In about 10 per cent of cases someone else will replace the person you voted for
YOU MAY be feeling pleased with yourself this morning if you voted in yesterday’s local or European elections. You had dozens of candidates competing for your attention but you weighed up the options, chose a candidate or series of candidates and, in order of preference, expressed your view as to whom you wish to serve as your local councillor or MEP for the next five years. It may surprise you then to know that in about 10 per cent of cases at some stage someone else will replace the person for whom you voted, without further reference to you.
There is a strong likelihood that at least one of the 12 Irish MEPs will not serve their full term. There is always the actuarial possibility that one or more vacancies could be caused by the death of a sitting member but vacancies are far more likely to arise because one or more of those whom you elected to the European Parliament decides to abandon that post and stand instead for Dáil Éireann at the next general election.
Casual vacancies in the European Parliament are filled from a list of substitutes lodged by the candidates themselves or their party at the time of nomination. The replacement list of the political parties may contain up to four names more than the number of candidates the party is running. The replacement list of a non-party candidate may contain up to three names. Fianna Fáil always puts the running mate as the first replacement on each candidate’s sub list; Fine Gael does likewise where it runs more than one candidate. After that the list is selected by internal party convention or interview process.
If a vacancy emerges the subs are asked in order of their place on the list, if they wish to go to the European Parliament and if they do, they are legally entitled to the spot.
Even though there is a real prospect that at least one of these substitutes will be an MEP within the next five years this list of replacement candidates does not appear on the ballot paper and indeed the line-up of substitutes has received very little attention during the campaign.
If you took a careful look around your polling station yesterday you would have found their names on a couple of official notices posted on the walls but you would have had to look hard. The political musical chairs occasioned by this substitute process and the moves between national and European politics can border on the absurd. In 1994 Pat “the Cope” Gallagher, then a TD for Donegal South West, ran and won a seat in the European elections. In 1997 he opted to concentrate solely on the European Parliament and gave up his Dáil seat. However, in 2002 he decided to give up the European Parliament seat and return to Dáil Éireann. He was succeeded in Strasbourg by one of his substitutes Seán Ó Neachtain, a little-known Connemara councillor.
Unlike most replacement MEPs, Ó Neachtain held the Strasbourg seat in his own right in the 2004 European elections. A few weeks ago Ó Neachtain announced his retirement and now looks set to be succeeded in the European parliament by his predecessor, Pat “the Cope” Gallagher. Much attention this week has focused on the intense struggle for the last seat in Dublin between Fianna Fáil’s Eoin Ryan, Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald and the Socialist Joe Higgins. The latter two, however, have indicated that they will still contest the next Dáil election meaning that if you voted for McDonald or Higgins and either is elected, the ultimate beneficiaries of your vote could be Clare Daly, a socialist councillor in Fingal who is Higgins’s nominated replacement or Eoin Ó Broin, a Sinn Féin Dáil candidate in Dún Laoghaire who has spent most of his life as a party official and is now McDonald’s substitute.
If you live in Ireland East, you may have considered both Fine Gael candidates and opted for Mairead McGuinness over John Paul Phelan as the person you wanted to do the job in Strasbourg. However, while polls suggest that Phelan won’t win his own seat, there is a real prospect that he will end up sitting in McGuinness’s seat since she is likely to contest the next Dáil elections.
For Labour in Dublin the first substitute on Proinsias De Rossa’s list is the outgoing Dublin north inner city councillor Emer Costello who, as it happens, is married to the party’s Dublin Central TD Joe Costello.
The internal process by which Labour selects substitutes is not clear but this may have been a trade-off for the Costello organisation’s support for Ivana Bacik’s candidacy in the Dublin Central byelection.
The process by which Libertas selected and ordered its substitutes is an even greater mystery, but curiously the first and second substitutes for the party’s Ireland East candidate, Raymond O’Malley, are a Pauline O’Malley and an Edward O’Malley.
Even in the local elections you cannot be sure of what or whom you voted for. More than 60 of the 883 city and county councillors elected in 2004 resigned their seats.
These vacancies are filled by co-option by the remaining members of the council but by convention councils almost always co-opt a nominee of the departed’s party or organisation.
About half of those who stepped down from councils did so following election to Dáil Éireann in 2007 but the other half just decided to give up local government.
In a couple of instances in Dublin the same council seat was passed between several people since the 2004 local elections.
The identities of the councillors and MEPs who have been chosen by voters will be unveiled over the weekend. The substitute process means, however, that the ultimate occupants of many of the seats will be determined by fate and party apparatchiks.