‘Why are all the people talking about Dick Spring, Mommy?’

'Why are all the people talking about Dick Spring, Mommy?’ a youngster asked her mother as they enjoyed lunch at a busy restaurant in the centre of Tralee. The chatter all around was dominated by politics. It was Wednesday, 18 February 1987 and a short distance away at the CYMS Hall at the end of Denny Street, the votes cast by the electors of Kerry North at the general election the previous day were being counted. ‘Because they are worried he might lose his job,’ the mother replied. ‘But,’ said the child, ‘can’t he get the dole, like Martin?’

How prophetic it was that just four days before the 1987 general election, The Kerryman lead headline read ‘Spring sounds the alarm.’ The report explained that Dick Spring, the Tánaiste, leader of the Labour Party, and TD for Kerry North was alleging there was a sophisticated campaign to undermine his position and cost him the Dáil seat he had held since 1981 – and which his father, Dan, had held without a break since 1943. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were conspiring to split his vote, Spring told a press conference. Just weeks before, Spring had walked out of the coalition government which Labour had put together with Fine Gael under Garrett FitzGerald at the beginning of 1983. The coalition had struggled to balance the books in the midst of an economic recession and a dispute over health service cuts. Labour was in the doldrums and had been at five percent in one pre-election opinion poll. But despite the unpopularity of the government and the prevailing economic crisis, The Kerryman noted that anything less than Spring heading the poll in Kerry North would be ‘a sharp rebuke to the Kerryman who has had such a high profile in Irish politics in the past five years.’

                                                                         

A week later, when the ballot boxes were opened, Spring’s worst fears were almost realised. Like many candidates when the boxes are emptied, he didn’t go to the count first thing and instead waited at home for news from the tallymen. But when nobody had contacted him by 11am his suspicions grew. When his brother, Arthur, turned up, with ‘his chin down around his knees,’ on the doorstep at noon, he knew there was a problem – a quick calculation and Spring was convinced he would lost out by about twenty-five votes. Spring’s first preference return was down ten percent on the November 1982 poll and had collapsed by almost 3,000 votes to 6,739. In a spectacular performance, Fine Gael senator and former Kerry senior football captain, Jimmy Deenihan, had polled over 10,000 votes to surge to the head of the poll, ahead of Fianna Fáil’s Denis Foley on 7,611 and Fianna Fáil’s Tom McEllistrim on 6,161.

With Deenihan elected comfortably on the first count and Denis Foley taking the second seat thanks in part to a healthy transfer from the third Fianna Fáil man in the field, Dan Kiely, the Labour leader and Tom McEllistrim were left to the slog out for the last seat. At the end of the sixth and final count just after 10pm, McEllistrim was just five votes behind Spring and returning officer, Louise McDonagh declared that Deenihan, Foley and Spring had been elected. McDonagh later described what followed as ‘one of the most traumatic nights of my life.’ Tom McEllistrim, a former junior minister whose family had been represented in the Dáil since 1923, demanded a recount immediately and so began one of the most gripping electoral battles in the history of Irish politics.

In the only known case of the popular and well-known Ideal Homes Exhibition interfering with the timing of the counting of votes in an Irish general election, count staff were forced to commence the recount immediately rather than adjourn until the following day as the count centre was needed to host the interior decorating roadshow. McDonagh, whose father, Louis, from Listowel had been a county councillor for many years, had little choice but to proceed and the scrutiny of the ballots began all over again, not least because finding another secure location where the ballots boxes could be held overnight would have been difficult, as she later recalled:

With hindsight and the experience I now have, I would have postponed the recount until the next day. I would never again start a recount at twelve o’clock at night … (but) I would have had to remove everything to a different counting centre … I had the late Donie Browne (former state solicitor for Kerry) with me as my legal adviser … he was brilliant and knew proportional representation better than anybody I had ever known.

The Kerryman captured something of the drama as well as the fatigue as the clock ticked on into the wee hours and total of 34,000 papers were rechecked and scrutinised:

‘In the hall, or the streets and in the pubs, people referred to friends, brothers, mothers and sisters who could have “swung it” had they voted. Everyone seemed to know someone who was going to vote to Mac or Spring but didn’t. By midnight it became clear that the recount would go on until about 3.00am and each passing minute after that they seemed to draw more people to their beds … As the clock struck one a hard core of around 250 dedicated followers remained – determined to stick it out till the sweet or bitter end.'

