EUROPEAN ELECTIONS: DUBLINTHE SOCIALIST Party candidate Joe Higgins struck a significant blow against Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin by clinching the final European Parliament seat in Dublin ahead of outgoing MEPs Eoin Ryan and Mary Lou McDonald.
Mr Higgins overtook Mr Ryan (Fianna Fáil) in the seventh count to take the third and final seat at the conclusion of a marathon count in the early hours of yesterday morning.
He will now join two other outgoing MEPs, poll-topper Gay Mitchell of Fine Gael and Labour’s Proinsias De Rossa, in this constituency, which was reduced from four seats to three seats ahead of this election.
Mr Higgins’s victory, which came at 5am, was due to a very high transfer of lower preferences from Ms McDonald.
The 22,201 transfers Mr Higgins received from the Sinn Féin candidate brought his total to 82,366, overtaking Mr Ryan who received 5,426 transfers from Ms McDonald, giving him 76,956 votes.
Her transfers went to Mr Higgins on a ratio of four to one.
Earlier he had also benefited from a significantly higher transfer rate from Patricia McKenna, the former Green MEP who stood as an Independent and finished in sixth position.
The destination of the third seat was always going to depend on two factors: the gap between Mr Ryan and his nearest rival and which candidate, Mr Higgins or Ms McDonald, was ahead of the other after the first count.
In the event, Mr Higgins secured 50,510 votes, some 2,500 votes more than Ms McDonald. From early in the count, Sinn Féin accepted she would be unable to bridge the gap between the two candidates.
In addition, Mr Ryan’s total of 55,346 was considered too small to fend off the challenge of Mr Higgins in subsequent counts.
As expected, poll-topper and outgoing FG MEP Gay Mitchell was first elected on the fourth count. His total of 96,715 was just a little under 5,000 short of the quota. Outgoing MEP Labour’s Proinsias De Rossa, with 83,471 votes, was next elected on the sixth count.
The Green Party’s Deirdre de Búrca sought a recheck of her votes before she was eliminated on the third count. By then, she had accumulated 21,991 votes, trailing Ms McKenna, who had 22,380 votes.
Ms de Búrca called off the recheck when it became obvious that she would not secure enough votes to qualify for €38,000 in election expenses. She said that the cost of her campaign had been “several multiples” of that figure.
“This campaign was largely funded through my own personal funds,” she said.
Mr Higgins said yesterday that he did not intend to serve a full term in Europe and would contest the Dublin West constituency at the next general election.
After his victory was announced, he said: “This is a roar of opposition by ordinary people in Dublin to savage policies of the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government in making working people, and the unemployed, pay for a crisis caused by speculators, big developers and by big bankers.”
Mr Ryan said he was disappointed with the result, but he insisted that Fianna Fáil could recover from its current difficulties.
“People said that Fine Gael was down and out and would not recover, and it did recover,” he added.
“That is the nature of politics. You have good times, and get into power, and go through a difficult periods.”
Fianna Fáil, he said, had suffered because it had to make difficult decisions in Government.