THE reverberations from Fianna Fail's poor electoral performance in the west will echo around a number of constituencies there for months to come. This is particularly true in Donegal South West, where the shock election of Independent Tom Gildea on an anti MMDS ticket has shaken the party's complacency as never before.
Although the complex deflector issue had inflamed passions all along the western seaboard in recent months, most observers felt the Government had defused the issue with its proposals to license deflector groups.
But the devil is in the detail, as they say, and the proposal to levy relatively high licence charges on the numerous small groups in Donegal kept the issue to the forefront in that county.
Even so, the challenge from a deflector candidate was always unlikely to succeed in Donegal South West. Monitoring the poll in the constituency was regarded as about as exciting as watching paint dry, as over the years it consistently returned two Fianna Fail TDs and one for Fine Gael.
The key factor in Mr Gildea's election was not just his impressive campaign he had about 40 election workers canvassing from boreen to boreen - but disaffection within Fianna Fail over the choice of its second candidate, Mr Enda Bonner.
That disaffection was strongest in the Glenties and Ardara areas, which gave Mr Gildea more then 90 per cent of the first preference vote, according to tallies.
Mr Gildea, who comes from Glenties, benefited from resentment that two local contenders for the Fianna Fail nomination had been shouldered aside in favour of Mr Bonner.
These were the captain of the All Ireland winning football team in 1992, Mr Anthony Molloy, who comes from Ardara, and Mr Frances Brennan from Glenties.
Mr Bonner lives outside the constituency in Letterkenny and is not well known in southwest Donegal. But he was the preferred choice of the party hierarchy, including outgoing TD, Mr Pat "the Cope" Gallagher. In the event, he was selected amid much recrimination and internal division at the party convention in March.
The choice was received as a personal insult by a number of staunch Fianna Fail supporters in Ardara and Glenties.
Some of them canvassed for Mr Gildea during the election, turning a protest vote over the deflector issue into a credible challenge for the third seat.
In Mayo, meanwhile, Fine Gael's ring a ring a rosy around its political opponents has left Fianna Fail activists scratching their heads. The Fianna Fail vote went down by 7 per cent on its 1992 result, leaving it with two out of five seats instead of the four out of six it won then.
Mr Michael Ring's spectacular first preference vote of over 10,000 has also left Fianna Fail in deep trouble at the northern end of the constituency, where Dr Tom Moffat just managed to scrape in for the last seat ahead of his party colleague, Mr Seamus Hughes.
Mr Hughes comes from Westport, the same political base as Mr Ring, and polled well. The message from the Mayo voters seems to be that local loyalties are now less important than performance and a proven track record in deciding where to cast votes. It will be heard as an alarm call in the Moffat camp and will encourage Mr Hughes, first elected in 1992, to try again.
The result also gives Fine Gael much food for thought. The Ballina electorate was unimpressed by attempts within the party to portray the election as a fight between the north and south of the county for whatever goodies were available from Dublin and Brussels.
Those attempts included full page advertisements in the Western People by friends of the Ballina based Fine Gael candidate, Mr Ernie Caffrey. They seem to have backfired: Mr Caffrey's vote went down, and his party colleagues to the south reaped the benefit.
Overall, however, the strong performance of the rest of the Fine Gael team will make it difficult for Fianna Fail to regain the supremacy it formerly had in Mayo.