LABOUR LEADER Eamon Gilmore has said he is confident the party’s newest recruit, John Kelly, will mount a strong challenge for a seat in Roscommon-South Leitrim in the next general election.
Mr Gilmore yesterday announced that Mr Kelly, an Independent member of Roscommon County Council, had joined the party. Mr Kelly has been a councillor since 2004 and topped the poll with two quotas in the Castlerea electoral area when re-elected last year. He stood as an Independent in the 2007 general election polling over 4,500 votes, or about 40 per cent of a quota.
Mr Gilmore admitted that the presence of the Labour Party in Roscommon had been a “bit thin on the ground”. The last national representative was the late Jack McQuillan, who was a Labour TD for only two years: he first won his Dáil seat for Clann na Poblachta and was re-elected for three successive terms as an Independent. The Labour candidate in the 2007 election, Hughie Baxter, polled just 832 votes.
Mr Gilmore said of Mr Kelly yesterday: “I have been seeing his work on Roscommon County Council and he has caught my eye . . . He is deeply rooted in the community and has a long record of campaigning on social and economic issues. It has been clear to me for some time that he shares many of the values and political priorities of the Labour Party.”
Mr Kelly said that Labour’s policies were “a mirror image of my own issues. I do not see it as a big move to move from being an Independent to Labour.
“I am quite confident that the electorate of Castlerea and Roscommon will follow suit and continue to vote for me no matter what party I am,” he said.
Asked how his views on abortion and same-sex unions, which were described as conservative, tallied with that of his new party, Mr Kelly replied: “I don’t have opinions on everything. I wouldn’t like to think that anybody, including the media, should think that I do have an opinion on everything. As regards same-sex unions, the choice is there for people and I would respect that choice.”