Updated 23:45
WE HAVE ONE more sleep before we find out who will be the last elected MEP.
It’s between Fianna Fáil’s Pat the Cope Gallagher and Independent Marian Harkin in the Midlands North West constituency.
Harkin leads by 275 votes.
The returning officer announced tonight “I have decided to commence a full recheck starting at 10am tomorrow morning”.
The margin is less than 0.05 per cent of the total poll.
Both candidates are sitting MEPs.
Sinn Féin’s Matt Carthy was elected to the European Parliament earlier tonight.
Carthy had come in second on first preferences, but had failed to attract the requisite transfers until tonight.
Earlier today, Fine Gael MEP Mairead McGuinness has been re-elected to the European Parliament after picking up a huge number of transfers from her eliminated party colleague Jim Higgins on the fifth count in Midlands North West.
In Ireland South, Fine Gael pair Deirdre Clune and Sean Kelly have been elected to the European Parliament.
They join Fianna Fáil’s Brian Crowley and Sinn Féin’s Liadh Ní Riada.
It’s over 24 hours since Crowley, a perennial poll topper in the region, was elected, with a massive surplus of almost 50,000 and now the count is finally over.
Outgoing MEP Prendergast, whose pre-election decision to call for Eamon Gilmore to step down caused major embarrassment within the party leadership, has been Tweeting her thanks this afternoon…
The ballots have been cleared away at Dublin’s RDS since yesterday.
Nessa Childers and Brian Hayes (FG) will be joining SF’s Lynn Boylan in Europe after a ‘ballot check’ requested by fourth-placed Eamon Ryan, the Green Party leader, uncovered only “incredibly minor discrepancies”.
- additional reporting from Hugh O’Connell and Paul Hosford
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