AFTER seven days of counting, checking, rechecking, tagging and retagging the Dublin South East papers, the 166th seat in the 28th Dail remains unfilled.
John Gormley, the coolest man in the RDS, is still confident that his 27 vote majority over the PDs' Michael McDowell - who stayed away from proceedings again yesterday - will hold. Green Party activists say there is no reason to believe any discrepancies uncovered in the six days of checking and rechecking papers will prove enough to overturn the result declared early last Sunday.
The rechecking process was actually completed by lunchtime yesterday, when legal representatives for both sides concluded their arguments over which papers were valid and which were not.
The returning officer, Mr Brendan Walsh, and his team repaired for the afternoon to assess the outcome of the week long deliberations. At 5.30 p.m. he returned to announce that of the 336 votes which had ultimately been in dispute, 158 had been found to be valid, 85 had been misplaced and 83 had been found to be spoiled. He said agents for both candidates had asked for full details of the movement of all the relevant votes to be set out on paper, which was expected to take about two hours.
Like everything else in this marathon count, the process took longer than expected and at 9 p.m. Mr Walsh said proceedings were being adjourned until 10 a.m. today. This brought an audible sigh from the attendance, which had swelled from three observers early in the morning to about 80 last night.
Those who dropped in included Fine Gael's Frances Fitzgerald, already assured of her seat in the constituency, and defeated Democratic Left TD Eric Byrne, who was perhaps there to offer counselling, having endured a 10 day count himself in 1992.
