What happened in Mayo didn’t buck the national trend, but the strength of the two major parties saw them hold on to all the seats in the county. The challenge of Sinn Féin’s Rose Conway Walsh faded away from early on Saturday morning the real action was on the battle between Lisa Chambers and Michelle Mulherin for the final seat.
At the end despite some hairy moments and predictions that he would be beaten to the top of the poll by Michael Ring, Enda Kenny was the first man past the post and on the first count, it wasn’t until the ninth count that we have another person make the grade when Michael Ring got in on the transfers after Dr Jerry Cowley was elected.
The real story of the campaign was the battle between newly elected TD Lisa Chambers and Michelle Mulherin which played out right from the get go as soon as the boxes were opened. Chambers polled 8,231 votes to put her ahead of Mulherin, but the real story was the vote management by the party, with Chambers taking a large block from all over the county. It also worked out well for them when Ring failed to reach the heights expected and also interestingly that Dara Calleary didn’t go over the quota at with quite a sizeable portion of his number ones votes potentially swinging towards his fellow Ballina candidate Mulherin.
But by smart vote management, Fianna Fail managed to keep Calleary comfortable in third place throughout the whole count and sure of his seat, but ensuring that none of the people who voted for him number one before giving a number two for Mulherin in Ballina, with her being the second town candidate helped her in anyway.
The Fianna Fáil vote management strategy was as brilliantly executed as Fine Gaels was here five years ago, when the got four of the five TDs elected.
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The newly elected Lisa Chambers with her two grandmothers Phyllis Staunton and Bridie Chambers after she was elected on Sunday. Photo: Michael Donnelly
What this means going into the next few months and years leaves both parties in a very different positions, will both Kenny and Ring run again for Fine Gael, there’s plenty of doubts that even one of them would want to come back again after a long political life, while for Fianna Fáil the 29-year-old Chambers along with the 42-year-old Calleary the future looks very bright. For Fine Gael they will have to put in a lot of ground work over the next few years if they are going to have candidates who will be able to make sure they hold on to seats in Mayo, with the defeated Mulherin the only potential to really look like standing a chance from their current ranks.
Meanwhile for Sinn Féin they will be happy that they did increase their vote again this time around, but the two major parties still have a strangel hold on the hearts and minds of the electorate in Mayo it still seems. Sinn Féin has seen it's vote grow and grow over the past few elections in Mayo and they've put in a lot of ground work to ensure this continues to grow.
