ANALYSIS: Fianna Fáil is set to repeat its excellent vote management record of 1997, but it's a free-for-all in the Fine Gael camp, writes Jack Fagan.
THE perfectly executed vote management strategy that delivered three of the five Meath seats to Fianna Fáil in 1997 will be seriously tested this time around by an anti-incinerator lobby.
The protest group has put forward their own candidate to highlight their opposition to Meath County Council's decision to allow the country's first public incinerator to be based near the village of Duleek. About five miles away, also in east Meath, local residents are taking a High Court action to block a "super-dump" on a landfill site near Kentstown.
The challenge by the anti-incineration candidate Pat O'Brien has little prospect of carrying him into the Dáil, but it could make life difficult not for the Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, but for one of his running-mates, Minister of State Mary Wallace. She has to pitch for about 40 per cent of her votes in east Meath under Fianna Fáil's policy of clearly defining the areas allocated to each of its three candidates. The strategy worked like a dream in the last general election - each of the three successful candidates got well over 7,000 first-preference votes - but some party strategists fear that Wallace could be limping in behind this time around. Her camp denies that her little publicised opposition to the siting of either the incinerator or the "super-dump" in her neck of the woods has been dictated by hostility at the doorsteps. On the contrary, her personal assistant, local councillor Nick Killian, says that in their canvass of areas like Duleek and nearby Stamullen, only about one in 10 householders mentioned their objections to the incinerator.
Despite obvious anxiety about the incinerator, Fianna Fáil is confident that increased prosperity in the constituency over the last five years should ensure that they will do even better than in the 1997 election, when they got 41.88 per cent of the first-preference votes as against 36.92 per cent for Fine Gael and 6.52 per cent for Labour.
Dempsey has copper-fastened his strong position in south Meath and Navan, turning up at virtually every event of any consequence in the past five years. And just as Intel has done the Government no harm by confirming that it is finally to proceed with a major extension in Leixlip, Tara Mines has sent out the right signals in Navan by announcing the reopening of Europe's largest lead and zinc mine, closed since last year because of depressed metal prices. The third outgoing Fianna Fáil TD, John Brady, not one of the stars of the 28th Dáil, has not lost touch with his constituents in north Meath, where the big farming community traditionally support Fianna Fail.
The way in which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael run their election campaigns in Meath could not be more different. The Government party steadfastly relies on vote management to deliver the desired results. Fine Gael's three candidates seem to have no interest in ground rules as they fight to retain the two seats won last time by long-standing TD and former party leader John Bruton and a Navan auctioneer, John Farrelly. The free-for-all apparently favoured by Bruton should enable him to head the poll once again. In the last election, he got just over 13,000 first preferences - 4,300 more than Dempsey - allowing him to bring in Farrelly, who had lost the seat in the previous election.
Bruton's strong showing on this occasion may not be enough to save Farrelly, who has seen some of his former supporters switch their allegiance to the third Fine Gael candidate, 26-year-old Councillor Damien English. He has been a thorn in Farrelly's side for the best part of a year, grabbing much of the attention with his own newssheet, The English Report, which addressed most the local issues in the election. Worse still for Farrelly, an opinion poll conducted by Fine Gael put English way out in front, taking 11 per cent of the votes as against 7 per cent for the outgoing TD. Not surprisingly, Farrelly saw red, claiming that the poll was an attempt to sabotage his campaign. The poll made better reading for Bruton, who was shown leading on 19 per cent, one point ahead of Dempsey.
With either Farrelly or English expected to take the last seat, there will be little compensation for Labour's excellent candidate Peter Ward, who will have to share the left-wing vote with former Labour TD Brian Fitzgerald, now running as an independent. Sinn Féin's Joe Reilly has had a high profile in local politics for several years and, although he is expected to pick up a considerable number of second preferences when the anti-incineration candidate is eliminated, he is unlikely to figure in the final shakeup.
Prediction: FF 3, FG 2. No change.