Higgins reassured of place on FG euro elections ticket

A Fine Gael MEP said he was reassured by the party's general secretary at a clear the air meeting in Dublin airport last night that there is no conspiracy to push him off the party ticket for the European elections.

Jim Higgins will be running alongside fellow MEP Mairéad McGuinness in the newly reconfigured Midlands North-West constituency.

Mr Higgins had previously been elected in the North-West constituency, while Ms McGuinness was elected to Ireland East.

Fine Gael headquarters were pressuring Mayo-based Mr Higgins not to stand, but he told RTÉ's Morning Ireland today he held a meeting with Tom Curran, the party's general secretary, in Dublin Airport last night.

It had been reported senior party figures would show him polling figures setting out in detail the difficult task Mr Higgins faced in getting re-elected, but Mr Higgins said this was incorrect.

It was also known that senior figures in Fine Gael believed Mayo TD and former GAA manager John O'Mahony would be a stronger candidate than Mr Higgins, but Mr Higgins also dismissed this.

“John is a very good friend of mine, I’m the person who brought him into politics in the first place. John has always said that as long as I am there, he has no interest in running, good bad or indifferent.”

Mr Higgins claimed there was no basis to the “headquarters conspiracy”.

“There was a lot of stuff out there in terms of the rumour mill, that there was a party headquarters strategy, let’s call it a conspiracy, that Jim Higgins was going to have to stand aside,” he said.

“I’m very confident as a result of the meeting I had with the secretary general that everything is going to be fine.

“What we decided yesterday is that there will be two candidates, and obviously that’s Mairéad and myself. Secondly it was decided that we had to take the two seats.”

He also said the some parts of the Midlands North-West constituency, which comprises 1.7 million voters in Cavan, Donegal, Galway, Kildare, Laois, Leitrim, Longford, Louth, Mayo, Meath, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo and Westmeath, will be allocated to Ms McGuinness, others to him, while some will be open for competition between both."