To read the full story, see 'A Century of Politics in the Kingdom - A County Kerry Compendium' by Owen O'Shea and Gordon Revington' available from Merrion Press on A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium | Irish Academic Press

 

Paddy Cahill, revolutionary, newspaper editor and Kerry TD from 1921 to 1927

 

Patrick J (Paddy) Cahill from Tralee was a born at Caherina, Tralee in 1883. He attended Tralee CBS and was a contemporary of Éamon de Valera as a student at Blackrock College. Cahill won an All-Ireland senior football medal with Kerry in 1904 (the final was played in 1906) alongside Austin Stack and played with Kerry for several years. He worked at John Donovan & Sons in the Square, Tralee. Cahill joined and rose through the ranks of the Irish Volunteers and was involved in plans to land arms at Fenit for the Easter Rising. He took over the leadership of the Kerry Volunteers when Austin Stack was arrested but he was almost immediately interned himself at Richmond, then Wakefield and Frongoch until the general release of December 1916.

 

Cahill left his employers in protest because it was supplying to British troops in World War I. He participated in the Lispole Ambush and other engagements during the War of Independence. He was controversially removed as head of the Kerry No. 1 Brigade in 1921 but many of his men remained loyal to him.

The cinema he ran at County Hall on Staughton’s Row in Tralee with others was burned down by the Black and Tans in November 1920. He was elected to the second and third Dáils as a Sinn Féin TD for the then constituency of Kerry-Limerick West and was on the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. He sat in the fourth Dáil as a Republican deputy for the seven-seat Kerry constituency. During the Civil War, Cahill was imprisoned and again went on hunger strike, becoming seriously ill at one stage. He was released at Christmas in 1923. 

Cahill turned to journalism and went on to found The Kerry Champion newspaper with Thomas Lynch from Armagh, who would later serve as a chairman of Tralee Urban District Council. 

The newspaper was published between 1928 and 1958 and Cahill was editor and managing director for many years. A lifelong public advocate of abstinence from alcohol, he died on 12 November 1946. Cahill’s Park in Tralee is named after him.

The Fine Gael candidate deselected for being "so unpopular" - the dramatic Kerry South by-election of 10 November 1944

The first ever by-election held in Kerry was brought about by a judicial vacancy. Fionán Lynch, a former senior government minister and a prominent member of Cumann na nGaedheal (and later Fine Gael) was one of the three TDs elected for Kerry South at the general election of 1944. Lynch, of Kilmakerin, Waterville – who had been Minister for Education in the provisional government of 1922 and later served in cabinet under WT Cosgrave – had been in the Dáil since its establishment; he had represented Kerry and Kerry South since 1919 without a break. The snap general election of 1944 had been called by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera just a year after the previous one which had seen Fianna Fáil retain power and secure an overall majority with over 48% of the vote. At the poll held on 30 May 1944, Lynch, who was also a high-profile barrister, was again returned for Kerry South alongside Fred Crowley and John B Healy of Fianna Fáil.

Just a few months later however, in October 1944, a vacancy arose in the Circuit Court on the Sligo and Donegal circuit. The Fianna Fáil government looked to the opposition benches in the Dáil to fill the judicial slot and Lynch was appointed to the bench. Notwithstanding their political differences, the Fianna Fáil leader, Éamon de Valera held Lynch of the opposing Fine Gael party in high regard – they had been comrades during the Easter Rising in 1916 and remained friends. Lynch, who had been in relatively poor health since the late 1930s – he had been unable to campaign actively during the 1938 general election and had stood down as Leas Ceann Comhairle after just year in the role, in 1939, due to poor health – accepted the appointment. He was to remain a judge until 1959.

Fionán Lynch TD

A by-election to replace Fionán Lynch in Kerry South was set for 10 November 1944 and it immediately presented Fine Gael with a serious headache. The party was in poor shape in Kerry generally in the 1940s – Lynch was the only Fine Gael TD in the entire county at the time. Fine Gael and its predecessor Cumann na nGaedheal had never elected a TD other than Lynch in Kerry South. The party hadn’t formally contested county council elections in Kerry in either the 1930s or most of 1940s and it wasn’t until 1948 they put forward local authority candidates on the official party ticket. The party was thus denied the valuable foundations that council seats provide for Dáil candidates. Lynch’s departure to the judiciary, therefore, created a huge void for his party.

The weakness of the party organisation in Kerry South was reflected in the shambles that was their candidate selection. A convention held on 22 October and presided over by party leader, Richard Mulcahy, chose Donal F Collins from Killarney to be their standard bearer. Collins, former a member of Killarney Urban District Council – as his father, Con, had been – was an auctioneer based on High Street. Just days into the campaign however, Collins was unceremoniously deselected as the candidate by the Fine Gael national executive and replaced with 28-year-old farmer and general merchant, Eoin O’Connell from Cahersiveen whom Collins had defeated by just one vote at the convention.

