This article is from page 6 of the 2014-04-22 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 6 JPG
BRUCE Springsteen may has robbed the Banner county of a future political leader.
Kilrush local election candidate, Joe Coughlan (Ind), who famously presented The Boss with a giant sized Irish passport during his sold out Thomand Park concerts in July of 2013, has decided to call time on his election campaign, after meeting Springsteen once again in Nashville last week.
Mr Coughlan originally announced his decision to run for a seat on Clare County Council in February of this year. Launching his campaign he said that it was time for him to either “put up or shut up” and said that he was “tired of seeing people running again and again” for election.
However, after being offered the opportunity to meet The Boss in America last week, he has decided to pull the plug on his political career.
“I’ve been in Nashville for a couple of days and I met him [Springsteen] after I saw him in concert last Wednesday. It hit me after I met him over in Nashville, this is the kind of thing that I wouldn’t be able to do if I was elected,” he said yesterday.
“I didn’t ask him about it [the election], but to be honest I didn’t want to run for just for the sake of it. If I was going to be a politician then I wanted to be 100 per cent committed to it.”
Mr Coughlan famously presented Bruce Springsteen with an oversized Irish passport during his concert in Limerick in July of last year. Later that evening, he was invited to share a drink with The Boss in the Basement Bar of the Adare Manor Hotel.
“I think I’ve started to see the reali- ty of what running for election would look like. People here did encourage me to run and if I was a councillor I’d like to be able to make most of the people happy, but the way things are I don’t think I’d be able to do that,” he said. “I have a good life, I have my business. I think it [being a councillor] would have taken up too much of my time.” Mr Coughlan did not rule out the possibility of running for election in the future and said that if the amount of wages paid to county councillors were increased, and he could give up his day job, he would consider running for election in the future.