101 candidates await countdown for 48 county council seats
Fine Gael are running the largest number of candidates with 31. Fianna Fáil are next with 23, one ahead of the independents. Labour have 11 candidates, Sinn Féin 10 and the Greens four.
There are just 14 women candidates seeking seats in County Hall. There are no women standing in either the Blarney, Macroom or Skibbereen electoral areas.
The highest number of women candidates, four, are in the Midleton electoral area. There are two each in Bandon, Bantry, Carrigaline, Fermoy, and one each in Kanturk and Mallow.
There are 10 county council electoral areas and the votes will be totted up at three different count centres. In total, 303,582 people will be eligible to vote.
The counts for the Skibbereen, Bandon and Bantry electoral areas will take place at the community centre in Clonakilty.
Mallow Youth Centre will play host for the counts of the Kanturk, Fermoy and Mallow electoral areas.
The biggest count centre will be at the Parochial Hall in Gurranabraher.
There the fate of those contesting the Midleton, Carrigaline, Blarney, Macroom and Bandon areas will be decided.
In addition, there will also be 12 separate count centre for town council elections in Passage West, Cobh, Midleton, Youghal, Fermoy, Mallow, Clonakilty, Bantry, Macroom, Kinsale and Skibbereen.
Sharon Corcoran, a senior official with Cork County Council, has been appointed as the returning officer for Co Cork.
She said ballot boxes would start being opened at around 9am on Saturday. At this stage the European votes will be separated from the Local Election votes.
All European ballot papers will then be taken to the Neptune stadium to be counted.
“We are hoping to be in a position to have started all the first counts in the 10 county council election areas by 2pm at the latest,” Ms Corcoran said.
She added that judging on past performances it was expected that the results of the first counts would start coming in from around 5.30pm onwards.
Ms Corcoran is expected to make a number of visits to the count centres at Gurranabraher, Clonakilty and Mallow throughout the day.
She has 10 deputies who will each take charge on one of the electoral areas and 20 assistant deputies who will help them.
“We will have around 160 scrutineers who will be checking the ballot papers. That obviously is only for the county council elections and doesn’t include those who will be scrutinising the town council elections,” Ms Corcoran said.
It is expected that the smaller count centres will have final counts before midnight. However, by far the largest number of ballot papers will be counted in Gurranabraher and in 2004 it was nearly breakfast time before all the results were in.
