Resilient political hopeful harbours thoughts of another run

LIFE AFTER LEINSTER HOUSE:Margaret Conlon did not dwell on the loss of her seat but failure to back her Seanad bid rankled

WHEN MARGARET Conlon lost her Cavan-Monaghan Dáil seat she “didn’t dwell” on the defeat.

“The way I look at it, you dust yourself down and move on. I respected the voters’ decision,” says the former Fianna Fáil TD. “When you sign up you must . . . take the consequences.” There “is no point in wallowing in self-pity. It does you no good.”

But she still believed she had “more to give” and moved straight away into a Seanad election campaign. She did not win a seat, but when the results came in “I did very well considering it was my first time” and her votes “transferred directly” to three Fianna Fáil senators. “I brought the three of them in,” she insists.

But what really rankled was that she “didn’t have the support of the leader”, Micheál Martin.

She wasn’t on the list of 10 Seanad candidates he believed were the best chance to promote Fianna Fáil’s recovery and bring in new blood and a gender balance in his greatly diminished parliamentary party. Five were subsequently elected.

“It was a blow because in 2007 when I ran I only had a nine-week campaign. I was the last to be selected and I got 9,300 votes,” says the vice-principal of St Louis secondary school in Monaghan, who returns to her post next month.

“If I was the only one to have lost my seat I would be asking where did I go wrong . . . but there were so many more than me who lost and we are down to 20 TDs and no women in the Dáil. I couldn’t really understand why I wasn’t worthy of support. If I’d got some support I believe I would have been elected.”

She did not come from a political family, although “my father was very active in Fianna Fáil. He was just one of the foot soldiers and he was the one who got me involved.”

Reflecting on her experience she says: “I will always have the distinction of being the first elected female TD in the Cavan-Monaghan constituency. There was a Mrs [Bridget Mary] Rice in Monaghan [from 1938 to 1954] but I am the first . . . No matter what, I did make a little bit of history.”

In 2007 Fianna Fáil went looking for her to run in the election. People had been saying, “you’ll be in the Dáil” but “I never thought it would happen to me. I always thought there were so many other people further up the ladder than me.”

She points out that “a lot of people never get the chance to do it, particularly women”. In 2007 “if my children, now 18, 15 and 11, were younger I wouldn’t have been able to do it”. She says more women might be in national politics if the Dáil hours were normal hours – starting at 9am and finishing at 5pm or 6pm; rather than starting late and sitting late into the night.”

When she heard about the earlier starting time on a Tuesday “I smiled to myself when I saw that,” the new time of 2pm, rather than 2.30 pm. But she acknowledges that not everybody can get in early because of the distance they travel.

During the election campaign “75 per cent of doors were opened by women. We make up 50 per cent of the population and yet our representation is two Fianna Fáil women senators and no Fianna Fáil women in Monaghan County Council.”

Looking at the state of the party “I don’t think we can go any lower than we’ve gone. We can only be coming back up”.

The support is still there from ordinary cumann members who, she says, are very experienced and want be part of, as they see it, a “great party”.

As for her own intentions: “I wouldn’t like to think that my political journey is done and dusted. I’d like to think that I’d run in the future.” But for now “my clear focus is school. A lot of the pupils I knew when I was there are gone and I will be getting to know the new pupils”.

But she enjoyed “every day” in the Dáil, and particularly loved the “parish pump” politics. She enjoyed speaking in the Dáil on education and health, but “it was the small things that you do for people that make a difference”.

The biggest of those things was her involvement in getting sites for a primary, secondary and school of further education after the Army barracks closed in Monaghan. “The diggers are coming in, in September.”