Mayo backs Higgins but Casey a comfortable second

ON HOME GROUND Sabina Coyne Higgins, a native of Ballindine, pictured on the Presidential campaign trail for her husband Michael D Higgins, receiving a warm welcome from Pat Coyne with Olivia, Noel and Adam Sheridan, in Ballindine recently. President Higgins was comfortably re-elected at the weekend. Pic: Trish Forde

Edwin McGreal

Like every constituency in the country, Michael D Higgins received the largest share of the Mayo vote in Friday’s Presidential election.
But former RTÉ Dragon, Peter Casey, took almost one in three votes in the county as his vote surged in the final days of the campaign.
Michael D Higgins received close to half of the votes cast in Mayo, with 49.8 percent of the vote. Derry man Peter Casey, whose controversial comments about the Travelling community almost led to him withdrawing, came in second in the Mayo constituency with 31 percent of the vote.
It was a considerable way back to the other four candidates. Senator Joan Freeman the founder of Pieta House came third in Mayo with 6.4 percent. SeΡn Gallagher, who was on the brink of being elected seven years ago, fared nowhere near as well this time around and that was replicated in Mayo where he polled 5.4 percent of the votes.
Sinn Féin in Mayo will be very disappointed with their vote. Their candidate, Liadh Ní Riada, came a lowly fifth with 5.1 percent of the Mayo vote while the third of the former Dragons, Gavin Duffy, brought up the rear with just 2.3 percent.
In Mayo there were a total of 42,027 votes, of which 593 were spoiled including one voter in Ballindine, home of President Higgins’ wife Sabina, who wrote on their ballot the name of US President Donald Trump.
President Higgins received 20,642 first preference votes in Mayo with Peter Casey on 12,850, Joan Freeman on 2,663, SeΡn Gallagher 2,235, Liadh Ní Riada 2,107 and Gavin Duffy 937.
It’s a considerable improvement on President Higgins’ vote from seven years ago where he received what was still an impressive 38.3 percent. SeΡn Gallagher’s fall from favour is reflected in the fact that he received 25.2 percent of the vote in Mayo in 2011, almost five times what he polled this time around.
The Sinn Féin candidate in 2011, the late Martin McGuinness, picked up 11.9 percent of the Mayo vote (more than twice Liadh Ní Riada’s share) with Mayo native Mary Davis (9.4 percent), Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell (9.2 percent), Dana Rosemary Scallon (3.2 percent) and Senator David Norris (2.8 percent) completing the Mayo results seven years ago.
A greater level of engagement with that election is evidenced by the fact that turnout in Mayo in 2011 was 55 percent.
Last Friday’s turnout was just 46 percent for Mayo, still two percent above the national average turnout of 44 percent.
In relation to the referendum to remove the offence of blasphemy from the constitution, Mayo voters came down on the side of removing it but not by a high margin.
A total of 23,305 voters voted in favour with 17,630 against, 57 percent for and 43 percent against. There were over 1,000 spoiled or invalid votes. Nationally the percentage of voters who voted to remove blasphemy from the constitution was 64.85 percent.