Kenny shows his ruthless streak to shake up Fine Gael landscape in Galway West

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

How can you evaluate Hildegarde Naughton’s elevation to the Seanad? A surprise comparable to Galway beating Armagh in Pearse Stadium last Saturday? Hmmm, not quite – more a surprise comparable to if London had beaten Mayo in McHale Park last Sunday.

The new Fine Gael senator has easily the most exotic name in parliament (Fianna Fáil senator Camillus Glynn retired in 2011) and is a politician with undoubted ability and a lot of promise.

From the Oranmore side of the city, she represents the western suburbs of the city, so her voter base potentially straddles both sides of the Galway urban area. She polled a respectable 3,606 (or a third of a quota) in the 2011 General Election, and wasn’t very far behind the three other candidates. 

She has also been Mayor of Galway and with her musical background will give new meaning to the political spin-meisters desire to have an “all singing and all dancing candidate”.

I met her and her mother canvassing around the town of Ashbourne for Helen McEntee during her successful campaign in the Meath East by-election earlier this year. She certainly has the dedication and the perseverance and the smarts for national politics.

It’s not that Naughton doesn’t deserve her elevation – it’s just that if you were thinking about it coldly, there are many other places in the country in bad need of a strong Fine Gael presence.

Dublin North West – where the party has no TD – is one that springs to mind. Or Laois and Offaly where there will be two constituencies each with three seats the next time around – and Fine Gael would have a biddable chance of winning a seat in at least one.

Enda Kenny’s decision to appoint Naughton adds to a very healthy complement of parliamentarians from the two Galway constituencies – 14 in all, and 15 if you include Ronan Mullen). But her appointment is also very telling about Kenny’s thinking on two distinct matters – his attitude towards those who defied the party whip over abortion; and what his opponents say is his utterly cynical attitude to the Seanad.

On a strict and steely analysis of Fine Gael’s chances of electoral success in Galway West, the decision does not make a huge amount of sense.

The party already has two TDs in situ and a Senator who certainly believes that one of the two seats should have gone in her direction.

Moreover, the addition of a healthy chunk of South Mayo – nine electoral areas around Ballinrobe – coming into Galway West, there is also the prospect of John O’Mahony migrating south in the hunt for votes.

I’ve never been convinced that this is a serious option for O’Mahony. He would have to rely on a big Galway vote and that would mean an incursion into Sean Kyne country. I don’t believe O’Mahony will move in the same way I don’t believe Micheál Kitt will move from Galway East into Roscommon/Galway.

Even without O’Mahony it’s a crowded field. And while it was certain that Naughton would be a candidate in the next General Election, what Kenny has done has been to promote her into the second slot in the constituency after Kyne.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.