SINN FÉIN’S finance spokesman Arthur Morgan has announced he will be stepping down from politics at the next general election, in order to return to his family business.
“I want to move on, I want to do something different,” Morgan explained on this morning’s Morning Ireland, saying he was at an age (56) where he now needed to decide whether he should stick with politics for the remainder of his time pre-retirement, or whether to return to his family firm.
“I think it’s no secret that I was quite reluctant to go into the Dáil in the first place – I left the family business, and a position I held in that business, to go and do the Dáil. I’ve done that now.”
Asked if he had found the prospect of two terms in opposition frustrating, Morgan agreed that “there are conventions about the Dáil that are extremely frustrating,” saying that the government had often refused to accept opposition amendments to legislation, regardless of their quality.
The Dáil was, in his eyes, a “very stuffy and a very restrictive place” which required radical reform – a sentiment he had also given to the Dundalk Democrat newspaper – and he was looking forward to getting the “just go do it” mode of business.
Morgan’s Louth constituency, where he has been a TD since 2002, is gaining a seat in the next general election, though the increase is largely moot because another current TD, Seamus Kirk, is automatically returned as the sitting Ceann Comhairle.
Morgan said his decision to step down had been accepted by the local constituency organisation, with whom he had an “exceptionally good relationship”.
The Irish Times reports that Morgan had unsuccessfully contested general elections in Louth in 1987 and 1989, and the Leinster constituency in the European elections of 1999.
He had, on the same day as the European election, been elected to Louth County Council where he sat for four years until he lost his seat under the Dual Mandate rules.
Morgan served seven-and-a-half years of a 14-year sentence in the Maze Prison after being found guilty of possession of explosives and weapons following an arrest at Carlingford Lough in 1977.
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