Right now and heading into June’s Local Elections is a good time to be a candidate for The Labour Party. Labour could take four - perhaps if lucky five - seats in the Galway City Council, but can it do the same in the county?
The party has only one county councillor - Colm Keaveney - and Labour knows that it has an uphill battle to secure more seats in areas that have traditionally been barren ground.
However the party feels that with the increasing urbanisation of many Galway towns, the opprobrium in which Fianna Fáil is currently held, and the fact that Eamon Gilmore is emerging as a respected leader, could provide grounds for a breakthrough.
Certainly Josette Farrell - Labour’s Oranmore candidate along with Enda O’Rourke - feels the tide may just be turning in the party’s favour.
“There is optimism in the Labour party,” she tells me. “A lot of people are tired of the Government who have been in power too long. Many towns in the county are becoming urbanised and there are new people moving in which creates possibilities for Labour.
“People who have lived long in Claregalway and Oranmore know me and know the work that I have done on the ground over the years. In local elections people tend to vote for the person rather than the party, but I think Labour is also changing people’s mindsets.”
Why does Ms Farrell believe it is time that she should stand for election?
“Oranmore has a lot of infrastructure but not as much as it should have,” she says. “Claregalway is still without adequate play facilities. It needs a secondary school. For a while there it was a builders’ empire and new estates were going up all the time but there were no amenities for those who were to live in them. These are the kinds of issues I’ve been involved in for years and people said to me ‘Maybe if you get your voice in County Buildings you could really do things’.”
Ms Farrell will be campaigning for efficient traffic management throughout the Oranmore ward, provision of recycling banks, expansion of green spaces, recreation and leisure facilities, a library for Claregalway, community policing, a reliable bus service, and park and ride facilities.
A bypass for Claregalway is something many politicians have been shouting about for ages. Yet despite all the hot air that has been expended on this, the bypass looks no nearer to reality. Indeed it is unlikely ever to be built.
“It’s never going to happen,” says Ms Farrell. “Traffic is flowing more freely with the new lighting system but there still needs to be a relief road to take the huge amounts of traffic that is still coming through the town. The people of Claregalway need to go about their business unhindered so solutions need to be found to get the heavy traffic out of there.”
