Posted online: Jun 11th, 2009

By Sinéad Flanagan
Editor

WITH a voter turnout of 50.4 per cent, many are saying the county voted with its feet on this occasion. With many highs and lows for each of the parties over the weekend, one thing is for sure, Fianna Fail suffered as a number of experience councillors lost their town or county council seat in Friday’s vote.
Campaign manager for FF south Kildare, Des Groome remarked: “We made the best we could of it. It’s positive enough.”
In relation to the overall vote for the county council seats, Fine Gael came out tops with 28.2 per cent of the votes, followed by Labour on 23.7 per cent, Fianna Fail on 23.4 per cent, Other- which includes Independents 20 per cent, the Greens 3.7 per cent and Sinn Fein 1 per cent.

Independents real winners
Mr Groome claimed: “We held 29 per cent, almost 30 per cent of the vote in our area. That matched the FG vote. We were a little disappointed but not surprised that we had slipped from 35/6 per cent last time in the locals. We very much treated the campaign in isolation as a local campaign.”
Mr Groome says he feels the real winners in this election were the Independent candidates rather than the other opposition parties. In many areas such as Newbridge, Independent Paddy Kennedy romped home, as was the case of Leixlip’s Catherine Murphy.

South Kildare
In south Kildare three FF councillors won county council seats- Suzanne Doyle, Fiona O’Loughlin and Martin Miley Jnr, though Pat Black lost out. Des says: “Pat was only eliminated when the chips were down” adding that there was only a handful of votes in it. Mark Dalton also lost his seat in the Athy area.
Fine Gael’s campaign director Catherine Travers believes the result will lead to a general election after the next Budget. FG support jumped from just over 22 per cent in the last local elections to 32 per cent in the latest run at the polls. “For example in Naas we ran three councillors and got the three elected. We ran Darren (Scully) and Tony (Lawlor) in the council and got them elected too and in Clane we got an extra seat- a gain from Fianna Fail so we’re delighted with that. The only loss was Katie Ridge who lost her seat in Celbridge.

“Reversal of fortunes”
Ms Travers says the party made a gain of six seats this time around. “It’s a huge reversal of fortunes for us.”
Dave Moynihan who drove the Labour campaign in the north of the county says: “We’re very happy. We won three seats out of six”- Kevin Byrne, John McGinley and Colm Purcell, “which was unheard of previously. We had two going into it.” While in south Kildare, Mark Wall had a tremendous win in the Athy area with 3,284 votes. Francis Browne won a county council seat in Kildare and paddy MacNamara secured his place on the county council also with 1,817 votes.
In the town councils Labour faired out well also with Anne Breen and Ger Dunne securing seats and in Leixlip the party won two seats, having run two candidates.

Europe
In the European elections, MEP Mairead McGuinness FG held onto her seat with a whopping 110,366 votes. For Labour, Nessa Childers won a seat with 78,338 votes followed by FF Liam Aylward who received 74,666 votes. FG’s John Paul Phelan missed out on a seat in Europe.