Election 2024: Louisburgh seeks to regain its councillor
The beautiful Old Head beach near Louisburgh.
One of the great anomalies of the last local elections in Mayo was the failure of Louisburgh to return a councillor.
The seaside town had two live contenders – Fine Gael’s Austin Francis O’Malley and Fianna Fáil’s Chris Maxwell – and they claimed a quota between them, yet somehow Louisburgh ended up with no councillor when the final votes were counted. The vagaries of the proportional representation system had a lot to do with it but the failure to keep the votes in the local area was also crucial.
For decades, Louisburgh was the bailiwick of the legendary Fianna Fáil senator and TD, Martin J O’Toole, who served on Mayo Co Council for an incredible 44 years, from 1955 to 1999. When he retired, he was replaced by his protégé Peter Sweeney who held the seat for Fianna Fáil until 2004 when he was narrowly defeated by Fine Gael’s Austin Francis O’Malley.
Austin Francis maintained Louisburgh’s proud record of continuous representation in the council chamber for another 10 years before he was surprisingly defeated in the local elections of 2014. Many expected that he might regain his seat five years later but it was Chris Maxwell who polled more strongly, taking 899 first preferences to O’Malley’s 830.
When O’Malley was eliminated in the fourth count it was widely expected that Maxwell would get the lion’s share of the 888 votes that were up for grabs. Instead, the Fianna Fáil man only received 352 transfers – not a bad transfer rate but about 100 short of where he needed to be. In the end, he lost out to John O’Malley by 68 votes, so if Austin Francis’ transfers had even broken 50-50, Louisburgh would have regained its councillor.
This time around Chris Maxwell is running for Independent Ireland, the party of Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice, and he will be hoping to consolidate the Louisburgh vote and turn the tables on John O’Malley. The Louisburgh boxes will be very closely watched on Saturday, not just by Maxwell and the Green Party’s Peter Nolan (who is also based in the town), but by all of the candidates. A big vote for Maxwell will spell trouble for one of the four outgoing councillors.
