Emily Keegan

And it's been a tight contest between those two candidates since the early tallies yesterday morning.

There's a bit of a gap there with second and third place then.

Labour's Helen Ogbue did get the second most transfers of this round with 575.

But it's still not enough to close that gap because she's now sitting on 6,525 votes.

And it's looking very unlikely that she's going to be able to catch up to them.

Independent candidate Thomas Welby has now been eliminated.

So his 3,351 votes are being distributed in count six.

So we're down to seven candidates now.

And hopefully things are going to be speeding up now and we should be out of the count centre here in Salt Hill by mid-afternoon.

Good morning, Pat.

Things moving pretty slowly still here in Galway West.

We currently have 42% of boxes tallied and we still have the main three front runners that we've had all morning.

So we have Fine Gael's Sean Cain and Independent Ireland's Noel Thomas basically neck and neck with Noel Thomas at 20% and Sean Cain just ahead of him on 21%.

Labour then is taking up the third spot with Helen Ogbue on 12%.

Now, she was kind of a bit closer to the two men when we were just counting the Galway City boxes, but since we've moved into the county boxes and headed out towards Connemara, we've seen that she's kind of struggled to keep up with them as much, but still holding on to that third place very solidly here.

Good morning, Pat.

Yeah, so we've got about 30% of boxes open here now in Salt Hill and turnout so far is coming in at around 41%.

We've just in the past 40 minutes or so started to move out of the Galway City boxes and into the Galway County ones.

So that's given a boost to the turnout figures.

So far, we've got three kind of clear front runners, Fine Gael, Sean Cain,