Independent candidate Maureen O’Sullivan has been declared the winner of the by election in Dublin Centre at the end of the 7th count.
Ms O’Sullivan was elected without reaching the quota after the elimination of Sen Paschal Donohoe, the only candidate remaining in the field.
The lower preferences of Labour candidate Senator Ivan Bacik were distributed. Ms O’Sullivan received an additional 2,677 votes, bringing her total to 13,739 while Mr Donohoe received 2,318, finishing on 10,198.
The schoolteacher from East Wall, won the seat left vacant by the death of Tony Gregory, for whom she had been election agent for some 30 years.
In a short acceptance speech, Ms O’Sullivan said that the seat had been for community activists, friends, supporters who were with Tony Gregory for 30 years and who were with her now. She also thanked the late Mr Gregory’s brother, Noel, who she described as the “master strategist”.
She concluded: “Finally, this seat is for you Tony Gregory wherever you are. Tony, we did it for you. We were not going to hand it over to a political party.”
The first count in the constituency was declared just before 6pm with Ms O’Sullivan topping the poll ahead of Sen Donohoe, for a long time considered the favourite to win the seat.
On a valid poll of 28,412, Ms O’Sullivan polled 7,639 votes (26.88 per cent). Mr Donohoe’s total was 6,439 (22.66 per cent) with Labour’s candidate, Senator Ivana Bacik, lying third with 4,926 votes, or 17.33 per cent.
The other notable feature of this byelection has been the collapse in the Fianna Fail vote. Maurice Ahern’s first preferences stood at 3,483 or 12.25 per cent. This compares to the 44.5 per cent secured by the party in this constituency in the 2007 General Election, including a massive 39 per cent of the vote for Mr Ahern’s brother, the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
Indeed, Mr Ahern was beaten into fifth place by Mr Burke in what the party acknowledged was a very poor day in the constituency. Maurice Ahern said that the “tide had gone out for Fianna Fail” here as elsewhere.
From the first count, the consensus among all parties was that the gap of 1,200 votes between Ms O’Sullivan and Sen Donohoe could not be bridged, as she was likely to attract a greater volume of lower preference votes than the Fine Gael senator.
Earlier in the day, Labour Party strategists believed that Sen Bacik might be in a position to overtake Sen Donohoe in later counts and challenge Ms O’Sullivan. But the gap of some 1,500 votes between both candidates was too wide, her campaign team conceded.
Ms O’Sullivan, a secondary school teacher, was the election agent for the late Tony Gregory, for the almost three decades he was a deputy in Dublin Central. Ms O’Sullivan was co-opted onto Dublin City Council last year and ran under the banner of the “Gregory candidate”.
She said today that she began her campaign exactly one month ago. And while the campaign was not was as well resourced as some of her rivals, she said she encountered a huge mount of good-will during the canvass.
Ms O’Sullivan spent yesterday morning at her school, where her Leaving Certificate class was sitting its rearranged second English paper.