‘For a paper to be valid it must have recorded on it a first preference’

How a Kerry candidate rewrote the Irish electoral rulebook

'Wednesday, 10 February 2016: Ireland was deep in the midst of a general election campaign. The country’s lampposts were strewn with election posters, the party leaders’ debates were in full swing and door-to-door canvassing was continuing in earnest. Despite expectations that the country would go to the polls in the autumn of 2015, the Fine Gael-Labour government led by Enda Kenny had stumbled on into the new year until Kenny finally dissolved the Dáil on the morning of 3 February. His administration had lasted its full five-year term despite inheriting a bankrupt country and having to implement one austerity budget after another. Fianna Fáil, devastated at the previous election, were plotting a comeback. The long-anticipated campaign was well underway, and the ballots were due be cast on polling day which had been set for 26 February. But two weeks before the voters went to the polls and the shape of the new Dáil was revealed, they were already counting votes in Kerry. The tallymen and tallywomen were busy scrutinising bundles of ballot papers at the John Mitchel’s GAA clubhouse on the outskirts of Tralee. Apart from party apparatchiks from the constituency, the count centre was teeming with barristers and legal eagles from the party’s head offices. The county solicitor was present. So too several county councillors and seasoned election observers and psephologists like Fianna Fáil’s Teddy Healy, Fine Gael’s Frank Quilter and Labour’s Jerry Mason, party loyalists who would ordinarily have been immersed in campaigning for the general election. But it wasn’t general election ballots which were being counted in the spacious sports hall a fortnight ahead of the rest of the country. Instead those gathered were re-examining several thousand ballot papers which had been cast almost two years before and which had been the subject of a ground-breaking and protracted legal battle which went all the way to the highest court in the land, blowing a gaping hole in the way in which votes had been counted in Ireland for decades, resulting in the rewriting of the Irish electoral rulebook and changing the way elections are run in Ireland forever.'

(Extract from 'A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium' by Owen O'Shea and Gordon Revington. Launching from Merrion Press on 18th October 2018. Pre-order your copy now on: https://irishacademicpress.ie/product/a-century-of-politics-in-the-kingdom-a-county-kerry-compendium/)