Frank Feighan spares the blushes of Fine Gael
Despite the many predictions suggesting the party would not retain its seat in this election, Frank Feighan helped defy the odds to battle his way into the fourth seat ahead of outgoing Fianna Fáil deputy Eamon Scanlon. Feighan polled some 900 votes fewer than his rival but he proved to be extremely transfer friendly, and crucially stayed ahead of his running mate Thomas Walsh, to take the fourth seat by a margin of over 1300 votes.
Feighan agreed that he was lucky. “I’m delighted,” Feighan told The Sligo Champion, “transfers all worked my way and I’m glad that I got a seat.”
“It’s a shame that I’m taking it off a very good friend [Eamon Scanlon] of mine, we’ve been friends since 2002, an excellent politician and he represented the constituency with great vigour and through his own personality and its at times like these that you’re sorry to take the seat off Eamon.”
The battling Boyle native, who now lives on the Strandhill Road with his wife, Elaine and two children, said the areas of the constituency that he had previously represented provided the base from which he built an ultimately successful campaign.
“I had been a TD for Roscommon and South Leitrim and north Roscommon and south Leitrim held but I got votes in north Leitrim and all across county Sligo and Donegal and I had a bit of luck as well, the transfers fell my way and I want to pay tribute to Thomas Walsh. We had a very unified campaign and I’m delighted to get over the line. It means so much, we had a great organisation, it was unprecedented that you had Tony McLoughlin, who was a wonderful TD and had done great work stepping down, we had a convention over a year and a half ago and you had two excellent candidates, Sinead Maguire and Gerry Reynolds getting selected and then they stepped down and we found ourselves in a unique situation but the organisation rallied and we have the seat, I’m fortunate that I’m the one that was successful.”
Feighan hopes there will be a stable government, whether that involves his party or not. “It’s been a difficult time. I’ve lost some very, very good colleagues, I’ve lost colleagues I knew in Labour and in Fianna Fáil as well and that is politics, sometimes the tide is with you and sometimes the tide is against you. I’d like to see that whatever happens that we have a stable government for the next five years, I think I’ve played my part in having a stable government since 2011 when there were difficult decisions that I had to make.
“We’ve gone from 15.1pc unemployment. I think the country is in a better place, but I think we need to spread that to areas such as the west and north west. I’ve a young family, a three-year-old daughter and a 3-month-old son I see their future as paramount to me with all the other children and people in the northwest. No matter where they come from, no matter what political persuasion, I intend to fight for all the people of the north west.”