and no prospect of a candidate. Something drastic had to be done about this. I recruited David Leach to co-ordinate the campaign and Mags Murphy, who had worked in local radio, and had a good knowledge of the Party and local media, to trawl the country, especially the northern half, head hunting possible candidates. She, together with regional organisers George Cummins in Munster and Brian McDowell in Leinster, came up with several new faces for the Party to consider.
We had just one Member in the European Parliament: Proinsias de Rossa in Dublin. I persuaded Proinsias to stand one last time and he reluctantly agreed. The previous summer I had consulted the members of the parliamentary party in the Munster constituency. None of the TDs wished to stand for Europe, so the choice came down to the senators.
Senator Alan Kelly appeared to me to be the best prospect. He was from Tipperary and looked like he would be the only candidate from that county. He also possessed a great campaigning energy. Even if he didn’t win, a run in the European elections would at least assist him in the general election. I floated the idea to him in a conversation in my office in Leinster House. He, shortly after, arranged a breakfast meeting in the Westbury Hotel between himself, his brother Declan who flew in that morning from New York, Mark Garrett and I. We talked through the pros and cons of his candidacy, and he eventually agreed to run, provided we held the selection convention before the summer break, which would give him most of the year to campaign. I agreed and the convention was arranged for Saturday 25 July in the Silver Springs Hotel, Cork.
Then, unexpectedly, another candidate stepped forward. Arthur Spring, a young businessman in Tralee and nephew of Dick, had been expected to stand in the local elections for Tralee Town Council and Kerry County Council but now announced that he wished to stand for Europe. Within the Party I was put under considerable pressure to drop Kelly in favour of Spring. The argument was that the Spring name would harvest more votes than an unknown Senator from Tipperary, whose name had never appeared on a ballot before. I was repeatedly pressed to postpone the convention until the autumn. I refused. I thought a selection contest would be a good start to the campaign. It was intensely fought. At one point I felt it was getting a bit too rough and I asked the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, Jack Wall, to travel to Newcastle West to meet both men and to cool things down a bit. Jack reported back that I should stop worrying; the future of the Party was secure with such fine young candidates available, and to let them at it.
Saturday 25 July was sunny and warm in Cork, as the buses from Tralee, Killarney, Nenagh, and Thurles pulled up in front of the Silver Springs Hotel. I had travelled there earlier to meet privately with Arthur and Alan and seek agreement on what each would say after the convention so that Party unity in Munster would be assured. As Jack Wall had indicated, there was no cause for worry: the two had already met that morning and worked out everything themselves.
Kelly won the nomination, and ran one of the most thorough and energetic campaigns I have ever seen. It included a rap song and endorsements from many well-known figures, such as rugby legend Peter Clohessy.
I had great difficulty finding a European candidate for the Leinster constituency. None of the parliamentary party would stand. I pressed Willie Penrose, Dominic Hannigan, and Liz McManus in particular, but they would not agree. I also spoke, unsuccessfully, to a number of suitable high-profile figures. I was getting desperate when out of the blue I was approached at a business dinner in Dublin by somebody whom I had known since my student days. He wondered if I had considered running two candidates in Dublin, and mentioned that Nessa Childers, daughter of the late President Erskine Childers, and at the time a Green Party councillor, might be interested. I had already agreed a one-candidate strategy with Proinsias de Rossa and I was not going to go back on that. I wondered, though, if Nessa might fit the bill for Leinster.
The Childers family was from Wicklow. Nessa’s grandfather, Erskine Childers, whose yacht The Asgard had smuggled guns into Howth harbour in 1914, had later been arrested in Wicklow during the Civil War and was held in Wicklow Gaol before his execution in 1922. Nessa had been a member of the Labour Party up to 2004, when she had sought a nomination for the local elections in the Clonskeagh Local Electoral Area where she then lived. She was unexpectedly defeated for the nomination at the selection convention, and she took it badly. I was the Party’s National Director of Elections at the time and I offered to have her added as a candidate in some other electoral area, but she declined and left the Party to stand successfully as a Green Party candidate in Blackrock. She was still a Green Party councillor when, as arranged, she called to my home in Shankill to discuss the possibility of standing as a Labour candidate for Europe in the Leinster constituency. She agreed to stand and we discussed the choreography for her to leave the Green Party and announce her candidacy. I advised her to avoid bitterness in her resignation from the Greens.
Liz McManus undertook to manage Nessa’s campaign, which was often rocky. Nessa had difficulties during some local radio debates. I recall offering words of encouragement to her during canvasses in Kilkenny and in Kells. Fine Gael’s Avril Doyle tore into her, an approach which, in the end, backfired to Nessa’s benefit. A colour piece by Lise Hand in the Irish Independent gave a flavour of the campaign:
... while Nessa is obviously sincere, it’s hard to get to grips with which issues she really feels passionately about. Ask her what her Big Issue is, and she simply sticks to the party line. ‘The’ answer that all the Labour Party candidates will give is jobs, and going out to Europe and representing people with integrity and competence’.
In Hennessey’s sports shop, Eamon and Nessa pose for photographs brandishing a pair of hurleys. Eamon gently pokes the candidate in the side with the stick. ‘A’ dig in the ribs –– this is how to do it, Avril, sorry, Nessa,’ he grins.
Outside of Galway City and Sligo, Labour had only a patchy organisation in Connaught/Ulster or the Ireland North-West constituency. There was no obvious candidate, and those who had stood in the previous two European elections had fared badly.
Former Labour Senator Kathleen O’Meara mentioned Susan O’Keeffe to me. Susan was the Grenada TV journalist who, in 1991, had made a documentary about the Irish beef industry which led to the establishment of the Beef Tribunal. Susan herself was the only one to be subsequently brought to court in connection with the broadcast. She was still working as a journalist and living in Sligo. She is a woman of great personal courage, and displayed it once again in standing for Labour in the North-West constituency, in effect risking her professional career.
She was a determined candidate, and raised many issues including the inadequacy of cancer services in the North-West. She debated effectively in the media with Declan Ganley, who, despite his high profile in European referenda, ran unsuccessfully as a Libertas candidate. Though she didn’t get elected, Susan polled a very respectable 28,708 votes, which set her up as a possible Dáil candidate for the future. Happily, Ganley called a recount and while it didn’t help him, an extra 2,000 votes were found for O’Keeffe. This brought her over the threshold for a State refund of election expenses. Ganley’s recount ended up benefitting the Labour Party by €38,000.
Proinsias de Rossa was comfortably elected in Dublin, as was Nessa Childers in Leinster. Alan Kelly’s result was a closer call, the count going to the very end before he became the third Labour MEP elected. I travelled to Cork to celebrate Labour’s best European Election since 1979, and indeed Labour’s best ever local elections. We won 132 city and county council seats, resulting in the highest numbers of Labour councillors since the foundation of the State.
I was the toast of the Party of European Socialists leaders’ meeting the following week in Brussels. Overall, it had not been a particularly good election for Europe’s social democratic parties, and in the post-election analysis, the party leaders felt that in the election the PES should have put forward a name for President of the European Commission. José Manuel Barroso was about to be re-appointed by default. The idea was born, that in future EU Parliament elections, the European parties should nominate candidates for the office of Commission President.
Europe continued to dominate the Irish political agenda through the summer and early autumn. The Government had negotiated some important changes to the original Lisbon Treaty to address the principal concerns of Irish voters in the referendum the previous summer. Each country would have