Higgins keeping them guessing as Galway hosts Labour conference

Date Published: {J}

They were hatching dark plots at the Labour Party Conference in an early morning session on Sunday that was not broadcast on RTE television – key activists from western constituencies were involved with Constituency Organiser Niall Ward in preparations for the next election.

It was Galway City Councillor Tom Costello who last week voiced the growing confidence in Labour circles that just as they had a “Spring Tide” under the leadership of Dick Spring, there was the possibility that, underlying the promising opinion polls, may be a “tsunami” based on voter anger and frustration at the crisis in the country of the past few years.

The Sunday session entitled “How The West Can Be Won” and run by Niall Ward, involved a detailed look at organisation, candidates, polling, increasing membership – and the conference showed just a little of it, with two prominent new recruits to the ranks of Labour attending the sessions at the National University of Ireland, Galway new conference centre at the weekend.

Among the 1,200 attending the conference were Pat Fitzpatrick and Lorna Higgins. Fitzpatrick is a former officer in the Green Party, who stood for the Greens in the General Election of 1997 in West Galway and polled a respectable 1,600 first preferences. Lorna Higgins stood as an Independent in the June 2009 Local Elections in the Loughrea area, and got 809 first preferences.

The ‘star recruit’ at the conference in the Bailey Allen Centre was Dr. Jerry Cowley, who served as an Indepependent TD in Mayo from 2002 to 2007 and has a remarkable record of service to the community in areas such as care of the elderly and the returning men and women of the last major wave of emigration from this country.

In Mayo, where Fine Gael holds three seats and Fianna Fail two, the Cowley candidature is sure to cause some head scratching in the bigger parties.

West Galway is a very good example of the influence one person can have – at the weekend, Michael D. Higgins was recalling that, when he joined Labour in Galway in 1968, there were twelve members and it was a long build-up to ‘overnight success’ in taking a Dail seat in the 80s.

Activists at the conference believed that new recruits such as Pat Fitzpatrick and Lorna Higgins, who are both based in Athenry area, could be a very worthwhile addition to the ranks of Labour in East Galway, where the Labour General Election candidate will be Councillor Colm Keaveney, a trade union official living in Tuam who polled 2,519 first preferences in the Tuam area in the Local Elections and was elected on the first count there.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.