Fine Gael senator Sean Kyne holds a narrow lead in Galway West’s by-election according to an Irish Times\/TG4 opinion poll of the constituency.<\/p>\n
Mr Kyne, a former junior minister, leads the poll on 17% of first preferences, followed by Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas on 16% and Labour councillor Helen Ogbu on 12%.<\/p>\n
M\u00edde Nic Fhionnlaoich of the Social Democrats is on 9%, while Fianna F\u00e1il’s Cillian Keane is a point behind. Both former mayor Mike Cubbard and Sinn F\u00e9in’s Mark Lohan are on 7%, with Green Party candidate Niall Murphy and independent Thomas Welby on 6%.<\/p>\n
Orla Nugent of \u00c1ont\u00fa is clocking at 4% of support with Sheila Garrity, the independent who was co-convener of President Catherine Connolly’s Galway campaign, is on 3%.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms Connolly’s victory in the presidential race in October triggered the by-election.<\/p>\n
Mr Kyne’s lead appears more solid given he is more transfer-friendly than Mr Thomas according to the poll. 15% of respondents would give Mr Kyne theirs, while just 7% said the same for Mr Thomas. A total of 11% said they would give a second preference to Ms Ogbu, and 14% said theirs would go to Mr Welby.<\/p>\n
When asked what they thought the most important issue would be, 27% of those polled said roads, while 26% said housing.<\/p>\n
The survey was conducted by phone among a sample of 530 adults in the constituency on behalf of TG4 and The Irish Times by Ipsos B&A and has a margin of error of plus or minus four points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fine Gael senator Sean Kyne holds a narrow lead in Galway West’s by-election according to an Irish Times\/TG4…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3656,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-437598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-catherine-connolly","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437598","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=437598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}