Enda Kenny's bid to be re-elected Taoiseach and lead the next Government will not be supported by the majority of Galway's nine TDs when the 32nd Dáil meets today. TDs are also divided on whether Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will eventually form a coalition.
Fianna Fáil's Éamon Ó Cuív and Anne Rabbitte, and Independents Catherine Connolly, Noel Grealish, and Sean Canney will not vote for Dep Kenny, while the Galway Fine Gael TDs - Seán Kyne, Hildegarde Naughton, and Ciaran Cannon - will support their party leader's effort to secure a second term in office. A majority of the TDs will not support the nominations of Micheál Martin or Gerry Adams for taoiseach either.
There are also sharp divisions between the TDs on the make-up of the next Government. Both Dep Kyne and Dep Connolly believe the next administration will be Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil, although they differ in why this should be.
"Fine Gael has a mandate, a reduced mandate, but we are the largest party," Dep Kyne told the Galway Advertiser. "I think the country deserves stable government, and as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáíl are the only parties with the numbers to do that, consideration has to be given to that option, otherwise we will be back to the country later this year or early next."
Dep Connolly believes FG and FF should coalesce. "They should do it and do it now. The electorate have spoken," she says. "There is no real difference between them. It's like both speak Irish, just one has a different dialect to the other - but they still speak Irish. An FG-FF coalition would help Irish politics as it would define the debate, along left/right lines, and also get us back to focus on housing, health, public transport. We hear a lot of talk about government formation, but very little about these issues which are now at crisis level.
