{"id":215421,"date":"2025-12-28T23:29:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T23:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/215421\/"},"modified":"2025-12-28T23:29:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T23:29:12","slug":"cork-mep-kelleher-believes-he-would-have-won-presidential-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/215421\/","title":{"rendered":"Cork MEP Kelleher believes he would have won presidential election"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"contextmenu internal_Body1st\">Cork MEP Billy Kelleher said he believes he would have won the election if given the chance to run for the Irish presidency ahead of Jim Gavin.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">In an interview with the Irish Examiner, Mr Kelleher said he is confident that he would have been a polling favourite over winning candidate Catherine Connolly, and Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s nominated candidate, Mr Gavin.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Mr Gavin\u2019s campaign for presidency was heavily backed by Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin and party deputy leader Jack Chambers, but after it emerged he owed \u20ac3,300 to a former tenant, he withdrew from the race.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\n            \u201cI believe that I would be reflective of a modern Ireland, and I think that a lot of people would have engaged with me and supported me in that,\u201d\u00a0\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">said Mr Kelleher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\u201cUnfortunately, let\u2019s be honest, we ended up in a situation where, towards the end, it was basically a one-horse race. The public, because of what happened, didn\u2019t have enough choice.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cork MEP Billy Kelleher said he believes he would have won the election if given the chance to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[79,61,60,1843,43,978],"class_list":["post-215421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-cork-news","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-micheal-martin","tag-news","tag-presidential-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215421","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=215421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}