Fahy native elected to Meath County Council

Fahy native elected to Meath County Council


Anton McNulty

One of the success stories of the recent local elections was in Meath where Sinn Féin won eight council seats including one for Fahy native Michael Gallagher.
Cllr Gallagher was elected in the seven-seater Kells Municipal Area where he polled 1,599 first preference votes. Based in the village of Drumconrath in north Co Meath, Cllr Gallgher was one of two Sinn Féin candidates elected in the Kells area with running mate Johnny Quirke.
Having had only one county councillor on the Council following the 2009 election, all eight of the Sinn Féin candidates who ran in the election were elected. The result was all the sweeter for Michael who lost his seat in the last election by just 30 votes.
“It was great to get elected again and for two of us to be elected in the one constituency was brilliant. We went from no councillors to two and in the council as a whole we went from one to eight which was a great achievement. There was a feeling the weeks before the election that there was a big swing towards us [Sinn Féin] and we feel we could have had more candidates elected if we ran them” he told The Mayo News.
Michael and his family moved to Drumconrath in 1969 when he was 12 years old as part of the land commission allocation of farmland in Meath to families from the west of Ireland. He said he still has a number of cousins living in west Mayo and still pays big interest to politics in Mayo. He travelled to Castlebar for the European election count which say Sinn Féin candidate Matt Carthy elected to the European Parliament.