Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Patricia Ryan, an Independent – ex-Sinn Féin – TD who was first elected in Kildare for that party in 2020, despite being on holidays overseas during the campaign, has been unseated.

City Councillor Mike Cubbard (Ind), who failed to take a seat in Galway West last weekend, confirmed he had been in Morocco for four days during this General Election.

He’d expected the current Dáil to go full-term, as Micheál Martin and Simon Harris had repeatedly said, and had prepared for a February or March 2025 election.

“We planned to get over Christmas, and then go out with a bang after Christmas,” he said.

When a November election was called, it clashed with a trip to Morocco with children from Galway Bohemians soccer club, to which he had committed last March.

“We booked it when Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil told us the election would be in March; I didn’t break my commitment, they did,” he said.

Cubbard’s campaign was again run without posters. It mostly concentrated on social media posts, but his wife Karen picked up the slack to knock on doors while the candidate was in Africa.

On Sunday, as he was eliminated on the eighth count, Cubbard was offered a re-count, because he was just short of the number of votes needed to reclaim campaign costs from the State.

The former mayor honourably declined, because 61 was too many votes to find in a recount. But he will always wonder whether he would have earned 61 additional votes – and got his expenses back – if he hadn’t travelled abroad.

Pictured: Cllr Mike Cubbard who had expected the current Dáil to go full term. As a result, he had committed to a trip to Morocco with Galway Bohemians in November and missed four days of campaigning.