Gerry Ryan is running for the Labour Party in Croydon Central in a seat the party must win, writes Mark Hennessy
IN HIS youth, London-born Gerry Ryan, the son of Irish emigrants, spent six weeks every summer with his grandparents, playing in the fields and quiet roads around Coolaney, Co Sligo.
Today, Ryan, a councillor, is running for the Labour Party in Croydon Central, a seat that was won by the Conservatives in 2005, and which now has a notional Labour majority following boundary changes.
“Coolaney was idyllic, I loved it. I went over for the holidays to Nan McGowan and my parents came for the last two weeks, as so many others did,” he says, sipping a coffee in the Bangers and Mash cafe in New Addington.
Ryan has just finished canvassing in the area with Northern Ireland Secretary of State Shaun Woodward. Other Labour luminaries have already been, or are due to lend a hand in the remaining weeks of the campaign.
“This is a crucial seat,” says Ryan, who joined Labour in the 1980s during some of its darkest days, and is today chair of the party’s group of councillors that have an Irish background.
Ryan, who is on the local council for eight years, is married to Jackie and they have two sons, Lee and Dan. He has campaigned on issues of concern to the Irish community, including housing for Travellers. “They are the most discriminated community of all. People need to speak up for them. Thatcher did away with the need for councils to make provision for them,” he says.
Immigration looms large in conversation in this constituency, largely because Lunar House, the home office’s asylum and immigration centre on Wellesley Road near East Croydon, keeps the issue visibly to the fore.
The British National Party, which is running several hundred candidates, is hoping to make some inroads in the constituency with its candidate, Cliff le May.
Le May, based at the New Addington end of the constituency that has a substantial number of council homes and where Labour’s vote has been slipping, faced racism allegations last year.
Responding then to a Conservative survey form posted through his front door, he wrote: “Stop ruining our community by stuffing New Addington with violent immigrants who have no right to live among decent civilised white people.”
Ryan says: “The presence of Lunar House leads some people to think that the immigrants will all be living in the area, taking services, so the BNP is going to use that argument.”
Though the BNP has pockets of support, the real battle will be between Ryan, Conservative candidate Gavin Barwell and Andrew Pelling, who won the seat for the Conservatives in 2005 but is now standing as an independent.