O’Connell declares as independent

Kilbeggan woman Kate O’Connell, who represented the Dublin Bay South constituency as a member of Fine Gael between 2016 and 2020, has declared her intention to run in the forthcoming general election.

This time, however, Ms O’Connell is to run as an independent candidate, having declared in an interview with The Sunday Independent that she had “no desire to run as a sweeper for any candidate”.

Since that interview, Fine Gael has said that Ms O’Connell was not asked to run for the party, although it confirmed it had been in discussion with her – along with others – about a potential addition to the ticket.

In a statement to the Irish Times, the party said: “Fine Gael informed Ms O’Connell earlier last week that we would not be considering her further for addition in Dublin Bay South.”

Ms O’Connell, who is originally from Cornaher, and who is the daughter of former FG county councillor Michael Newman and his wife, Maura, is a pharmacist, and prior to election to Dáil Éireann, served a four-year term as a Fine Gael councillor on Dublin City Council.

During her time as a TD, she was one of Fine Gael’s most high profile members, and featured regularly on TV panels and radio talk shows.

However, since losing her seat, Ms O’Connell’s relationship with Fine Gael has been tense, and in a frank interview with Claire Byrne on radio in 2021, she spoke of the animosity she had experienced from some members of the party, stating that she had been the victim of “particularly personalised commentary and attacks”.

So bad had it become, Ms O’Connell revealed, that one constituency member had planned to hand her a sod of turf at a meeting in front of other people and that on another occasion, a group if FG supporters had spoken about putting a sign outside her pharmacy pointing to the M50 and saying “Westmeath This Way”.

Relations between Ms O’Connell and the new party leader, Simon Harris, were understood to be a lot more cordial than between her and his predecessor, Leo Varadkar.

In her Sunday Independent interview, Ms O’Connell said that among the issues driving her desire to regain a seat in Dáil Éireann were the wastage of public money, and the controversial National Children’s Hospital.

She also expressed misgivings about the cost-of-living measures in the budget, and also about the government’s understanding about the realities of life for small and medium enterprises.