Craic On

Re-elected

It’s official now. Martin Farren has been re-elected to the council.

With transfers he finished in 8th place with 1403 votes.

John Ryan of Fine Gael took the 9th and final council slot with 1360 votes as opposed to Sinn Fein’s Ciaran McLaughlin’s 1307.

That makes it 3 council seats for Fianna Fail, two for Sinn Fein, two for Fine Gael, one for Labour and one for Independent.

First Count

Martin got 1038 first count votes this time as opposed to 881 last time. He had wanted a couple of hundred more than he got last time so he wasn’t too far off target.

That means he increased his vote by 18% at a time when Labour nationally had lost half of its vote from 15% last time to 7.5% now.

Those at head office in Dublin will have taken notice of Martin’s performance and that should give him even greater clout when he goes to Labour Government ministers and asks for something for this area.

He got 131 transfers from Mary McCauley and 59 from Black Micky Doherty which helped take him to safety.

Reward

It is a reward for the hard work that Martin has put in from day one. He has struck up a good relationship with those in charge of departments at the council and that helps a lot when he wants to get things done for local people.

He also gets right on the phone to Labour ministers nationally when something needs done here like getting funds to fix the shore walk.

He got on the phone to Labour Minister Alan Kelly after the shore walk was destroyed and got a sympathetic hearing when asking for cash to fix it.

Moville got €80,000 for it and it’ll be all fixed up for the summer when our visitors arrive.

Campaign Team

It’s also a highly successful campaign for his team including Don McGinley and Seamus Bovaird and that will be noticed by the national Labour leadership as well.

They may find themselves being asked for advice from the big boys.

There looked to be a chance that Moville could lose its only councillor as the count got closer and at one point Martin was only 5 votes ahead of Ciaran McLaughlin who was in 10th place and there were only 9 council slots.

He must have been sweating on Mary McCauley’s transfers which were next to come.

However, all’s well that ends well.

Moville Vote

It will be interesting to see the percentage of Movillians who voted for Martin. When Cecilia Keaveney lost, missing out by just 51 votes in the first vote, it turned out that less than half of Movillians (47%) voted for her (Arthur got 81 votes in the first ballot).

I would guess that Martin got a large percentage of the Moville vote.

He and his team will feel like a million dollars today (if a little tired). He’ll be receiving the congratulations of Movillians over the coming days.

Well done Martin!