Ireland’s Minister for Health fails to be re-elected and loses long-held seat

Ireland’s Minister for Health has failed to be re-elected and has lost his seat in Wicklow, which he has held since 2011.

Fianna Fail’s Stephen Donnelly is now one of the biggest casualties in the country’s election after he was eliminated in the early hours of Monday morning.

He lost out to the Irish premier’s running mate Richard Timmins, who secured the second seat for Fine Gael in the consistency.

Mr Donnelly faced a tough fight to retain his seat in the constituency after boundary changes saw it reduced from five to four seats.

Mr Timmins benefitted from a huge surplus from the party leader, after he topped the poll with 5,000 votes to share.

Mr Donnelly had a long wait to have his fate confirmed at the count centre in Greystones, with counting finally ending shortly before 5.30am on Monday.

Earlier, Mr Donnelly said it was “always going to be very tight”.

“We knew Simon (Harris) would take a huge vote,” he said.

“The government vote, if you like, in the constituency was strong actually, but when you are sharing a constituency and hometown with a taoiseach and moving from a five-seater to a four-seater, when you put those two things together, obviously, it creates a lot of pressure.

“So I think we all knew it was going to come down to the final seat. It was going to come down to transfers.”

Mr Donnelly was first elected in the constituency as an Independent candidate in 2011.

He went on to help co-found the Social Democrats in July 2015 with Roisin Shortall and Catherine Murphy.

His popularity during the 2016 general election campaign surged, and he topped the poll in Wicklow as a member of the Social Democrats, with 14,348 first preference votes, representing a share of 20.9% of the vote.

Soon after the election, he left the party following a number of disagreements with the co-leaders as he wanted the party to enter Government formation talks with Fine Gael.

However, Ms Murphy and Ms Shortall opposed the move.

After sitting as an Independent for a while, he then joined Fianna Fail in early 2017.

This ultimately led to a dent in his votes in the 2020 general election when his share dropped to 7.7%.

He was eventually elected on the 15th count after three days of counting.

Mr Donnelly was appointed as Minister for Health by party leader Micheal Martin, and held the position throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

He oversaw the introduction of landmark legislation around mandatory disclosure for patients in the aftermath of the CervicalCheck controversy.

In October, he said he was “laser focused” on having the 2.2 billion-euro National Children’s Hospital opened by the end of next year.