Sinn Féin last night confirmed that Kildare South TD Patricia Ryan will not be contesting the forthcoming general election.
Ryan decided to resign from Sinn Féin rather than put her name forward at a convention at which, Ryan was informed, recently elected Councillor Shónagh Ní Raghallaigh would also be nominated.
Gript understands that Ní Raghallaigh, who did retain Ryan’s former Council seat in June with just 599 votes, would have had the backing of Sinn Féin head office.
Party whip Padraig Mac Lochlainn confirmed the news that Ryan had resigned from the party in a statement released to the media late last night and provided the clue as to the reason for her stepping down when he said that the party had informed Ryan there was “likely to be a contested convention. We encouraged Patricia to seek the nomination but she was unwilling to do so.”
I understand that the sitting TD was extremely unhappy with this as it is unusual for a sitting TD to have to face competition for re-selection – especially in a constituency where, polling and the local and European election results would strongly suggest, Sinn Féin has no chance of winning two of the four seats, and might be doing well to retain the seat taken by Patricia Ryan in 2020.
Sinn Féin only took one of the 40 seats in the elections for Kildare County Council in June. Their vote share across the entire county was less than 9% which placed them behind both the Social Democrats and Labour in terms of vote share and seats with those two competitors on the liberal left taking 9 seats in total.
Sinn Féin also has a seat in Kildare North where Réada Cronin was elected in 2020 but their total vote between the general election for the two Kildare constituencies in 2020 and the County Council poll in June fell by almost two thirds from 18,860 to 6,686. Interestingly there were no issues regarding the decision to allow Cronin to defend her seat and she was selected as the sole Sinn Féin candidate at the constituency convention last month.
What ought to have been in Ryan’s favour was that Sinn Féin the party retained the seat in the Kildare town ward which Ryan had taken in 2019. Their vote share also increased to 12.3%. Something that added meat to the discussion over whether they ought to stand another candidate in the general elections. Some locals believe that the plan was to select just the one candidate but that the candidate might not have been Ryan herself.
Ryan had been at the centre of several controversies since being elected which possibly soured her for the more sensitive elements in Sinn Féin head office. One was her having tweeted, prior to her election in 2020, a link to a site which claimed that the United States intelligence services had been responsible for the bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Even more offensive to the commissars was a statement she made in August 2022 regarding the placement of Ukrainian refugees at a modular homes site in Newbridge. Ryan had said that she believed that among her constituents there was “a concern that growing levels of homelessness and pending evictions in the areas where the modular units are being proposed could generate conflict.”
Although she qualified this in Partyspeak by a reference to the fear that this “in turn could be exploited by small far-right elements” her cards may have been marked. What she said is now being repeated both nationally and more discreetly at local level by other Sinn Féin TDs but there is no one more scorned than the prophet in their own land. As others who have left and been forced out of Sinn Féin have discovered over the years.
Sinn Féin’s overall dilemma is that if they are to have any chance of improving on the 37 seats won in 2020 they do need to aggressively target a second seat in those constituencies where they took more than a quota the last time and especially where they topped the poll with just one candidate. However, even in stronger areas such as Kerry the party has blinked on selecting a second candidate as this might endanger holding even one.
Mary Lou McDonald’s own Dublin Central constituency only decided after much rumination to add Councillor Janice Boylan to the ticket. Which hardly sounds a note of optimism or encouragement to sitting TDs in other constituencies.
Gript also understands that at least one other currently sitting TD may be under pressure from Sinn Féin head office and may not be re-selected to run despite having comfortably topped the poll in 2020.