Departure of former leader Wexford TD Brendan Howlin and Cork East TD Seán Sherlock from party ranks set to complicate strategy
Labour will be hard-pressed to retain Cork East, with Sinn Féin set to return a TD in the three-seater. File photograph: BloombergThe announcement by two of them — former leader, Wexford TD Brendan Howlin and Cork East TD Seán Sherlock — that they will not be contesting the next election does not make life any easier for Ivana Bacik’s party.There is some optimism within the party that the likely candidate to replace him, Cllr George Lawlor, will hold the seat.
This is because, despite the Wexford constituency being reduced to four seats by the Electoral Commission’s recent boundary review, the redrawn map leaves the Labour Party’s main support base in the south of the county intact.The same boundary review moved his Mallow heartland to Cork North-Central, which meant that were he to run, Mr Sherlock would have had to start fresh in a new constituency — a daunting prospect for a politician with a young family.
But a safer bet would have been Mr Sherlock’s return in an unchanged Cork East given his family’s almost six decades of representing the area. However, neither do people in Labour underestimate the scale of the challenge facing the party with one source saying: “There are no safe Labour seats” and all of the party’s TDs will have to “fight for it” if they are to be returned to the Dáil.Labour has still not recovered from the electoral battering it got in 2016 after its stint in government with Fine Gael in the years following the last financial crash.
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