The race for seats at the Euro table is up and running in Mayo
by Caoimhín Rowland
We seem to treat European parliamentary elections similar to how GAA clubs select county board delegates.
Whoever shouts the loudest, raises the most probing questions in the clubrooms during AGMs will be given the green light to do the same to others, but not at home!
Perhaps prophets aren’t accepted in their homeland or we just desire an easy, stress-free no questions asked or answered existence.
An Irish solution to an Irish problem.
The county board delegate is the least contested or favourable position within a GAA club, but it forms an important role in how other clubs across the county view your club.
This point is unfortunately often missed in how we elect members of the European Parliament.
Mayo will be a hotbed for the Midland North-West constituency. Votes will be totted up here in the TF and we will have two candidates already confirmed to be contesting for the two major parties.
The incumbent Maria Walsh (FG) will be aiming to retain her seat. In 2019 she faced local opposition in Saoirse McHugh, next year it will be Fianna Fáil’s Lisa Chambers.
The Castlebar senator has her sights set on what Thatcher infamously called a ‘Mickey Mouse Parliament’, in the Belgian capital.
Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan is now well worn into his parliamentary seat, even if his trousers were famously left absent during a zoom parliamentary session, albeit he was wearing sports shorts after completing a jog.
He has given all of the indications that he will run once more. He loves elections and will only bow out when the people depose him.
Neither Walsh nor Chambers will threaten his perch. The establishment parties tend to do poorly in recent European elections. Indeed it is the norm across the continent.
Elections are seen as a protest, an opportunity to try something new and see if it works, with little to no follow up homework.
On average, an MEP earns over €100,000 a year through a salary, and a guaranteed €320 for each day they ‘clock-in’ to work.
In 2019 in the run up to the last election, the Irish Examiner did research on how much each of our MEPs earned during the five years sitting.
Ming was one of only two to decline the request from the paper, while the rest transparently provided figures of just north of half a million earned in their time as MEPs.
To quote a former commissioner from this town, try it sometime.
In Castlebar last week I only had to step outside the office door to accost a candidate in next year’s European elections.
Hermann Kelly of the Irish Freedom Party was standing on Market Square with a large banner proclaiming his party’s name and the slogan, ‘Irish Sovereignty…. Not EU Control’, over an image of the 56-year-old in a London GAA jersey pucking a sliotar with a hurl in the direction of a dog which was photoshopped in the colours of the EU.
A former communications director for UKIP and confidante of Nigel Farage, the use of the word ‘sovereignty’ emblazoned over a Cu Chulainnesque metaphor for Irish freedom was as garish as it was comical.
Kelly, an ardent campaigner against the European Union, has spent much of his adult life earning from the Brussels trough. After UKIP departed in 2019, he latched onto right wing MEPs in Romania and now works for one named Cristian Tarhes.
Kelly will run alongside Maria Walsh, Lisa Chambers, Barry Cowan, Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan and others in this constituency.
He will be hoping to do better than his showing in the Dublin constituency in 2019, where he received just 2,441 votes (0.67%) of votes.
Keenly aware anti-migration, anti-lockdown and climate denial sentiment has only grown in Ireland since the last ballot, Peter Casey polled surprisingly well here, but I doubt Farage’s former spin doctor will garner enough to continue his gorging on lucrative Belgian waffles.
But it's early days yet.
And we still await the deliberations of the boundary commission in regard to the number of seats.