Businessman Gareth Sheridan is to target support from Carlow and Offaly county councils as he seeks to secure a place on the ballot paper in next month’s presidential election.
Mr Sheridan (36) secured the backing of a second local authority on Tuesday when Tipperary County Council voted to support his candidacy, after Kerry councillors endorsed him earlier this week.
Tipperary council voted 20-19 in favour of holding a run-off vote between Mr Sheridan and Cork City councillor Kieran McCarthy, which the businessman won by 17 votes to three, with 16 abstentions.
Fine Gael councillor Mary Hanna Hourigan was among those to vote in favour of a run-off, and then for Mr Sheridan, despite an instruction from Fine Gael headquarters to block candidates seeking to enter the race, which former cabinet minister Heather Humphreys will contest for the party.
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Mr Sheridan’s spokesman indicated that he believes he can secure the support of a proposer and seconder in both Carlow, which will vote on Friday, and Offaly, where the vote will take place on Monday.
If both councils agree to hold votes, and if Mr Sheridan can be proposed and seconded before winning an overall vote, he will be on the presidential ballot paper with the required support of four local authorities.
Speaking after the vote, Ms Hourigan said councillors have seen their power whittled down by central government and indicated she felt it was important to exercise an independent choice in the presidential contest.
She said she would be supporting Ms Humphreys in October, but added: “I don’t think Simon Harris or [Fine Gael general secretary] John Carroll has the authority to tell me what to do or how to vote.”
As an elected councillor, she said, “I should be able to vote freely and do what I feel is the right thing to do,” adding that she was impressed by Mr Sheridan and that it was important to encourage more people to enter politics.
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Councils in Wicklow and Galway also met on Tuesday but elected not to endorse any candidate. Mr Sheridan later told RTÉ Radio that a lot of councillors have “an appetite to abstain” from voting in order to “let the process play out”.
Mr Sheridan’s team are understood to have identified councils where there are significant numbers of independents and where the local authority has a track record of endorsing a candidate when deciding which ones to target.
A spokesman for Mr Sheridan said he and his campaign team had been working “non-stop, weeks in advance, and today multiple times” to secure the Tipperary backing, and had been speaking to local authority members around the country for months.
He said: “Initially nobody thought we could get two; we believe we have a pathway to get two more.”
Speaking at the National Ploughing Championships in Co Offaly, Tánaiste Simon Harris criticised Sinn Féin’s late announcement of its presidential strategy, due to be revealed on Saturday. He said it had been “carefully curated and media managed” and would be released “just in time for the Sunday papers”.
