Fianna Fáil is privately admitting that the party has lost its North West EU seat, one of the few EU seats the party was certain it would be able to hold onto in the June elections.
Following MEP Seán Ó Neachtain’s sudden departure, the party was thrown into disarray in a desperate search for a candidate to replace him. It was a task even more forlorn and thankless than that of Sisyphus.
The Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív refused, as did businessman Padraig Ó Ceidigh and Galway hurling icons Joe Connolly and Joe McDonagh. Even the idea of running TV personality Síle Seoige came to nothing.
It certainly shows how far Fianna Fáil has fallen when even the limelight loving Síle could not be turned into a candidate.
In the end the party plumped for former MEP and former junior minister Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher to run alongside former senator Pascal Mooney in the North East.
That Mr Mooney could not even get elected to Leitrim County Council tells it’s own story. That Dep Gallagher, a former MEP, who told former taoiseach Bertie Ahern a number of years ago that he wanted to return to Ireland to take up a ministerial post, is being forced to run again in the European elections speaks volumes.
Many will conclude - and not illogically - that Mr Gallagher’s heart may not be in it and that he is doing this as a massive favour to a desperate Fianna Fáil.
Certainly Fine Gael’s EU candidate senator Joe O’Reilly has zoned in on this. “The fact that Dep Gallagher was once an elected MEP in 1999 but left abruptly in 2002, on a promise for a Junior Minister position in the Dáil, shows he has no real commitment to the European Parliament nor to these elections. It seems he has been dragged in kicking and screaming at the 11th hour.”
The party ticket is also unbalanced geographically (Dep Gallagher admitted this in an RTÉ interview two weeeks ago ) and this is a problem that could come back to haunt FF. Dep Gallagher is based in Donegal while Mr Mooney is in Leitrim - both counties are in the north of the constituency. There is no one to cover the Mayo, Galway, Clare, Athlone region. This is in contrast to Fine Gael which has Jim Higgins covering the south and Joe O’Reilly the north.
In a sense, Mr Mooney’s selection is itself as big a problem as the difficulty in replacing Seán Ó Neachtain. Had FF HQ known prior to the convention that Mr Ó Neachtain was not going to be able to run, it could have calmly assessed the matter and come to the conclusion that a strong Donegal runner (Mr Gallagher ) teamed up with a reasonable but not necessarily front-runner from Galway - Michael Kitt, Cllr Michael J Crowe, etc, - would be appropriate.
As it stands, Fianna Fáil finds itself with a guy from a county of 28,000 people running as a key element of a ticket that has nobody from the southern half. You can bet Libertas’ Declan Ganley and Sinn Féin’s Padraig MacLochlainn are rubbing their hands with glee.
