Old foes see Galway West as critical to power hopes

With the election date now officially confirmed, we complete our previews of the three Galway constituencies – and this week DARA BRADLEY looks at Galway West were the two big guns, looking to come up with the numbers to lead the next Government, will be banking on taking second seats.

Will we get a green wave or a purple revolution? Will Fine Gael hold two seats, or will Fianna Fáil’s reversal in fortunes in recent opinion polls deliver a second seat? Will the Labour Party come off life support, and will Sinn Féin bounce back from a bashing in the local elections? And what impact – if any – will the ‘Oughterard effect’ have on the result of the 2020 General Election in the Galway West constituency?

Dealing with the last question first, all eyes will be on the performance of Independent TD, Noel Grealish, who plunged himself into the eye of political storms in 2019 with controversial statements about migrants.

His opposition to a Direct Provision centre in Oughterard – when he described Christian refugees fleeing Syria as “genuine” and African asylum seekers as “economic migrants” who come to Ireland to “sponge” off the system – have been described as thinly-veiled racism by political opponents and commentators.

Far from cave-in to requests to apologise, however, Deputy Grealish doubled down on the comments some weeks later during Leaders Questions when he asked for assurances from An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, that “astronomical” amounts of money, or personal remittances, sent home to Nigeria were “not the proceeds of crime and fraud”.

Supporters argue he was entitled to ask the question, and there is a proportion of the electorate who are sick of the being told what they can or cannot say or think by the ‘PC-brigade in Dublin 4’.

Deputy Grealish certainly is not politically correct, which will repel some of the 7,187 voters who gave him a ‘number one’ in 2016, but his views may strike a chord with a cohort of voters in Galway West, in the same way Peter Casey garnered 20% of first preferences in the presidential election for anti-Traveller comments.

Solidarity/People Before Profit candidate, Joe Loughnane, who couldn’t muster enough support to win a City Council seat last May, hasn’t a hope of taking a Dáil seat either. But his profile during the Oughterard episode, as chairman of GARN, Galway Anti-Racism Network, has been higher, and it will be interesting to see if he can increase his share of the vote.

If Fine Gael doesn’t hold its two seats here, then it will be under serious pressure to remain the largest party in the Dáil to form a Government.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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