Fine Gael wins seat with almost 3,000 votes to spare

Fine Gael senator Mr Tom Hayes won the Tipperary South by-election yesterday with a result which surpassed even the most optimistic predictions of his supporters.

The farmer from Golden had been expected to win but the margin was a surprise as he finished the day with almost 3,000 votes to spare over Ms Phil Prendergast of the Workers' and Unemployed Action Group.

It was another depressing by-election result for Fianna Fail, although Mr Michael Maguire fared better than an opinion poll last week suggested and he also improved on the party's performance in last year's by-election in the same constituency.

The party's director of elections, Mr Brian Lenihan TD, criticised the publication of the MRBI/TG4 poll three days before the vote. Mr Maguire, he claimed, had been gaining on Mr Hayes before the poll "called it" for the Fine Gael candidate. Opinion polls published less than a week before voting were "an interference with the integrity of the secret ballot".

The big loser yesterday was the Labour Party, whose candidate, Mr Denis Landy, was backed by 80 per cent of the voters in his home area of Carrick-on-Suir but failed to make an impact elsewhere.

The Fine Gael leader, Mr Michael Noonan, acknowledged Mr Hayes's victory as a boost for himself as party leader, but he stressed by-elections did not make or break leaders. "If you look at Bertie Ahern's record, he's lost six by-elections in a row . . . so if the future of leaders was to hang on the results of by-elections, Bertie would be long since gone."

Mr Hayes (49), who received 35 per cent of the first-preference vote, 8 per cent more than he received last year and 11 per cent more than the party's support in the 1997 general election, said he knew his campaign had gone well "but I didn't want to be telling myself that".

As the only candidate who had also contested last year's by-election, he had a higher profile than any of his rivals and he built on that over the past month. Labour is hoping to re peat that trend with Mr Landy, who will be better known to voters outside Carrick-on-Suir at the next general election.

Mr Landy was an outstanding candidate who would gain the support of the rest of Tipperary South "in due course", said the party leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn.

Labour seems to have little hope in the short term, however, of uprooting the Workers' and Unemployed Action Group as the dominant left-wing force in the constituency.

Tally figures, borne out by the final result, showed that Mr Landy secured just 1.6 per cent of the vote in the Cashel area, 2.8 per cent in Tipperary and 6.6 per cent in Clonmel, where Ms Prendergast received just over half the votes cast. She said the result was "a victory" for the action group which will probably run two candidates in the next general election. Her colleague, Mr Seamus Healy, won last year's by-election.