Bradley Bytes: ABT (Anyone But Thomas) crowd carried the day in Galway West Bye-Election

Some of it is just ignorance of our Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote system.

However, others who should know better are deliberately driving the narrative that the Independent Ireland candidate was a victim who was hard done by. He was not.

Seán Kyne, second on first-preference votes, won the Bye-Election because he received more transfers (second, third, fourth etc preferences) than Thomas.

It’s not that voters who support parties of the Left like Labour and the Social Democrats wanted Seán Kyne to win. They didn’t. They wanted Helen Ogbu or Míde Nic Fhionnlaoich as their TD.

But when it came down to a choice between two Moycullen men, more voters chose what they felt was the least-worst option – Kyne instead of Thomas.

It’s hard to believe that in the year 2026 this has to be explained but the online conspiracists are trying to discredit the result.

So for the record, there is no conspiracy. The vote counting process at the count centre in Salthill couldn’t have been more open and transparent. Tally people can stand and watch every vote being counted, and transferred.

What the cranks are correct about is that there was an anti-Noel Thomas vote at play.

Though he got 10,007 number ones, a significant number of the 37,886 people who voted did not want Thomas elected. That doesn’t mean they wanted Kyne. It was satisficing.

We could speculate for ages about why Kyne was more popular, or why Thomas was so transfer repellent.

Was it the ‘Inn is full’ comments; the attendance at an IRB meeting; the fuel protests; opposition to Salthill-Knocknacarra’s pitch plans? Who knows? But each of those issues probably gained him as many votes as they lost.

One issue, though, that helped Kyne gobble up Left transfers was housing.

It may have played well locally, at the time, for Thomas to oppose Galway County Council plans for 48 social houses in Moycullen but it cost him Left transfers. And Kyne, who suffered initially for supporting that housing plan which ultimately did not go ahead, got rewarded eventually last weekend for holding the unpopular Government line in 2021.

FF/FG transfers

The Bye-Election runner-up, Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas had a dig at his former party Fianna Fáil when he highlighted the significant transfer (2,851 votes or 47%) from Cillian Keane to Fine Gael’s Sean Kyne.

Thomas goaded his former party by claiming Fine Gael was “gorging” on Fianna Fáil, adding: “In my day that would have been absolutely and utterly unheard of”.

In fact, a strong FG/FF transfer rate did happen in his day – and he was the main beneficiary of it!

In 2019, Thomas was a Fianna Fáil candidate for Galway County Council in the South Conamara Local Electoral Area.

When Fine Gael’s candidate Ann Flaherty – Kyne’s secretary – was eliminated, more than 50% of her 703 transferable votes went to three Fianna Fáil candidates. Thomas took a whopping 52% of the total number of Fine Gael transfers that went to Fianna Fáil, even more than Máirtín Lee who hailed from the same end of the constituency as Flaherty.

Count cramp

Mayor emeritus Pádraig Conneely, the former Fine Gael city councillor, suffered from nocturnal leg cramps after enduring two long days of counting in Salthill last weekend.

He was prescribed Indian tonic water containing quinine which eased the pain but a sleepless night meant he couldn’t travel to the Leinster House for Seán Kyne’s first day back in the Dáil.

Conneely is as combative as ever as per a snide quote to Eavan Murray in the Sunday Independent in relation to Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s analysis of her party’s Bye-Election result.

“Tiocfaidh ár lá has come to ‘it is not our day’,” he sniped.

Former Sinn Féin councillor Danny Callanan – who regularly clashed with Conneely during their time on the Council – said he rarely agreed with Conneely on anything, but felt his analysis of Sinn Féin was “spot on”.

Bye bye to by-election!

The pedants who followed the Tribune’s online coverage of the Galway West Bye-Election got very exercised about our spelling of Bye-Election (with an 'e' and hyphen).

The Irish Times style guide uses byelection, and the Irish Independent uses by-election but the Tribune and RTÉ used Bye-Election, which is the official spelling in Ireland and is used by official sources like the Electoral Commission and Citizens’ Information.

Art O’Leary, Chief Executive of An Coimisiún Toghcháin, said they follow the wording of the 1992 Electoral Act which spells it bye-election. “It’s the law,” he added.