Sir, – Your Front page story (September 9th) asserts that Fine Gael “strenuously blocked” attempts by Senator David Norris to secure nominations from county councils and that his failure to secure more than one nomination was “largely due to a whip by Fine Gael on its councillors to oppose his nomination”. This is an extraordinary contention since it is completely at variance with your own newspaper’s coverage of proceedings at various county council meetings.
In Donegal, Kerry, Louth, Mayo and Roscommon all Fine Gael councillors abstained from voting on the issue, in effect leaving the decision on the presidential nomination to the remaining members of each council. How can this be described as an effort to “block” Mr. Norris? Members of Fianna Fáil, Labour, Sinn Féin and the Independent ranks on these bodies then voted overwhelmingly to nominate either Mary Davis or Seán Gallagher, with little or no support for Mr Norris. In fact, on many of these councils, Mr Norris did not receive even a single vote. These meetings were reported extensively in recent editions of your newspaper, making it all the more extraordinary that your correspondent chose to refer only to Galway City Council, the only council where Fine Gael actually opposed Mr Norris, as it if it were somehow representative of a nationwide stance by the party.
The vast majority of councillors who voted against Mr Norris’s nomination have come from the ranks of Fianna Fáil, Labour, Sinn Féin and Independents, so why have Fine Gael been singled out for its supposed opposition to his candidacy? In any event, a decision to support one candidate over another is not “blocking”, it’s simply democracy. – Yours, etc,