The last few months have been “hell” for the former Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley and his family, his wife has said.
Speaking at the count centre in Laois as her husband was elected an Independent TD, Caroline Dwane Stanley said she would refuse to resign from the Sinn Féin party until she “gets answers” from senior members regarding the debacle that led to his resignation.
She described the past five months as “hell” for the couple and their family.
Mr Stanley resigned from Sinn Féin in October amid controversy over the handling of an internal investigation into allegations against him.
He took the third and final seat in the Laois constituency on Sunday, leaving Sinn Féin without a TD in the area for the first time since 2011. In the end he pipped his former party’s candidate Maria McCormack to a seat by a margin of almost 3,000 votes.
Thanking his campaign team, he said: “I had a very good group of republicans canvassing with me, some of them are ex-Sinn Féin, some of them are people who will not renew their membership, some of them are new people who would have been supportive of me in the past and haven’t worked in election campaigns in the past but a lot of them, there was a particularly strong group of women who pulled this together and I have to thank them for this ... the support that we got from women in terms of getting out and canvassing and getting posters up, but also the support from women on the doorsteps, was fantastic.”
He said he had focused on the things that mattered to voters, infrastructure, housing, health services, the needs of workers and families and “pulled it off against the odds”.
“A lot of media commentators would rightly recognise that people who leave parties and particularly people who leave Sinn Féin tend not to do good but we defied the odds here, starting out with no organisation just a few weeks ago ... and we got it over the line comfortably.”
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said in recent weeks the party had done everything it had been obliged to do in hearing the complaint of sexual harassment made by a woman against Mr Stanley and also in relation to the counter-allegation made by Mr Stanley that the woman had demanded a sum of €60,000 from him in order not to pursue matters further.
When Mr Stanley resigned as a Sinn Féin member he cited a “kangaroo court” set up by the party after the complaint about him was lodged in late July and strenuously denied any wrongdoing.
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