In a dramatic letter published on the front page of the Kerry Champion, Collins described how just a day after the convention four or five delegates who were at the convention told headquarters that he, Collins, was ‘the wrong man.’[i] The Fine Gael general secretary, Liam Burke arrived in Killarney the following day and met party members and later told Collins he had made enquiries and had deduced that the candidate was ‘so unpopular’ that he would have to stand aside and allow O’Connell to contest the by-election. Collins was further warned that it would ‘detrimental to my business if I did not stand behind the chosen candidate.’  Collins’ signed off his letter with a stinging rebuke of the party leadership:

I would like in view of all facts if [Fine Gael leader] Mr Mulcahy and the Fine Gael Organisation would put their “cards” on the table and state publicly from what source my general unpopularity arose in two or three days or better still to state publicly the true reason for overthrowing the decision of the Convention. Why was my unpopularity not discussed at the Convention? That was the place to do so prior to having my name published as a candidate. Apparently these people have not the courage of their convictions. As my livelihood covers all Kerry it would only be fair and just if Mr Mulcahy came out publicly with anything he has to say against me. Perhaps not so much Mr Mulcahy as his influential friends in Killarney. If this is Mr Mulcahy’s “Democracy” I wonder what Dictatorship is?[ii]

Kerry Champion, 4 November 1944

Meanwhile, a Glenflesk native and national school teacher, Donal ‘Danny Jim’ O’Donoghue, was nominated by Fianna Fáil to contest the by-election. During the War of Independence, O’Donoghue had been Commandant of the 2^nd Battalion of the 1^st Brigade of the IRA. He taught for many years in Cork before becoming principal of Barraduff national school in east Kerry in 1933. The only other nominee for the by-election was Senator Edmund Horan. A native of Firies, Horan had contested the 1943 and 1944 elections in Kerry South on behalf of the farmers’ party, Clann na Talmhan. He won a seat on the Agricultural Panel in the Seanad following the 1944 election. In 1942, ten farmers’ candidates had won seats on Kerry County Council and Horan was drawing on a strong electoral base. He told voters that the government of the day ‘was unable to undo in twenty years what Cromwell did in a month, that was, to restore the land to the people to whom the land belonged.’[iii]

Donal O'Donoghue TD

Though Fianna Fáil might have been somewhat better organised than their opponents on the ground, organising resources and money – at the height of the Second World War – presented its own challenge. John B Healy TD was forced to write to Fianna Fáil headquarters saying ‘I find it impossible to get petrol here. I would be obliged if you could get some extra allowance for me.’ The response from party general secretary, Seamus Davin, was that petrol coupons – which were rationed during the war – could only be had from the director of elections, Senator Fred Hawkins, who was based in the party office in Killarney.[iv] After the by-election, the secretary of the Comhairle Dáil Cheantair, Richard Godsil from Rathmore, said the party locally had been left with a debt of £50 and he sought the support of head office in dealing with creditors who were itemised by category such as transport: ‘M. O’Neill, Killorglin, 4 Traps P.D. £4.’[v] The party however mobilised senior figures to address the all-essential after-Mass meetings with the party’s archives holding a list of where ministers would be dispatched, including, for example, ‘Frank Aiken – Killorglin after last Mass.’[vi]

The result– after what The Kerryman called a ‘very clean and strenuous campaign’[vii] – was a comfortable win for Fianna Fáil and Donal O’Donoghue. He polled close to half the entire vote and picked up 10,986 first preferences ahead of Horan on 6,795 and O’Connell on 4,822. The result created an extraordinary and unprecedented situation in Kerry South – if not in all of Ireland – in which Fianna Fáil were in possession of all three seats in the constituency through O’Donoghue, Fred Crowley and JB Healy.[viii] It was a historic and unique feat which the party would never repeat.

Copyright: An extract from 'A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium' by Owen O'Shea and Gordon Revington, Merrion Press, 2018, available at:

https://irishacademicpress.ie/product/a-century-of-politics-in-the-kingdom-a-county-kerry-compendium/

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[i] Kerry Champion, 4 November 1944 

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Correspondence between JB Healy TD and Fianna Fáil Head Office, 27 October 1944, Fianna Fáil Constituency Files, IE UDDA P176 UCD Archives.

[v] Letter from Richard Godsil to Fianna Fáil Head Office, 16 July 1945, Fianna Fáil Constituency Files, IE UDDA P176 UCD Archives, Dublin.

[vi] List of ministers assigned to church gate collections, Fianna Fáil Constituency Files, IE UDDA P176 UCD Archives, Dublin.

[vii] The Kerryman, 11 November 1944

[viii] The authors have not found an equivalent situation during their research.