Simon Harris said Fine Gael is not concerned about a Left coalition forming to take the Government parties on at the next General Election.<\/p>\n
The Tan\u00e1iste told RT\u00c9 One while Catherine Connolly had \u201cclearly won\u201d and will be \u201cthe president for Ireland and for everyone,\u201d he was not anxious about the next General Election.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to take from their day (The Left), they won the Presidential Election,\u201d Mr Harris said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish them well with their victory.\u201c\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Minister Harris added:\u00a0 \u201cWhen you get to a General Election it\u2019s very different.\u00a0 Are the Labour Party going to ask people to vote for Mary Lou McDonald?\u00a0 It\u2019s quite a leap.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minister Harris pointed to Enda Kenny being Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach when Left candidate Michael D Higgins, was the victor in the presidential election.<\/p>\n
He said the main concern for Government now was those who hadn\u2019t turned out to vote – a suspected around 40pc – and those who had spoiled their votes – around 10pc.<\/p>\n
\u201cThats what I\u2019m most concerned about,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cThere is clearly a winner, no doubt, but I\u2019m most concerned about the number of people who feel disaffected by politics, they didn\u2019t come out and vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looks like potentially you could see 40pc of the electorate not voting and 10pc putting in a bit of thought into what they put on the paper to spoil their vote<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to get under the bonnet (to find out) what is making people feel disaffected by politics.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that consideration across parties would be given to candidates entering the race.<\/p>\n
And he denied Fine Gael had run a negative campaign.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\u201cI want to thank Heather Humphreys, she\u2019s a great colleague and friend,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cHundreds of people came out across the country.\u00a0 She carried herself with grace and dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n
A two-candidate race was always \u201cgoing to be difficult\u201d he added.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
But she had been a success with gaining more backing from the public than Fine Gael had in recent elections, he added.<\/p>\n
He added that he had \u201cno regrets,\u201d and that Fine Gael are \u201ca party under renewal, under my leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laura Lynott\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Simon Harris said Fine Gael is not concerned about a Left coalition forming to take the Government parties…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3656,895,3775,2044,61,60,2043,43,978,3415],"class_list":["post-103575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-catherine-connolly","tag-fianna-fail","tag-fine-gael","tag-heather-humphreys","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jim-gavin","tag-news","tag-presidential-election","tag-sinn-fein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}