MINISTER FOR HEALTH Stephen Donnelly has lost his seat in Wicklow after he was excluded on the final count this morning.

The Fianna Fáil candidate yesterday conceded that the race was going to be “tight”. Fine Gael’s Edward Timmons was elected ahead of him, securing over 1,500 more votes.

Donnelly said the combination of his constituency having one fewer seat in this general election and Taoiseach Simon Harris’ vote share meant that his position was precarious.

He is the second government TD not to be returned in Wicklow after Green Party candidate Steven Matthews was not re-elected.

Fine Gael’s Harris and Timmons, the Social Democrats’ Jennifer Whitmore and Sinn Féin’s John Brady have been elected to the constituency.

Donnelly was hopeful that he would be able to stay in the race, admitting that he “just [had] to wait and see” how the votes transferred between the candidates. 

The Wicklow constituency was altered in the boundary redrawings last year.

It used to span the entire area of County Wicklow, but the Electoral Commission decided to put the area around Arklow town into a new Wicklow-Wexford constituency. Wicklow lost a seat in the process, going from five to four.

Harris topped the poll and was elected on the first count.

Donnelly says that even if his own vote wasn’t strong, the “government vote” in the constituency was.

“When you’re sharing a constituency and a hometown with a Taoiseach, and moving from a five-seater to a four-seater – put those two things together, obviously it creates a lot of pressure,” he said.

“I think we all knew it was going to come down to the final seat.”

Donnelly was first elected as an Independent in Wicklow in 2011, before co-founding the Social Democrats in 2015 and becoming one of its leaders. He controversially left the party for Fianna Fáil in 2017.

He became Health Minister in 2020 after being re-elected.