Timmins seeks to re-enter the Fine Gael party
FORMER West Wicklow TD Billy Timmins has applied to re-enter the Fine Gael parliamentary party.
Four years after he was expelled from the party for refusing to tow the party line on the abortion issue, Mr Timmins is now seeking to once again become a member of the party.
Since his departure, Fine Gael has changed its policy on so-called ‘matters of conscience’ and allows members a free vote and sources say that this may have influenced Mr Timmins’s decision. ‘It is true and I made my application on November 10. This has to be considered by the party and there is a process that has to be followed. I am awaiting the outcome of this,’ he said. Sitting Wicklow Fine Gael TD Andrew Doyle said that he is glad to see that Mr Timmins has applied to re-join the party.
‘I and my family have a long association with FG and with the Timmins family, both with Billy and his late father Godfrey. I was Billy’s Director of Elections in the 1997 and 2002 campaigns, when we successfully retained a FG seat in the con- stituency against a backdrop of the retirement of Godfrey in 1997 and a national swing against the party in 2002. I was then part of the successful ticket that regained a second seat for the party in 2007 (after 25 years) and as part of the team that won an unprecedented three seats for the party in 2011, helping in no small way in catapulting FG into government and to being the largest party in the country. This result was the culmination of many years of rebuilding the party in Wicklow, post the upheavals of the early 1990s, a process that I and many other dedicated, unsung local members worked so hard to achieve.’