Adrian Kavanagh, 13th June 2013 – with updates as convention/candidate selection process proceeded (see the bottom of the post). Final update posted on 16th June 2014. 

69 members of the Fianna Fail Local Area Representatives group contested the 2014 Local Elections, with most of these contesting electoral areas in the more urban parts of the state (as detailed later in this post). Slightly more than half of these failed to win seats in these elections, with 29 Fianna Fail LARs (49.2% of these) winning seats while 30 Fianna Fail LARs (50.8%) lost out in these elections.  

There was a notable geographical dimension here and the levels of success for Fianna Fail LARs varied between different places. In Cork, the Fianna Fail LAR group proved to be especially successful with 75.0% of this group (6 out of 8 LARs) winning seats at the local elections (and this percentage might well have been higher had Padraic Vallely not withdrawn from the Ballincollig-Carrigaline contest). By contrast, only 44.4% of the 28 Fianna Fail LARS contesting the elections in Dublin won seats.

There was also a notable gender dimension in terms of success levels for Fianna Fail LAR candidates, with male LARs faring notably stronger than the female LARS. 25 of the 42 (59.5%) male LAR candidates managed to win seats at these elections, but only 4 of the 17 (23.5%) female Fianna Fail LAR candidates proved to be successful in these contests. The female LAR candidates proved to be slightly more successful in Dublin than in the rest of the state – 3 of the 10 (30.0%) female LAR candidates in Dublin managed to win seats but only one candidate (Lisa Chambers) out of the 7 female LAR candidates (14.3%) in the rest of the state won a council seat.

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With less than twelve months to go until the local elections and following on the publication of the Local Electoral Area Boundary Committee Report 2013, this post marked the first attempt on this site to tease out what a party’s potential list of candidates for these elections would be.  To do so, I started by looking at Fianna Fail, the party that was probably best placed to emerge as the largest party at a local authority level in the state following next year’s elections (This is based on factors such as recent poll figures and a tendency for government parties to suffer in mid-term “second order” elections, as well as the “political opportunity” offered by the 2011 General Election to bring in new faces to the party but to also permit experienced, losing general election, candidates to contest these elections as well.) To start with, I (tried to!) listed here all the names of Fianna Fail’s group of Local Area Representatives.

This group tended to be comprised of (mainly) unelected party members who were acting as party representatives usually (but not exclusively) in areas where the party lacked local representation following the poor results in the 2009 Local Elections and 2011 General Election. This list was compiled based on information drawn from all the constituencies pages on the Fianna Fail party website (and thanks to Cllr. Jimmy Moloney for drawing my attention to the relevant links!).  The details provided by the party website did not, however, seem to be fully complete or correct (and I added to the list of LARs as and when I got further details on these) and there did seem to be some errors on this. For instance, the site listed Sarah Ryan as the LAR for Dun Laoghaire but she was in fact a Local Area Representative for the Dundrum electoral area. The move of Lorraine Clifford into Pembroke-South Dock was also not registered on this site.

In organising this list, I tried to match the Local Area Representatives to the new local election constituency units as best as I could – given that the Local Area Representatives appointed prior to the 2013 boundary revision were linked to areas approximating to the old local election constituency units. In some cases I had to make “guesstimates” as to which of the new local election constituencies these candidates might be based in. 

This list did not tend to include Fianna Fail local representatives at the county/city or town council (with occasional exceptions of LARs who became councillors to fill Fianna Fail council vacancies), but these details could be found on other posts on this website. As such the higher number of members of this Local Area Representative grouping tended to be found in parts of the State where levels of Fianna Fail representation on local authorities were relatively low, or non-existent in the case of some of the electoral areas.  Local Area Representatives tend to be clustered particularly in the more urban regions of the State, including Dublin and its commuter belt, as well as the other cities. 40 of the Local Area Representatives (44.4%) were based in the Dublin region and 12 are located within the Cork region (13.5%), while 8 hailed from Louth, 7 were based in Kildare and 4 were based in Limerick City. 

Based on what information I garnered, I estimated that there were 90 of these Fianna Fail Local Area Representatives in all. 67 of these were male (74.4%) and 23 were female (25.6%). Over half of the female Local Area Representatives (12, or 52.2% of the total number of female members of this grouping) were based in the Dublin region. Just over seventy percent of the Fianna Fail LAR group were successful in winning places on the party ticket for the 2014 Local Elections. (All of the fifty two candidates/LARs (59.8%) who won places on the party tickets at their local electoral area conventions are highlighted in the table above by a ** marking. One member of this group, Padraig Vallelly, withdrew from the elections in protest at the parachuting in of another candidate in his electoral area after the selection convention had taken place. Eight other members of this LAR grouping were subsequently added to the candidate list for their electoral area after their convention (highlighted in the table above by a * marking), bringing the total number of selected LARs to date up to sixty (69.0%).) Sarah Ryan, Lorraine Clifford, Catherine Ardagh, Deirdre Kelly, Kate Feeney and Liam Dockery, as well as Sean Kelly, were candidates who initially contested selection conventions and then were added by party headquarters after failing to win the nomination at these. Geraldine Leddin was also added as a candidate for Limerick City West, even though she had decided not to contest the convention for that electoral area.  

Seventeen members of this group of selected LARs were female (28.3%) and forty three were male (71.7%), but with this number of male LAR candidates being reduced down to forty two after the Vallelly withdrawal. Females accounted for six of the eight LARs who were added to electoral tickets by party headquarters after conventions had taken place. While 73.9% of the female LARs listed here were successful in making it on to the candidate lists in their respective electoral areas (against 64.2% of the male LARs), only 47.8% of these female LARs were successful at their selection conventions (against 61.2% of the male LARs).

The Dublin region accounted for twenty three of the LARs who were nominated at their local electoral area conventions (and five other candidates who was added by party headquarters after their convention), while the Cork region accounts for eight of the candidates who were successful at the convention stage (and one other candidate who was added by party headquarters after their convention) of these.

At least thirteen members of this LAR grouping contested their local conventions but were not selected to run at the local elections at these (including Deirdre Kelly in West Cork electoral area, Clara La Combre in the Swords electoral area, James Flanagan and Catherine Ardagh on Crumlin-Kimmage, Ian O’Beirne in the Clontarf electoral area, Lorraine Clifford, Maria Bohan and John Hanafin in the Pembroke-South Dock electoral area, Kate Feeney and Liam Dockery in the Blackrock electoral area, Sarah Ryan in the Dundrum  electoral area, Daryl Baron in the Beaumont-Donaghmede electoral area).

A further twenty five members of this LAR group either did not decide to go forward to contest their local conventions, or else lost out at these (but details of such conventions have not reached me as yet).