Cobbled constituency will be an Independent Republic

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

I have seen sacks better stitched together than the new constituency of Roscommon/East Galway as created by the Constituency Commission.

It’s some trick to make everybody in Connacht agree on one thing – that they made a right bags of all the constituencies and left very few happy west of the Shannon.

But none was more roughly hewn together than Roscommon/East Galway.

Granted, not everybody was unhappy;  I’m sure Michael Fitzmaurice isn’t too displeased, after his election an Independent TD for Roscommon in the by-election last year.

And if there was any doubt about him defending his seat, it was removed when all of his own hinterland in North East Galway – where he was elected a county councillor earlier that year – now becomes part of the new constituency.

We have poured endlessly in this column over a huge portion of the old Galway East being yanked away and yoked on to the neighbouring county.

Roscommon has always posed a bit of a headache for constituency commissions. It’s not big enough in itself to have three seats so it has tended to ‘borrow’ bits of other counties or has been lumped in with unsuitable counties.

For a number of years it was put into an unhappy arranged marriage with Longford. The constituency was divided by the Shannon. One half of it was in Leinster and the other in Connacht. And candidates from one county just did not transfer to their party colleagues in the other.

As the late Longford Fianna Fáil fixer Mickey Doherty memorably commented about the River Shannon: “Votes don’t swim”.

Later, another botched experiment saw Leitrim divided in half with each half being an add-on to a bigger constituency.

Roscommon got South Leitrim – and that left a cruel situation where there was no TD from Leitrim in the Dáíl from 2007 to 2011.

Now a huge swathe of East Galway form Ballinasloe to Castleblakeney to Creggs to Glinsk has been moved into Roscommon.

The upshot is that Galway East is now like a clipped eagle and the people of the east of the county are now part of a constituency for which they feel no great affinity.

The change of terrain will add some uncertainty although you would be churlish indeed to predict either of the two outgoing TDs who are standing losing their seats.

Indeed, it will be one of the few constituencies in the country where there are more independent Deputies than party ones.

Of course, Denis Naughten took his seat in 2011 as a Fine Gael TD. But he then had a spectacular falling out with Enda Kenny over the Taoiseach reneging on promises he made about Roscommon Hospital’s A&E services.

Naughten is a strong policy man and was counted by all the small parties as well as by various independent alliances. But he has stayed resolutely independent.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.