Fidelma Healy Eames is glad that she wasn’t elected a TD in 2002.
She reveals this during a lunch break in her pacy campaign which has seen her pounding the streets in a bid to win that elusive seat tomorrow three weeks.
Even though the disappointment at the time was immense for the Maree woman, she acknowledges that maybe this election represents the feeling that her time has come.
“Even though I was bitterly disappointed at the time, I now know that if elected now, I will be a much more effective TD than I would have been in 2002. That comes from th experience you gain, the contacts you make, the little things you learn along the way.”
And what an eventful journey that has been for the senator. And what things she has learned along the way. While the backwaters of FG locally may have been relatively still to choppy before her arrival into local politics, her time as a councillor and later as a senator has certainly been colourful in the party in the constituency.
There is no doubt that the defeat in 2002 when FG melted nationally was disappointing for Project FHE — the ambitious educationalist could scarcely have thought that it would be the guts of a decade later before she would be in with a strong shout in Galway West, such was the closed nature of the shop. Opportunities to be the favoured Blueshirt were few and far between, and there was much angst when Brian Walsh was selected to lead the team ahead of her four years ago.
She was determined then not be left on the subs bench again, so Project FHE had its greatest moment so far, earlier this year when she attracted many supporters to the selection convention which saw sitting TD Padraic McCormack surprisingly beaten. There were claims that she packed the convention with her own followers, but she dismisses this suggestion by saying that such a path was open to all candidates and that some of them had longer to prepare for this than she had.
“No, that was suggested but no it’s not true. Every candidate had the opportunity to bring along their own cumann. Other candidates had plenty of time to prepare for this convention, so everyone had the same opportunity,” she said, adding that she had put in the hard work and reaped the benefits accordingly.
“People know that I’ve been walking the walk, not just talking the talk, and they feel that my time has come. That is what I have been hearing on the doorsteps.”
She enters this election as the most senior politician on the FG ticket — a ticket that seemed to have a self-destruct button written all over it when two extra candidates were added to it, one right under her nose in Oranmore. Just as in the local elections when the party again packed Oranmore, it seemed that if FHE is to be sitting on a Dail leather seat on March 9 she will have to do it the hard way.
“Yes, it is very crowded and it would have been nice to have your own patch all to yourself and for each candidate to have their own patch all to themselves, but that’s the way it is.
“Everyone on the ticket is there because the party wanted them to be there, but there are only about eight miles between myself in Oranmore and Sean Kyne in Moycullen, so it is very crowded for four of us. It is hard and the hardest part is working out who can be where on any particular night.
“We’ve enough on our plates without having to work on that. I’ve people from Connemara looking for me to come out but I’m not allowed in there. It is tough managing the ground. This is difficult andd this has hurt me that I could not even get Oranmore completely.
“From the outside, it does look strange that FG are placing such pressure on their candidates, but if they manage to take two seats in Galway West on February 25, then nobody within the party will be complaining.
“I’m not a paranold perosn, it’s just tough,” she said. “I would like to have had some closed territory. We should have had a section of about 10,000 votes in our own wards and territories, that we would have them to ourselves exclusively and that the rest should be open,” she said. “There have been teething problems about this, but this is the strategy, and we have to keep to it because we don’t want to fall between two stools,” she said.
Ahem. Teething problems. Wouldn’t one love to be a fly on the wall during thsoe teethng problems?
FHE is no shrinking violet and it is obvious that she relishes the challenges that such wrangling throws up and that she probably faces as much opposition from within her own party as she does from the opposition who are often content just to sit back and let FG seal their own fate. Her approach to her politics is like friendly fire, it achieves the objective, but there is often collateral damage.
And so Project FHE steams along.
“The campaign is going well. People realise that Fianna Fail have got us into a deep hole economically, so we need to build hope, get out of that hole and plan for the future.
“I’m meeting lots of families who are left broken by the crisis, who are saying goodbye to their children week after week. They’ve spent their lives educating their children and they want their family around. So we have to give hope to that young generation, and that is why I am excited about our policies and that’s what make me all the more determined to be part of it.
‘I have worked very hard for this and people are beginning to realise that.This is a watershed for he region and the country and I want to be a part of that. Without sounding corny, I want to make a contribution to it all,” she said.
With just three weeks to polling day, defeat is unthinkable now for the senator. Her children are older now and this will be the first election she will contest where she won’t need to hire a babysitter. Her son has accompanied her on the canvas and enjoyed the banter. She refuses to be drawn on what may lie beyond either victory or defeat. To lose out would see her relegated down the pecking order locally. If she wins, she would be in with a shout of a portfolio, most likely in education.
“We can’t think about any of those matters. I want to win this seat for the party and to play my role in fixing Ireland,” and with that she is gone, off to continue the campaign to get the chance to use her unique style of politics for Galway.
