Councillor to meet gardaí after being attacked in West Cork

A Fine Gael councillor who was attacked while canvassing in West Cork is due to make a full statement to gardaí this evening in relation to the incident.

Cllr Humphrey Deegan was left with a bloodied face after the incident last Friday in Clonakilty.

“I was trying to restrain him against the car and I had him held in a bear hug but he managed to scrawl my face. I didn’t even realise that he had drawn blood until things calmed down,” said Mr Deegan.

The assault took place around 4.30pm on Connolly St in Clonakilty while Mr Deegan was canvassing for his party colleague, John O’Sullivan.

Mr Deegan said a car pulled up and a man started shouting abuse before getting out of the car and approaching him. Campaign leaflets were knocked to the floor and Mr Deegan said a woman who was in the man’s company started tearing them up and spitting on them. “They were shouting that ‘the Shinners will fix ye’”.

“It was bullying, nothing else. They were trying to get us to leave the street. It was low level intimidation,” said Mr Deegan.

Gardaí arrived on foot of receiving a call from the scene and Mr Deegan was advised to get his face attended to, which he did at his local GP clinic. He was still trying to get his head around what had happened, he said, as was his wife, Margaret.

Fine Gael MEP candidate for Ireland South Deirdre Clune said such attacks had no place in a democracy.

“An attack on an election candidate is an attack on democracy itself. We all have the right to disagree and the right to protest, but the act of physically attacking someone because of their party affiliation belongs to another, darker age in this country,” she said.

Meanwhile, in Dublin West, by-election candidate David Hall has claimed he is the victim of a blackmail attempt over a video of him making alleged racist remarks. Mr Hall, founder of the Irish Mortgage Holders Association which advocates on behalf of distressed borrowers, said yesterday that his remarks had been taken “totally out of context” and were made in the course of “banter” with friends around a poker table in 2007. He did not realise the conversation was being taped.

Mr Hall claims two men have demanded €10,000 to destroy the video in which he appears to say in relation to “blacks” that “everyone should have one”.

Mr Hall said the exchange was between himself and a long-standing Sri Lankan friend who he said replied at the time that every house should have a fat, bald Irishman. He described the timing of the release of the video as “remarkable, sinister, and cynical” and said it is now the subject of a criminal investigation after he lodged a complaint at Blanchardstown Garda Station on Friday.