LAST UPDATE | 15 hrs ago
IT’S DOWN TO the wire in Wicklow for outgoing Health Minister Stephen Donnelly – but he’s not conceding just yet.
The Fianna Fáil TD says it is the combination of fewer seats and having to share them with Taoiseach Simon Harris that have made his position precarious.
Green Party TD Steven Matthews was the latest casualty in the constituency, failing to retain his seat on the eighth count.
Donnelly is currently sitting almost 1,300 votes behind fourth place Fine Gael candidate Edward Timmins.
Speaking to reporters at the the count centre in Greystones earlier, Donnelly thanked his campaigners and voters, but said he knew all along it would be a tough race.
“It’s going to be tight, obviously. Tighter than anyone would like. It was always going to come down to the last seat in Wicklow, so we’ll see how things go,” he said.
Asked how he feels about his position, Donnelly said: “We’ll just have to wait and see how the votes transfer.”
He said he was talking to party leader Micheál Martin earlier and by their estimation Fianna Fáil has had a “strong election”.
“We’ve returned a lot of TDs. We’ve got some fantastic new TDs who hopefully look like they’re going to be elected.”
The Wicklow constituency was altered in the boundary redrawings last year. It used to span the entire area of County Wicklow, but the Electoral Commission decided to put the area around Arklow town into a new Wicklow-Wexford constituency. Wicklow lost a seat in the process, going from five to four.
Harris topped the poll and was elected on the first count.
Donnelly says that even if his own vote wasn’t strong, the “government vote” in the constituency was.
“When you’re sharing a constituency and a hometown with a Taoiseach, and moving from a five-seater to a four-seater – put those two things together, obviously it creates a lot of pressure.
“I think we all knew it was going to come down to the final seat.”
Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore and Sinn Féin TD John Brady will likely keep their seats in Wicklow, but that fourth seat is still up for grabs.
Fine Gael Councillor Edward Timmins is in the lead for it, but he’s fewer than a thousand votes ahead of Donnelly, so transfers could change this.
Asked if he still has a “fire in his belly”, Donnelly recounted his first election, which was the result of three days of counting.
He was first elected as an Independent in Wicklow in 2011, before co-founding the Social Democrats in 2015 and becoming one of its leaders.
However, Donnelly left his party for Fianna Fáil in 2017.
He became Health Minister in 2020 after being re-elected.
