Salthill meeting aimed at starting revival of FF’s Galway fortunes

Date Published: 15-Jun-2011

It might be the first major step in a Fianna Fáil revival – the party will be bringing them in from the highways and byways on June 23 as Micheal Martin addresses the assembled troops in the Galway Bay Hotel, in Salthill.

The meeting will be open to all Fianna Fáil supporters and you can be sure that it will carefully watched to see what kind of a crowd they can draw as they begin the process of rebuilding in Galway where they are now reduced to one TD in Galway West, Éamon Ó Cuív.

It will be down to Ó Cuív to bring in the maximum number of his own supporters and bus them in, if necessary – but party sources were playing down the idea of ‘big crowds’ . . . perhaps in the hope that the size of the crowd might surprise us all in the media, but also being careful, at the same time, not to create expectations that might not be met on the night.

City Councillors Mike and Ollie Crowe and Peter Keane will also be expected to play their part in bringing out the grassroots, though there is hardly a great history of people from the city attending political meetings in huge numbers. You can be sure, however, that the word has gone out that there must be a decent crowd.

Keane may now be one of those to watch out for in Galway West in the years to come, but he will have to be one of those to take the party organisation ‘by the scruff of the neck’. The run up to June 23 might not be a bad place to start if he has Dáil ambitions.

Mike Crowe ran on the ticket at the General Election and he and Frank Fahey – a TD for the best part of 30 years – were eliminated. Crowe has indicated that ‘national politics’ are on the back burner as far as he is concerned, though I would not rule out his brother Ollie, who now seems likely to be Deputy Mayor in the coming year, if the Galway Mayoral Pact agreement holds.

Fahey could always count on his own loyal supporters, but, since the election, he has dropped right out of the limelight and it will now be interesting to see how many of his loyal followers turn up on the night. For instance, Fahey had a good following for his campaign on the need for the Galway Outer Bypass and I know faithful followers of his who go right back to 1980.

In a lot of cases a significant number will be people who were intensely loyal to Fahey and were with him from that time around 1980 when the Fahey dream of ‘a TD for South Galway’ was launched. It was realised in a very short time indeed and later he moved to Galway City when a revision of the constituency meant he had to move.

He made minister and junior minister, but the career ended in February last when the Fianna Fáil vote in Galway West fell over 16% in a national wipeout in which hugely well known names were defeated all over the country.

However, there is a bit of a history in Galway of Fianna Fáil bringing out the attendances when they are in trouble – the night Bobby Molloy left to join the PDs, they packed defiantly into Flannery’s Hotel in big numbers.