LABOUR PARTY:Labour has reason to be happy with a solid performance in the elections, writes DEAGLAN DE BREADAN
LABOUR HAS good reason to feel pleased with itself after last Friday’s elections.
In the county council polls, Labour sources expected late yesterday afternoon that the party’s final haul of seats would be at least 125 out of 883. This would be an increase of approximately one quarter on the figure of 101 seats in the last council elections in 2004, which was itself an increase of 18 on the 1999 figure.
Labour’s share of the vote across the State went up to around 17 per cent from 11 per cent five years ago, and the party now commands almost 30 per cent of the local election vote in Dublin. It all augurs well for the general election, whenever that may be.
The party’s approach to local election campaigning was slick. Three weeks before the race started, each candidate was supplied with two different types of poster, canvass cards, policy leaflets, car-stickers and lapel badges – the panoply of modern electioneering. The candidates incurred about two-thirds or three-quarters of the cost.
There were 211 Labour candidates in the county council polls. The party’s organisation committee decided how many people should run in each electoral area, and candidates were chosen locally on a one-member, one-vote basis. About 25 or 30 candidates were added on by the committee.
Key figures in the campaign included party leader Eamon Gilmore and deputy leader Joan Burton, who was director of elections. The main backroom people included Gilmore’s chef de cabinet Mark Garrett, the party’s environment spokesman and Cork South-Central TD Ciarán Lynch, James Wrynne as chair of the organisation committee, and David Leach in charge of logistics.
In the European poll, Labour pulled a master stroke in nominating Nessa Childers to run in the Ireland East constituency, where her Fianna Fáil and republican family connections helped make her a prospect.
The turning point for Childers seems to have come when Avril Doyle, who had stepped down as a Fine Gael MEP for the constituency, launched a sharp personal attack on the Labour candidate as a “Foxrock Girl”.
Quite apart from the mild irony of Ms Doyle attacking a middle-class South Dubliner, this did not go down well with the voters, by all accounts.
Fine Gael’s questioning of Ms Childers’s knowledge of agricultural issues did not work either. She was clearly out of her depth in a radio discussion, but voters – in this constituency at least – apparently do not warm to personalised critiques.
When it was announced that Proinsias De Rossa would be running in Dublin, few would have forecast with complete confidence that he would retain the Labour seat. But at this writing he is widely expected to do so.
Although the party did not win either of the Dublin byelections to the Dáil, there was a significant increase in its share of the vote in Dublin South and a creditable performance in Dublin Central.
In Dublin South, Senator Alex White had seemed set fair to win the seat left vacant by the death of Fianna Fáil’s Séamus Brennan, until Fine Gael dropped its bombshell in the shape of RTÉ personality George Lee.
Nevertheless, White showed character in the face of adversity, bringing out more campaign workers and laying on extra posters. If the current political climate persists, he should win a seat in the next general election.
In Dublin Central Senator Ivana Bacik was a late entry to the race but still polled strongly, and the party will probably seek to place her in another suitable Dublin constituency next time.