THE WRITING WAS on the wall for Stephen Donnelly during last week’s RTE leaders debate when Micheál Martin declared, somewhat out of the blue, that Donnelly was one of the best ministers of health the country had ever seen.
Alarm bells should have been ringing then.
Airtime during these debates is precious and being namechecked by the party leader is not done by chance.
It was a last minute bid to shore up support for the Wicklow candidate.
This was only reinforced when Martin spent the final day of the election canvassing in Greystones with the health minister.
Donnelly has become one of the biggest casualties in the country’s election after he was eliminated in the early hours of this morning.
Overall, his legacy as health minister is a bit of a mixed bag.
He held the position throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and managed to come out of that somewhat unscathed.
He oversaw the introduction of landmark legislation around mandatory disclosure for patients in the aftermath of the CervicalCheck controversy, he managed to get some wait times down (though many are still too long), he oversaw the new consultant contract roll out and introduced new measures such as free contraception and HRT, free IVF scheme and free medication for women with severe sickness during pregnancy.
But Donnelly has faced lots of questions about serious issues and failings in the health service. These include the €2.2 billion National Children’s Hospital, questions about the recruitment embargo from members of the opposition (that government still deny is a thing), questions about the runaway spending in the health service and the chronic overcrowding in our emergency departments, highlighted by the systemic hospital failures that led to Aoife Johnston’s death.
He has also faced questions over other items that don’t make the headlines that often, such as why the review into Ireland’s cardiac care has not been published despite it being commissioned six years ago.
Health is often described as a poison chalice and a ministry that no politician wants (despite many former health ministers going on to take up party leadership or become Taoiseach).
Former Taoiseach Brian Cowen once famously referred to the Department of Health as ‘Angola’.
But Donnelly losing his seat in Wicklow can’t be blamed solely on the department he ran being full of political landmines.
The vote result in Wicklow comes down to a number of factors.
It’s not just that voters could have been giving Donnelly a kicking over failures in health, though that could form part of it.
It comes down to what a politician needs to remember when they are in high office.
All politics is local, as the saying goes.
The potholes matter, the local sports clubs matter, the traffic in and out of the county matters. Like it or loathe it but parish pump politics are embedded in the Irish political system.
But when Donnelly was in high office, he closed two constituency offices in the county, rarely held clinics with the public and is understood to have neglected the local Fianna Fáil cummann in the area.
His absence on the ground would be openly discussed by those within Fianna Fáil, as well as other local representatives.
This all came to the fore when the tallies were being counted in the Wicklow count centre on Saturday afternoon. Broken down into local areas, the votes gave the clearest indication that Donnelly was not going to get over the line. Why?
They tallies revealed that in his own town of Greystones, somewhere he would be expected to pull in a high enough vote, he got 920 votes compared to Simon Harris’ 6,710.
Donnelly, was never a grassroots Fianna Fáiler, but was parachuted into the party by Martin, who, at the end of the day, decided to take a punt on Donnelly.
Donnelly was first elected in the constituency as an Independent candidate in 2011.
He went on to help co-found the Social Democrats in July 2015 with Roisin Shortall and Catherine Murphy.
His popularity during the 2016 general election campaign surged, and he topped the poll in Wicklow as a member of the Social Democrats, with 14,348 first preference votes, representing a share of 20.9% of the vote.
Soon after the election, he left the party following a number of disagreements with the co-leaders as he wanted the party to enter Government formation talks with Fine Gael.
However, Murphy and Shortall opposed the move.
After sitting as an Independent for a while, he then joined Fianna Fail in early 2017.
This ultimately led to a dent in his votes in the 2020 general election when his share dropped to 7.7%, but he was eventually elected on the 15th count after three days of counting.
On the last day before election day, Fianna Fáil sources said they were optimistic about Donnelly’s chances, stating that he was in a better position than he was three weeks previous.
However, it was acknowledged that Donnelly had been “totally absent” locally for the last five years.
But this alone shows that politicians cannot neglect their local area, as there can always be an election around the corner.
On another note, Donnelly was not served by the fact that the constituency had moved from a five-seater to a four-seater, so someone was always going to lose their seat.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is, you may well try and be the best minister you can be, but if you don’t put in the legwork locally and look after things back home, you run the risk of being handed your notice.
The party also lost another candidate with a ministerial brief, in junior minister for disability Anne Rabbitte, who lost her seat in Galway East in the ninth count, in a constituency which got an extra seat.
Rabbitte entered politics in 2014 when she was elected to Galway County Council.
In 2016, she was elected as a TD and was then appointed to the Fianna Fáil front bench as Spokesperson for Children & Youth Affairs.
In 2019, she unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the European Parliament.
In 2020, Rabbitte was re-elected and appointed Minister of State with Special Responsibility for Disabilities, a position she has held until the dissolution of the Dáil earlier this month.
Albert Dolan, a young gun Fianna Fáil Councillor, who was just 20 when first elected to the Galway council, was successful in taking a seat in this constituency, and is understood to have put Rabbitte’s campaign under fierce pressure.
But aside from that, disabilities became one of the key issues raised on the doorsteps of this election campaign, and perhaps did factor into the loss of the seat here.
The failures families up and down the country are feeling could have played into the fall off in support for Rabbitte, at a time when Fianna Fáil have seen a boost in numbers.
Again, there are many factors why people lose out, but Rabbitte did hold the disability brief, and despite being a formidable politician and someone who always came across as passionate about disabilities and fixing the system, she was often in headlines about how dysfunctional the whole system operates.
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