Fianna Fáil look set to stick with the policy of having just one General Election candidate, after a meeting of the party in Portlaoise on Monday night showed no appetite for adding a running mate alongside long-serving TD Sean Fleming.
It had been felt that in the wake of the Brian Stanley controversy and the subsequent fallout in Sinn Féin that it presented an opportunity to add somebody to the ticket.
But the chance of winning a second seat in the reconfigured three-seat Laois constituency were considered very slim given how the party have been polling.
Austin Stack, a high-profile and long-time member of the party in Laois, was believed to be interested in being that second candidate if the party chose to go down that route while Joey Kennedy from Portarlington, who contested the Local Elections, was also mooted.
However, with no widespread desire to add a candidate, it’s now unlikely that they will do so, unless Fianna Fáil headquarters decide otherwise.
In Joey Kennedy’s case, despite the attractiveness of his Portarlington base, at just 19 he is actually too young to be a candidate. General Election candidates must be at least 21.
None of the party’s six councillors in Laois are interested in a General Election bid.
The Portlaoise-based Pauline Flanagan was Sean Fleming’s running mate in 2020 but she has since left the party and was an Independent candidate in the recent Local Elections.
On that occasion, Sean Fleming got 7,636 first preferences and took the final seat in the old Laois-Offaly constituency on the 11th count. Pauline Flanagan got 1,744 first preferences and was eliminated early on.
Sean Fleming had no running mate when Laois was last a constituency on its own in 2016. In that instance he got 13,626 votes and was elected on the first count with almost 4,000 votes above the quota.
This will be Sean Fleming’s seventh General Election to contest having been elected on all six previous occasions when he ran – 1997, 2002, 2007, 2011, 2016 and 2020.
Going back through the years, Laois elected two Fianna Fáil TDs from 1997 to 2011 when Sean Fleming and John Moloney served alongside each other in the Dail before Moloney was ousted by Brian Stanley in 2011.
Laois Fianna Fáil chairman Joe Dunne from Mountmellick has been appointed as the Director of Elections in Laois.
SEE ALSO – Fine Gael looking at adding a second candidate in Laois as General Election looms large
