Grassroots Fianna Fáil members seething over Keaveney move

 Fianna Fáil in Galway is raging with the party hierarchy over the shock announcement that Tuam-based renegade TD and former chairman of the Labour Party, Colm Keaveney, has joined the organisation.

 The recruitment of Deputy Keaveney was hailed as a coup by the party leadership, and a personal endorsement of the direction leader, Micheál Martin, has taken the party since the electoral collapse in 2011, but grassroots members in Galway are seething.

Micheál Kitt, the sitting Fianna Fáil TD, who has served the constituency in Galway East as an Oireachtas member since 1975, said the local organisation was “concerned” about the “lack of consultation” and the “secrecy” surrounding Keaveney’s defection.

County Councillor Michael Connolly went further and said not one rank and file member of the party that he had spoken to was in favour of this move. “There’s no rank and file support for this – none,” he said.

“If you want the truth – no, nobody (in Galway East Fianna Fáil) has said anything positive about it. I haven’t met anyone in the rank and file of the party who are in favour of this – no one. I’ve been getting calls from Cumainn in Ballygar, Laurencetown, Williamstown, Portumna, Moylough, Ballinalsoe, Tuam and others. There’s no support for this . . . they’re saying ‘what the f**k is going on?’”

Confirmation that the former Independent Tuam-based TD was to switch allegiances to Fianna Fáil was exclusively revealed in our sister newspaper, the Connacht Sentinel, on Tuesday, and then quickly spread.

Deputy Kitt yesterday confirmed his intention to run in Galway East in the next General Election, where Deputy Keaveney will be his ‘running mate’.

Yesterday Colm Keaveney insisted: “I’m not a hypocrite”.

The Tuam-based TD, whose criticism of Fianna Fáil in the past has been cutting, has also rebuffed accusations that he is an opportunist trying to save his own electoral skin by joining the party he once used to vilify.

Fianna Fáil is a party of renewal that has changed, he said this week, and it is “closest to my vision for a fairer future”.

The former SIPTU representative, who had a long-running spat with his former leader Éamon Gilmore before resigning last December, was unveiled by the Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin on the plinth of Leinster House on Tuesday.

His membership was ratified at a Parliamentary Party meeting earlier on Tuesday and he was appointed as Fianna Fáil’s frontbench spokesperson on mental health and special needs.

Speaking just last year regarding the Mahon Tribunal report, Deputy Keaveney spoke in the Dáil about the “rampant corruption” in Fianna Fáil and its “corrosive and destructive” effect the party had on Irish politics.

But this week, he told the Connacht Tribune that Fianna Fáil has “changed . . . it is a party of renewal”.

“I’m elected for tomorrow – I cannot undo what’s done in the past. What I will say, I have joined a party that is in the process of renewal, it is a party that has apologised for the past and it is the one political party that hasn’t involved itself in the hypocritical auction politics that’s currently taking place,” he said.

Read more in today’s Connacht Tribune