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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Pat Kenny Show. With timber living log cabins. Saturday and Sunday from 10am on Newstalk. Conversation that counts.
Well now I'm joined in studio by Kevin Doyle, Group News Editor of The Independent. Kevin, good morning. Good morning, Pat. We'll go through the front pages first of all. The Irish Mail on Sunday, Taoiseach's bizarre spin on Fianna Fáil poll humiliation. The independence on the independent rural home rules to be eased in a bid to lure back immigrants.
And an intriguing headline, row over atrocious behaviour at French horse sale.
Chapter 2: What are the main headlines from the Sunday papers?
And that's atrocious Irish behaviour, one believes. O'Donovan pushes RT to reveal top 100 earners. That's in the Sunday Times. And re-election woe rocks Martin and MacDonald. The Business Post, they have an exclusive. Ireland's outsized AI imports see dramatic surge. And this is about AI hardware coming through Ireland and being exported.
And all the sports supplements are talking about Leinster getting a mauling at the hands of Bordeaux.
Chapter 3: How is the Taoiseach responding to recent poll results?
Now, Kevin, let's talk politics first. One result in, one to go.
Yeah, and the result that's in, I guess, is the one that we expected. It was quite obvious probably from this time yesterday, Pat, that this was the direction of travel. And really, that's fine. It's probably what comes below it on the scorecard that poses more intrigue. It's a really good day for the SOC Dems. They now go ahead of Labour in terms of... dominance in the Dáil.
They have two candidates, two TDs in a constituency for the first time. And perhaps more importantly for them, they've beaten Mary Lou Macdonald.
OK, so if you look at the tea leaves for the various party leaders, obviously Sock Dems, as you say, they're feeling very rosy at the moment. But for Mary Lou Macdonald, a bit of a slap. A complete slap.
In her own constituency, after all. The first thing is it's her own constituency. And look, by-elections, we have probably two, you couldn't probably find two more diverse constituencies to have by-elections in.
So while generally by-elections can be quite a local thing and they don't represent national, we've got one here in the inner city of Dublin and we've got one in the Gaeltacht, out as far west. as you can go. So it is in a weird way a snapshot, if you like, of where the country is at. And the trend really from a Sinn Féin perspective is that they have done badly in both.
Because when these, when Pascal Donoghue was announced, announced that he was going to the World Bank, there was an obvious assumption in political circles. Well, sure, that's a Sinn Féin seat. There's no other outcome could come of that. It hasn't transpired like that.
It wasn't the candidate that Mary Lou wanted in the first place, so her own people in her own constituency defied her by putting Janice Boylan on the ticket.
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Chapter 4: What changes are proposed for rural home rules in Ireland?
Janice Boylan didn't perform well in the general election when she was the running mate of Mary Lou MacDonald, and it has transpired.
But does this give Mary Lou the right to say, I told you so, to her own party? Like, you've done us harm because you didn't listen to me.
Well, it's a little bit of cover, but at the same time, you're the party leader and it's your back door. So the party decided something. You're supposed to go with what the party says and make it happen. And look, she has been out campaigning, but it hasn't been delivered. And probably interesting, like the Boylan, Janice Boylan's vote held up in Cabra West, which is Mary Lou's area.
But once you go beyond that, the Sock Dems were eating into it big time.
OK, now we'll go to Galway West and we'll get the latest from Emily Keegan, who's standing by. Emily, good morning.
Good morning, Pat. We've actually just in the last 10 minutes now gotten the results of the fifth count, which is the first count of the day here in Galway West. And it was the distribution of AN2's Orla Nugent and independent candidate Sheila Garrity's votes after they were eliminated at about half past nine last night.
Noel Thomas of Independent Ireland still very much in the lead here on 11,075 votes now. That's followed by Fine Gael's Sean Cain who received 219 votes in the fifth count and brought him up to 10,126. So there are now 949 votes between them. 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.
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Chapter 5: How are by-elections affecting political party dynamics?
Independent candidate Thomas Welby has now been eliminated. So his 3,351 votes are being distributed in count six.
And how many of the candidates are left to be eliminated?
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.
OK, so we won't have a result by the end of the programme. All right, Emily. Thank you very much for that. Now, what do you read into that, Kevin?
Well, the first thing, it doesn't change the national picture, but this just shows you how by-elections are odd. Aim to giving its largest transfer to Labour. That makes no sense. That's down to candidates. That's down to geography. That doesn't play out in Dáil politics at all. They're on completely different ends of what they argue for. So that's interesting.
The thousand vote gap, 949 votes between Noel Thomas and Sean Coyne. Talking to people who were in Galway yesterday, they the sense is Sean Cain is going to get across the line. Even though he's a thousand adrift almost now. Well, Cillian Keane has nearly 9% of the vote. He's the Fianna Fáil candidate.
And even in Dublin, the Fianna Fáil votes largely went on bulk across to Fine Gael, if that repeats. And then the Labour vote is more likely to go to Sean Cain as well. And it's quite a large vote. So it may be tight, but people in the know down there think it's Sean Cain's.
OK, now we talked about Mary Lou's difficulties on foot of this. Micheál Martin, I mean, one of the papers there talking about the spin, which paper was it, the Mail? His bizarre spin on Fianna Fáil poll humiliation.
Yes, quite the headline. And the spin, as they see it, is that he said it's a good thing that the likes of Jim O'Callaghan is coming out and say, and Dara Cleary saying they want to be leader, which they have done in the last few weeks after the latest.
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Chapter 6: What insights do the latest Galway West election results provide?
The Secret Service is just after 6 p.m. on Saturday. A man approached a security checkpoint near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, pulled a gun from a bag and opened fire on officers. Secret Service returned fire. He was then taken to the hospital where he later died.
Officials say a bystander was also hit by gunfire, but investigators are still trying to determine whether that person was shot by the suspect or caught in the crossfire. No Secret Service officers were hurt. The president, we can confirm, was inside the White House at the time, but was not impacted. Now, multiple sources tell Fox News Digital the suspect was 21-year-old Nazir Best of Maryland.
Sources say he allegedly had prior encounters with the Secret Service and a history of mental health issues.
Okay, mental health issues again. If anyone wields a gun, it must be because they have mental health issues.
Yeah, and look, it does seem like, from what the reports we read this morning, that there were multiple interactions around the White House with this individual. Before, at one stage, he was declaring himself to be God. In social media, I think he was calling himself the real Osama bin Laden. So, why does a guy like this have a gun? Sure question. 21 years old and shot on the spot, I suppose.
The White House goes into a 40-minute lockdown. We've become so used to this now, Pat. It's kind of just, this will wash away over, like, it won't be on the front of the papers tomorrow morning.
I know the Fox News were reluctant to even suggest that the Secret Service might have killed the bystander or critically injured the bystander.
That struck me as odd because you'd imagine you can tell that very, very quickly. And that person is in a critical condition. So we don't know what will happen there. Well, we're still investigating that bombing of the girls' school in Iran as well. Well, yeah, exactly. And look, a judge had ordered this individual to stay away from the White House because he had been troublesome before.
But there was no history of violence. But it's, yeah, it's just becoming so common.
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