The people had their say, just as Lowry promised

THEY tried to heave him on to their shoulders but he wasn't having it. Mr Michael Lowry shook his head, planted himself firmly on the ground, fixed his hair and straightened his immaculate single breasted suit.

He had come from the death bed of his uncle, Mr John Joe Burke, in Nenagh hospital, his handlers told us, to receive the best vote of his political life. Did John Joe know about his nephew's win? He did, Mr Lowry said, smiling. "Amazingly he also managed to get out and vote yesterday." Mr Lowry arrived at the count centre in Nenagh with his teenage children, Michael, Lorraine and Jonathan. He pulled his daughter alongside him to be photographed. She tipped her head forward and hid behind her long red hair. He was shuttled through the throng with backclaps and handshakes. "G'man Michael, you did the business." He stood in the centre of the floor, a circle cleared around him and stared, raising one fist and then the second to ecstatic cheers. A cloth cap was thrown and then a Lowry baseball cap was planted on his head. It did not stay there long. One woman wearing a sticker for the Fine Gael candidate, Mr Tom Berkery, moved aside quickly. "I'm not going to shake his hand, I can assure you," she said.

Mr Lowry's wife, Catherine, arrived half an hour later with her two sisters. She got warm hugs and congratulations from supporters and the family stood in a tight circle once more for the cameras. The first preferences for Mr Lowry had filled three rubbish bins before being sorted into neat piles. "The people had their say," one supporter insisted. Just as Mr Lowry had promised.

"Vilified. He was vilified," another man shouted in the corridor. "Nobody should be vilified like that." As he stood on the table to do his television interview, Mrs Catherine Lowry stood behind, her head down, listening intently with her sister's arm around her. The technicians tried desperately to get him to look into the camera, pointing silently upwards but he looked into the distance with his hand to his earpiece. He had turned to give a swinging thumbs up to the crowd before the interview and they chanted "Lowry, Low-ry, Low-ry." The candidate himself was less triumphalist. He would not use the word "vindicated" and he would not say that he had been "hounded by the media".

There didn't seem to be a negative soundbite in sight, not even for Mr John Bruton, his legendary "friend forever".

Then, sitting in the trophy room of the McDermott GAA hall he greeted a fellow politician via a microphone, saying they went back a long way. "Politics and friendship," he said smiling, "at times they can go hand in hand." Then he left to return, he said, to his uncle's bedside.