggle.

The reasoning was obvious, and safe, enough. There just wasn't enough votes crossing the county boundary to allow a south Mayo candidate or Galway East candidate be sure of being in with a real shout of winning a seat.

Roscommon/Galway was a particularly ugly hybrid. It replaced another ugly hybrid of Roscommon/South Leitrim. The latter county, with Ireland's sparsest population, was effectively hacked into two with one half going into Sligo and the other into Roscommon.

There were cries that Leitrim would never again have a TD – but that did not quite happen. Leitrim had no TDs in either constituency in 2007. But then Manorhamilton-based Michael Colreavy bucked the trend for Sinn Fein in 2011. But there were explanations for that. Colreavy was born and had lived in Sligo for most of his life.

Albert Reynolds’ legendary right-hand man Mickey Doherty had the best summation of this unnatural situation when Roscommon and Longford were yoked together as one constituency. They were in different provinces and divided by the River Shannon.

"Votes don't swim," said Doherty pithily.

And so with the weight of all that evidence, would it be foolhardy for a candidate from, say, Ballinasloe or Ballinrobe to throw their hat into the ring in the two enlarged constituencies of Roscommon/Galway and Galway West?

My initial inclination was no. And the reason was that the incumbent TDs who lived close to the new territory in their constituencies would be the primary beneficiaries.

Take Galway West. A relatively small area comprising a population of 10,000 from South Mayo was added to the constituency. It's generally the Lough Mask area, near the Corrib. Eamon Ó Cuiv's home patch hugs the border and that whole area could be considered his hinterland. It would be inconceivable for a Fianna Fáil candidate to emerge.

Besides, Fine Gael also has a TD, Sean Kyne, in North Connemara. If you look at the later counts in Galway West in 2011, it was the N59 vote (especially when Tom Welby was eliminated) that propelled Kyne into a seat ahead of Fidelma Healy-Eames. No matter how good the Ballinrobe woman or man was they would be starting with a far smaller pool than any of the Galway incumbents.

More of Galway East was lost to Roscommon. For reasons best known to itself, the Constituency Commission decided to shear off 32 electoral districts. That was over 20,000 people exiled into Roscommon, including the populations of Ballinasloe, Ahascragh, Glenamaddy, Creggs, Glynsk and Castleblakeney.

The two incumbent TDs who were most affected were Paul Connaughton from Mountbellew and Micheál Kitt from Castleblakeney, who saw half of their respective vote bases being taken away in one fell swoop.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.