Challenger to those sitting pretty

FIANNA FÁIL election hopeful Des Kelly wasn’t exactly the most popular person in the party when his legal challenge threatened to upset their carefully stage-managed election campaign. But it didn’t bother him.

"I got some flack over it but not a lot," he said yesterday. "Bertie Ahern said he didn't agree with my points but respected my right to take the case. Given that I've five Supreme Court judges and one High Court judge agree with me, no one can say that I don't have right on my side."

Far from being a Fianna Fáil rebel, the 30-year-old electrical engineer says he's deeply committed to the party and was just standing up for his rights. But his determined stance against the privileges of sitting TDs isn't the first time he's clashed with the party establishment.

Kelly, who missed a council seat by just eight votes in the 1999 local elections, was forced to move from Castleknock in Dublin West to Lucan in Dublin Mid-West after sitting deputies made it clear there was no room for him on the general election ticket.

After launching an intensive campaign on the ground in the Lucan area, he realised he was facing another obstacle to getting elected when he leafed through election spending guidelines with his election agent Paschal O'Sullivan.

"If I had got elected back in 1999 then I would have been the youngest Fianna Fáil candidate in Dublin. I was gutted. This time I had put a lot of effort into the campaign and had moved house from Castleknock to Lucan but then to find out you were being discriminated like this was very unfair."

After consulting legal opinion from law students to eminent lawyers, he decided to take the case using the "Constitution as my shield".

Of course, there was also the small matter that the challenge secured him valuable publicity in the run up to the election.

The State fought the challenge and lost it in the High Court. As the election loomed, they decided to appeal it to the Supreme Court, effectively kicking the issue to touch until after the campaign.

Kelly polled well in May and finished fifth in the three-seater constituency, around 700 votes behind Labour's Joanna Tuffy.

Now that his stance over spending rules has been vindicated, he says he has no plans to use the Supreme Court ruling to try and get re-elected himself.

Instead he says it means that rather than protecting established TDs, the political system can try to give everyone an equal opportunity of getting elected. "They have tried to close off the door to new people trying to get elected. It opens up politics for new people trying to get in."