COUNTY IS NOT LIKELY TO SEE THE SAME TURNOUT AS IN MAY

While the voter turnout for the last referendum was extremely high, the topic of abortion was an extremely emotive one. In Co Wexford there was a 66.7% electoral turnout for the repeal referendum with a total of 73,220 votes cast. It is unlikely we will see these numbers this time out, although returning officer for County Wexford Marie Garahy, pictured, says that it’s hard to tell.

‘To be perfectly honest, I never really know what will happen in terms of the turnout,’ she said. ‘There does seem to be a bit of interest in it, so it could be around the same, but we just don’t know until the day.’

This count represents somewhat of a change of scenery for the returning officer and staff with Coláiste Bríde in Enniscorthy acting as the count centre due to the una- vailability of St Joseph’s Community Centre in Wexford town. Ms Garahy, however, doesn’t believe that the venue change will pose any problems whatsoever for her, the team of 100 counters and the ancillary staff who’ll be working on the day and despite the count centre being open access, she doesn’t anticipate a big surge of members of the public looking to view democracy in action.

Polling stations around the county will be open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday and the count will get under way at 9 a.m. the following morning in Enniscorthy. While it’s hard to tell how long the process may take, Ms Garahy is of the opinion that they could be in for a late one in the count centre. ‘I think it will be quite late,’ she said. ‘By the time we separate both papers and have a first count. Put it this way, I think it could be four or five o’clock by the time we have all the boxes open. Obviously, if a winner is declared on the first count it will speed things up considerably, but if it goes to a second or third count, it could be late. I think we will have the Presidential results on the Saturday night and then the referendum results probably won’t be until Sunday.’