Conor Bergin’s hopes of winning a seat in Seanad Éireann now rest on the Taoiseach’s picks after he was eliminated on the sixth count in the Administrative vocational panel.
Bergin, who has been a Laois County Councillor for the Borris-in-Ossory/Mountmellick Municipal District, was an inside Fine Gael candidate but he failed to make an impression in the ultra competitive Administrative panel.
He got just 25 votes (counted as 25,000 in order to avoid fractions due to the small electorate) with the quota set at 143,626.
There was also disappointment for former Portarlington-based Kildare South Independent TD Cathal Berry, who got just 17,000.
While Bergin and Berry have reached the end of the road in their bid to be elected to the Seanad in this particular route, they could still be one of the Taoiseach’s 11 chosen candidates.
The Seanad elections are a particularly complex affair with just 49 of the 60 seats filled by the electorate.
Forty three of those seats are on the vocational panels, for which the electorate is comprised of just sitting TDs and councillors as well as outgoing Senators. The university panels elect six
The remaining 11 are then chosen by the Taoiseach of the day, which in this case is Micheal Martin.
It is likely that those 11 have been carved up between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as part of the Government formation deal with the Independent grouping also possibly in the mix.
The Taoiseach can also choose to pick someone from a community group that are generally poorly represented in Leinster House. In 2020, Eileen Flynn was selected by the Taoiseach and in doing so became the first Traveller to serve in the Oireachtas.
She got 115,000 votes on this panel on this occasion just behind long-term Kerry-based Senator Mark Daly from Kerry, who topped the poll, as well as new Sinn Féin candidate Nicole Ryan from Cork.
Indeed it was arguably the strongest vocational panel of the five in the Seanad with 17 candidates for just seven seats.
Six of the candidates were outgoing Senators while Labour, with Darragh Moriarty, and Sinn Féin with Nicole Ryan were seeking to hold the seats previously held by Rebecca Moynihan and the disgraced Niall O Donnghaile respectively.
Fianna Fáil’s Diarmuid Wilson, from Cavan, and Fiona O’Loughlin, from Kildare, were also elected in 2020 and are on firmly on course to retain their seats.
Fine Gael duo Martin Conway (Clare) and Garret Ahearn (Tipperary) were outgoing Senators also and though seventh and eighth after the first count, are favoured to overtake the Labour candidate given the number of Fine Gael candidates in the race and the transfers that come into play.
In that context, Conor Bergin’s elimination isn’t overly surprising though no doubt he’d have preferred to have polled stronger.
His withdrawal from the Fine Gael selection convention in Laois ahead of the General Election allowed Willie Aird to be chosen unopposed and it was felt at the time that a Seanad seat was in the offing on the back of that decision.
It now remains to be seen whether he is in Fine Gael’s plans as they’ll have a maximum of five seats to play with.
In 2020, Fine Gael had four nominations (as did Fianna Fáil, while there were two Greens and one Independent).
On that occasion, Fine Gael’s four picks were Emer Currie, Aisling Dolan, Regina Doherty and Mary Seery-Kearney, three of whom had been unsuccessful in the Seanad election itself.
