Healy’s brother, Paddy Healy, serves as president of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland and runs unsuccessfully in the Seanad elections in 2007 and 2011 on the NUI panel, and in the 1980s runs in the Dublin North–East constituency as an Anti H-Block candidate.
Healy is re-elected to South Tipperary County Council at the 2009 Irish local elections. He wins back Tipperary South seat at the 2011 Irish general election with 21.3% of the first preference vote. On December 15, 2011, he helps launch a nationwide campaign against the household charge being brought in as part of the 2012 Irish budget.
Healy stands for re-election to the new Tipperary constituency as a non-party candidate in the 2016 Irish general election, and is elected on the seventh count. However, he is entered into the register of the 32nd Dáil as a Workers and Unemployed Action TD once again. He votes for both Gerry Adams and Richard Boyd Barrett for Taoiseach when the 32nd Dáil first convenes on March 10, 2016.
Boyd Barrett is adopted as a baby and is raised as a Roman Catholic in Glenageary, County Dublin, by his parents, David Boyd Barrett, an accountant, and his wife, Valerie. He attends St. Michael’s College in Dublin. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from University College Dublin (UCD). His birth mother is Sinéad Cusack, with whom he is later reunited in public. Since their reunion, he has had a good relationship with Cusack, her husband Jeremy Irons, and his half-brothers, Sam and Max. In May 2013, he reveals that theatre director Vincent Dowling is his biological father.
Boyd Barrett again contests the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the 2011 Irish general election as part of the United Left Alliance. On the ballot paper, he is named a member of People Before Profit, because the United Left Alliance had not yet been registered as a political party. Following a “nail-biting two days” of counting and recounting votes, he is elected on the 10th count without reaching the quota.
As a TD, Boyd Barrett, supports protests against cuts to Dublin Bus services. In Dáil Éireann, he condemns the 2011 murder of PSNI officer Ronan Kerr as “an utterly brutal action, which leads back down a road which has failed.” Marie O’Halloran in The Irish Times describes his “consistently passionate outrage and opposition to the Government’s handling of the financial and banking crisis.”
Boyd Barrett speaks at the Dublin location of the October 15, 2011 global protests, inspired by the Spanish “Indignants” and the Occupy Wall Street movements. The same month he says Enda Kenny‘s government is engaging in “spin and disingenuity” to cover up its austerity policies, decrying the closure of hospital emergency departments around the country for “health and safety” reasons.
On November 2, 2011, Boyd Barrett leads the United Left Alliance TDs out of the Dáil, in protest against the government’s decision not to hold a debate on the payment of more than €700 million to Anglo Irish Bank bondholders. On December 15, 2011, he helps launch a nationwide campaign against a proposed household charge being brought in as part of the 2012 Irish budget. He is part of an Oireachtas delegation that meets the Bundestag‘s Budgetary and European Affairs committees in Berlin in late January 2012.
TaoiseachEnda Kenny conveys his resignation to PresidentMichael D. Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin on March 10, 2016 after failing to get re-elected to the position in a Dáil vote, becoming acting Taoiseach as the Dáil adjourns until March 22. “It’s not the outcome that I personally would have liked to see but I respect the verdict of the people,” Kenny says. The vote for the former Taoiseach stands at: For 57, Against 94, Abstain 5.
Kenny, the MayoTD, says the Cabinet will continue its work while the various parties try to form a government. A government statement issued in the evening reads, “The Taoiseach, Mr. Enda Kenny, T.D., has this evening conveyed to the President his resignation from office. In accordance with the Constitution, the Government and the Taoiseach will continue to carry on their duties until successors have been appointed.”
Kenny says when Fine Gael and the Labour Party entered government five years earlier “our very survival was in doubt.” He adds, “The Government had to face unprecedented sets of difficulties. Many believed the situation was hopeless. The country is in a different place now.”
The outgoing Taoiseach says he is “fully committed” to working with other parties and independents to form a new government. He adds that “a substantial number of people do not want to serve in government.” Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin says the situation is not unprecedented and people should put aside the notion that “speed” is an issue in forming a government. “Ireland is relatively unusual in how fast it carries out the formation of government,” he says.
A total of 50 Fine Gael TDs are re-elected to the 32nd Dáil. The five abstentions in the Enda Kenny vote are TDs Michael Harty, Noel Grealish, Denis Naughten, Michael Collins and Mattie McGrath. They say they will abstain on each vote for Taoiseach in an indication they are willing to hold further coalition talks.
The vote for the other nominees are: Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin: For 43, Against 108, 5 Abstain. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams: For 24, Against 116. AAA-PBP candidate Richard Boyd Barrett: For 9, Against 111.
(From: “Enda Kenny resigns as Taoiseach after failing to get re-elected as leader” by Kevin Doyle and Niall O’Connor, http://www.independent.ie, March 10, 2016)
seamus dubhghaill 