Constituency profile: Carlow-Kilkenny

Fianna Fáil were trounced here in 2011, their vote slumping from 47.7% to 28.1%.

That led to Fine Gael taking three seats.

Given his failure to bring in a running mate in 2007, Phil Hogan was publicly rebuked by Enda Kenny, but, in 2011, Hogan was one of those three elected Fine Gael TDs.

Pat Deering and John Paul Phelan will be the party’s standard-bearers this time, and while a third Fine Gael candidate, David Fitzgerald, will contest, the two incumbents look set to be returned.

Maverick TD John McGuinness, who blazed a trail as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, is a formidable force locally and is sure of a seat.

When Hogan departed to become EU commissioner in 2014, his vacated seat was won by Fianna Fáil stalwart, Bobby Aylward, who looks certain to retain it.

Relations between the McGuinness and the Aylward camps are tetchy, at best, typified by McGuinness’ decision to take a foreign holiday in the run-up to the by-election.

The party is also running Carlow councillor, Jennifer Murnane-O’Connor, to hoover up votes in the county, but there is little chance of her taking a seat.

Labour’s Ann Phelan, in 2011, retook the seat once held by former ceann comhairle Seamus Pattison. Appointed a junior agriculture minister by Joan Burton in 2014, her recent fall from a canoe into a foot of water looms large in the memory.

She should be okay for the last seat, edging out Sinn Féin’s Kathleen Funchion, who will be hoping to compete for it.

Renua hold a genuine hope that its candidate, Patrick McKee, could sneak a seat, given his respectable performance in the by-election, where he took 9.5% of the vote.

We feel, however, it may not be his time and he is likely to fall short.

Also, sources say that locals feel that Carlow is the forgotten child in this constituency, so anti-Government feeling is higher, and there still is an outside chance of a surprise.

But, all going to plan and avoiding any major catastrophes, the incumbents appear set to return.

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