Analysis: Labour Cork looking to build on their recent gains in the local elections

“Absolutely, very disappointed,” Kathleen Lynch replied in March of 2016 when Catherine Shanahan of the Irish Examiner asked whether the former Labour Party TD had been disappointed to lose her Cork North Central seat in the previous month’s election.

“I mean you wouldn’t be normal not to be disappointed and especially when you’ve put in so much work.”

Across the city, in Cork South Central, her brother-in-law, Ciarán Lynch, also lost his seat in the same election.

Kathleen Lynch and Ciarán Lynch were the last Labour Party TDs in a city where Toddy O’Sullivan was re-elected at five general elections. They paid, like so many of their party colleagues, a heavy price for Labour’s participation in the 2011 austerity coalition government with Fine Gael.

Labour had entered that government as the junior party, with 37 seats, its highest ever showing, and it lost 30 of those seats in the 2016 election, leaving the party with what was then a historically low seven seats.

Before that, in the 2014 local elections, Labour lost 81 seats, more than half of its local authority seats. It also suffered a meltdown in the European elections of that year, losing all three of its seats.

In Cork City Council, the party lost all seven of its seats in 2014, ending the council careers of outgoing Lord Mayor Catherine Clancy, Ciarán Lynch’s sister, John Kelleher, former Lord Mayor Mick O’Connell, Lorraine Kingston, Denis O’Flynn, Michael Ahern and Ger Gibbons.

Councillors who attended the meeting when Ms Clancy returned the Lord Mayor’s chain said it was a bleak sight when she had to leave the chamber because she was no longer an elected representative.

The 2019 local elections saw Labour gain six seats nationally, leaving the party with 57 seats. In Cork, John Maher was elected in Cork City North East, the party’s sole councillor Leeside. In the European elections of that year, it won no seats.

The following year, in the February 2020 general election, Labour dropped nationally to six seats.

In the European elections this year, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin won a seat in Dublin, and in the local elections, Labour dropped one local election seat, to 56 seats.

However, in Cork the party showed a significant resurgence in June’s elections, tripling its seats, with Laura Harmon in Cork City South West and Peter Horgan in Cork City South East joining John Maher in City Hall.

Mr Maher was elected on the first count, with 2,005 first preferences against a quota of 1,985. Mr Horgan was elected on the 12th count and Ms Harmon on the 14th.

Last month, at a selection convention held in Togher and chaired by Ciarán Lynch, the Labour Party selected Ms Harmon as its candidate for Cork South Central in the next general election.

Losing his Mallow base to the expanded Cork North Central, popular Cork East Labour TD Seán Sherlock, who has a young family, has decided to retire.

Labour has yet to hold its selection convention for Cork North Central, but Mr Maher is understood to be weighing up his prospects of a Dáil run, while Mallow-based Labour county councillor Eoghan Kenny, elected for the first time in June, looks likely to put his name forward too. Clearly the party hasn’t written off the seat Mr Sherlock held since 2007.

Eight years since it last held a Dáil seat in Cork city, the Labour Party on Leeside is clearly hoping that the next general election will show it has, at long last, broken the curse of austerity.