This article is from page 6 of the 2011-11-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 6 JPG
SENIOR FINE GAEL party members in Clare yesterday described the party’s performance in the presidential election as a “total disaster”, with one party insider blaming the attempt to parachute Pat Cox into the race for “splitting the party”.
Gay Mitchell received just 2,545 first-preference votes in Clare in the presidential election, compared to the 24,524 first-preference votes received by the party’s candidate in this year’s General Election.
Shannon Senator Tony Mulcahy said that the decision to run a candidate who had been out of the public eye for such a long time was a mistake.
“The election was a disaster – I don’t see how anyone could think any different. It was a disaster for a number of reasons.
“You had Martin McGuinness, who is very high profile; Sean Gallagher who is on the TV; and then you had our man who has been out of the country for the last four or five years,” he said.
“We didn’t make an impact on this one at all. A lot of Fine Gael people I met before the weekend said that they were going to throw their support behind Michael D. That was it. If we had been closer, then maybe we would have got more of the vote? Maybe it was an anti-government thing.”
One party insider in Clare blamed the attempt to draft in Pat Cox as the reason why the party failed to per- form in the election.
“The decision by headquarters to bring in Pat Cox did not sit well with a lot of people within the party who have been working hard for the last number of years. There was huge resentment after that and that made its way down to every part of the Fine Gael campaign,” he said.
“It was a celebrity campaign. You had Dana, Martin McGuinness and Sean Gallagher and even Michael D is a semi-celebrity. Gay Mitchell was all about straight-talking to people and that didn’t connect with the people at all.
“But the Pat Cox affair split the party – it would have been very difficult for everyone after that.”
North Clare Senator Martin Conway said that the party needs to listen to what the people said in this election.
“We need to learn lessons from this and really take on what the people have said. You can go down very quickly in politics so we need to learn from this,” he said.