All smiles now Ð but vote battle may be only way to sort out FG rivalry

Date Published: {J}

It was someone in Fine Gael who put it rather well in the past week when asked whether there would be a General Election in the near future. He said it all depended on whether the suspicion and distrust between Fianna Fáil and the Green Party in government was greater than their fear of the electorate.

That uneasy feeling between the parties in government has been fuelled in recent weeks as they became accident prone, with the loss of Deirdre de Burca, Willie O’Dea and Trevor Sargent. There are any number of tests to come – including the further recapitalisation of the banks that could stick in the ‘craw’ of some of the Greens. That’s one of the fears among some TDs, though the weekend opinion polls might have served to steady some nerves.

Right now, Fine Gael believe that the fear of the voters is greater, and so Fianna Fáil and the Greens will try to stay in power for as long as possible, pushing the election out to 2012 if they can, with FF hoping that eventually they can avoid the kind of massacre that 27% support would bring – a full seven points behind Fine Gael.

So, maybe it’s on that basis that the earlier urgency about Fine Gael holding a selection convention in Galway East seems to have evaporated in recent weeks. That is despite the convention appearing to be potentially imminent around Christmas time as Fine Gael nationally lined-up any number of constituencies for early conventions – especially ones like Galway East where they had candidate selection problems to resolve.

You see, a few weeks back, quite an amount of early work had been put in train in Fine Gael on the whole business of sorting out precisely who would be on the ticket in four-seater Galway East. It’s a knotty question – with five high-profile contenders for a possible four places on the slate of candidates in a constituency where Fine Gael hold two Dáil seats (Paul Connaughton TD and Ulick Burke TD), and Fianna Fáil have two (Michael Kitt TD and Noel Treacy TD). There is some mad talk of Fine Gael getting a third seat . . . but that’s just looney tunes nonsense.

The Fine Gael strategy in the 2007 General Election – when they got 39.1% of the first preferences compared to Fianna Fáil’s 39.6% – was to have two candidates in the ‘northern end’ of the constituency (Connaughton, Mountbellew, and Councillor Tom McHugh, Tuam) and two in the southern part of the constituency (Burke, Abbey, Loughrea and Dr John Barton, Ballinasloe).

That was before the name Senator Ciaran Cannon – former leader of the PDs and a very new recruit to Fine Gael in Galway East – came into the reckoning.

Now there is a growing feeling in FG ranks in Galway East that a full-scale election battle in the southern end of the constituency may be the only way to sort out the intense rivalry between Burke and Cannon – with both of them getting on the ticket … ‘and the best horse jumping the ditch’ on the day of the election count.

As a Progressive Democrat, Cannon stood in Galway East in the 2007 General Election and got a very creditable 3,300 first preferences. He was assiduously courted by the likes of Frank Flannery and Tom Curran – two of the ‘recruiting sergeants’ of Fine Gael – and passed his first major electoral test in FG when he succeeded in getting his replacement on Galway County Council (Michael ‘Mogie’ Maher), elected to the Council in the June 2009 Local Elections.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.