The first Sinn Féin candidate to be elected in Galway city in 10 years is also, at 24, the youngest candidate to be elected to the Galway City Council. “My generation is the lost generation,” she says.
Although it took until the seventh count for her to be formally elected to the fourth seat in Galway City East, the momentum behind Mairead Farrell’s campaign was such that she was seen as on course to win a seat, at least two months ahead of the polling day. Not that she and her team had been in any way complacent, this was a victory built on hard work, careful planning, and dedication.
“It’s fantastic,” Mairead told the Galway Advertiser after returning officer Gary McMahon announced her victory in the Westside Community Centre late on Saturday night. “I’m delighted to have won a seat and I hope now that Anna Marley and Cathal Ó Conchúir will follow tomorrow. This is ‘Team Sinn Féin’.”
The average age of councillors is generally between late 40s and early 60s, but Cllr Farrell , at 24 is by far the youngest member of the new council and the youngest councillor elected in living memory. It certainly says something about the very different kind of council that Galwegians are electing in 2014.
“I have a degree and a masters and yet I’m unemployed,” she says. “My generation is the lost generation. I did my leaving cert in 2008 and I know so many people that have emigrated. Many people in Galway have family members of friends that have emigrated, but I think that in me, they saw someone who has stayed and can give the perspective of that generation in City Hall, and that the perspective of my generation is needed.”
Ms Farrell is also part of a dynamic, new, and young Sinn Féin membership, a generation of the party voters feel more comfortable voting for.
“I think Sinn Féin have shown in the Dáil that we hold the powerful to account and they expect us to do the same at local level,” she says.
With the first council meeting to take place next month, social housing will be among the priorities for the new Galway City East councillor. So will the looming and highly controversial water tax.
“We will be opposing this tax,” she said. “We defeated it in the North and we can defeat it in the South. The council has the power to lower these taxes by 15 per cent, and we wil be demanding they do so.”
