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Open Warfare in Limerick Fianna Fail ranks
Read more about: Fianna Fail, Limerick East, Munster
An emergency meeting of Fianna Fail councillors from Limerick County Council has been described as heated following the decision of Councillor Kevin Sheehan to throw his rattler out of his pram and resign from the leadership of the council’s Fianna Fail group in the council.
At the meeting which took place yesterday, there were desparate efforts to get Sheehan to reconsider his desision to resign, which he made after losing his position as council representative on the Shannon Foynes Port Company to his brother-in-Law, Fine Gael’s David Naughton.
If he will begrudge a member of his own family a little extra income, then it looks like us mere constituents are rightly shagged.
Anyway, back to this emergency meting. It looks like Eddie Wade took the opportunity to pick a fight with Noreen Ryan over her absence from the meeting last Thursday where Sheehan was voted out of SFPC.
A source has told the Examiner newspaper that Wade was subsequently “rounded upon” by Ms Ryan who left the emergency meeting before it concluded.
Councillor John Clifford took it upon himself to break up the row between Wade and Ryan according to the paper..
It was allegedly decided at the meeting to ask Councillor Sheehan to reconsider his decision to step down as group leader at the Council.
But the scandal and intrigue within Fianna Fail Limerick continues elsewhere. It is now claimed by Cllr Ryan that a secret meeting was held by fellow Fianna Faillers who passed a motion to ask party headquarters to add a fourth candidate to the election ticket in Limerick East.
She has also claimed that she was not invited to this meeting, and has called upon the party executive to investigate this meeting.
From Noreen Ryan’s statement:
The fact that some members of Fianna Fail would call this meeting and not inform all the County Councillors indicates that a campaign of dirty tricks is going on against me.
Even more alarming is the fact that a letter purporting to come from a meeting of Fianna Fail councillors was sent to party HQ requesting the addition of a fourth person to the election team.
This was done without all the Fianna Fail councillors being informed – a number of Councillors received no notice of this meeting and no agenda was circulated.
This type of underhand activity has no place in Fianna Fail today and I am disappointed that such an incident happened and that such a letter was written behind my back.
So, who could this unnamed fourth election hopeful be? Could Eddie Wade have come to the realisation that he hasn’t enough friends to secure 30 signatures to run as an independent, chosing to use all this bru-ha-ha to secure a place on the election ticket? Or could Kevin Sheehan be out to teach a certain female Fianna Fail Limerick East Election candidate who shall remain nameless a lesson? Whoever it is, it cannot look good for party colleagues to be seen picking fights and throwing tantrums in the run up to an election.
Good God. They are amatures playing at being important ant the bloody thing has gone to their ego. Someone slap them on the side of the head and tell them to get back to doing the little work we pay them for. None of them NONE of them has the slghtest chance of ever getting elected to the Dail. The ego boost of being third name on a ticket is almost always followed by the confidence destroying experience of being eliminated in the 2nd count. It’s not worth squabbling over.
This is very interesting when you consider what went on in Galway West and the Beverley Flynn situation in Mayo. Even the co-opting of Mary Leahy onto the Galway City Council was contentious. I don’t doubt that there are genuinely good people who are in Fianna Fail out of old family traditions, but the internecine proclivities from the cumann up are really showing what Fianna Fail craves: power. The party dresses it up with election promises but power is the modus operandi. But potentially the most fractious element of the whole party is the arrogance of head office when it comes to the cumanns, which are treated with the same contempt for democracy as the electorate were over the Nice Treaty. Members were shafted by head office in the selection procedure in Galway West. Indeed several councillors were shafted into the process of “selecting” Michael Crowe. I don’t have much sympathy for a membership that can look at the chaos of Iraq and not bite it’s leadership on the ass for turning a blind eye to Shannon. But I do think it’s interesting that teeth are being bared at the sniff of an election.