Ms Kathy Sinnott appeared to be facing another electoral cliffhanger late last night.
Ms Sinnott, who was narrowly defeated for a Dáil seat in a recount in Cork South Central in the general election, had 51,000 votes on the ninth count in the Seanad Labour panel election. The quota was 79,584.
Speculation varied about Ms Sinnott's chances of picking up the crucial transfers, given that voters tend to cast their preferences mainly in strictly political terms in the Seanad elections.
Ms Sinnott, who secured 44,000 first preferences, said she was not ruling herself out of winning a seat. "The transfers look good," she said. "I am in contention with some strong candidates. I think I am fighting for the last seat. I could be in trouble because there are some good vote-getters in my panel."
Ms Sinnott said Independent candidates had contested the vocational panels in the past, but she had been told by Seanad officials that there was no record of an Independent winning a seat up to now. "I think that I am an appropriate candidate for the Seanad, because the idea behind the vocational panels was that they were to contain people with an expertise in some area rather than representatives of political parties. It was not meant to be a political club," she said.
Ms Sinnott's campaign was supported by Sinn Féin and a number of Independents. She said that much of her Seanad campaign was taken up talking to disability groups.
She became a national figure when she won a landmark judgment against the State relating to her handicapped son, Jamie, in October 2000. Her decision to contest elections followed the publication of the Education for Persons with Disabilities Bill, which, she said, she found to be the "last straw". It was time, she felt, to get inside the decision-making process. She was accompanied at the marathon count by a team of supporters, including the Independent TD for Sligo-Leitrim, Ms Marin Harkin.
