Fianna Fáil is struggling to win support in an important town in Kildare
Maybe they don’t do a deep dive into the local election results in Mount Street Lower, Fianna Fáil’s head office address in Dublin.
Perhaps they’ll content themselves with what is an encouraging bottom line.
When all the seats were accounted for at the end of the Kildare County Council elections the party held a dozen, which left them on top of the heap and one more than Fine Gael, their closest rivals. FF managed to take one more seat than Fine Gael with less first preferences (21.4% to 28.1%)
It was a good day’s work; well, more like a few weeks of toil on the campaign trail.
In 2019, the party had taken the same number of seats at Aras Chill Dara.
A closer look however, shows that the party is struggling a bit in Naas, a situation that manifested itself last time out in the 2019 poll and hasn’t really been addressed.
The party has just one seat in the Naas Local Electoral Area, which is held by Cllr Carmel Kelly.
And while Cllr Kelly increased her share of first preferences, she again had to wait some time before being elected - the 12 count.
In athletes parlance, Cllr Kelly is a mid-pack runner - she won’t come last in the race but she hasn’t been winning it either.
With 8.4% of the vote, she finished 11th out of 14 in terms of first preferences won by Fianna Fail candidates across the eight electoral areas.
Something similar could be said about Veralouise Behan (9.7%) though she took a second seat in Athy.
Rob Power saw his vote fall in Newbridge, but again FF still took two seats.
Cllr Kelly fared better than Brian Larkin, the FF co-runner in Naas. He was an unlucky candidate in 2019, taking more first preferences than Kelly but failing to win transfers.
On this occasion Kelly outpolled him.
However disappointing it was for Larkin it was not really surprising given that Kelly had five more years under her belt as a councillor to help cement her position.
How different it was back in 2014 when James Lawless, now a TD, swept in on the first count.
At the end of the opening round he had more than a quota and a half of first preferences . He was accompanied by Rob Power and the late Willie Callaghan as FF took three seats in the Naas area.
Cllr Power underperformed this time in the Newbridge area but FF still took two seats there.