Labour lure Lovely Lorraine for another crack at the Dáil

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

We thought we’d seen the back of Labour Party Senator, Lovely Lorraine Higgins, after she failed to get elected to the Dáil in the Spring General Election, and subsequently failed to make it back into Seanad Éireann.

Since then, Lovely Lorraine set her sights on other pursuits but sources in the party locally say she may be poised to make a comeback – if a snap election was called.

Her appearance on the Claire Byrne Show on RTÉ this week, to talk about her hobbyhorse, cyberbullying, confirmed she hasn’t gone away, and sent the rumour-mill into overdrive.

Lovely Lorraine did quite well in Galway East, and garnered a healthy first-preference vote in a traditionally conservative constituency that is allergic to the left-wing pinkos in Labour.

She polled respectably, even though there was a tsunami of anti-Labour Party sentiment in Galway, and right across the country.

Labour strategists are looking to lure her back to the political fray, and are lining her up for another crack at the Dáil – but this time in liberal, lefty Galway West.

The theory is that Lovely Lorraine has many electoral assets – she’s educated, presentable, can string a few sentences together, AND ticks the gender quota box.

The problem, they say, was not her but the electorate. Galway East just wasn’t ready for Labour, and probably never will be. (Voting in Colm Keaveney in 2011 was a ‘blip’, and sure he didn’t last long in the party after getting elected to the Dáil, saw the writing was on the wall and switched allegiances to Fianna Fáil.)

But the Comrades in the party reckon if Lovely Lorraine switched to Galway West, which was once fertile ground for Labour, after her namesake, Michael D Higgins, carved out a seat there, then she could regain the ‘Left’ seat in the constituency, which was surrendered at the last election by one-term TD, Derek Nolan, and won by Independent former Labour, Catherine Connolly.

Now wouldn’t that be a great battle: Lovely Lorraine versus the Queen of the Claddagh.

Bring it on!

Senator’s sex talk

We can’t be positive. But we are pretty sure that when Galway native, Senator Billy Lawless was on RTÉ Radio One with Seán O’Rourke last Friday, speaking about violence in his adopted city of Chicago, he didn’t mean to say “gang bang areas” several times.

Or maybe he was referring to areas in the Windy City where orgies take place.

For more, read this week’s  Galway City Tribune.