Party leader Ivana Bacik will attend next week’s convention to select city councillor Helen Ogbu as Labour’s candidate for the 2026 Galway West by-election.
Senator Nessa Cosgrove, Conor Sheehan TD, and a number of other Oireachtas members, alongside local Labour councillors, are expected to attend. The opposition party is also planning to appoint a high-profile director of elections.
No other candidates are contesting the Labour Party ticket, so Ogbu should be selected unopposed to run for the Dáil at an event in the Raddisson Red Hotel next Monday evening.
The by-election must be held by May 11.
Elected in 2024 as the first person of colour to serve on Galway City Council, Ogbu has worked in the Galway Volunteer Centre for 16 years, and has fostered more than 30 children.
Previously employed in diplomatic service, she arrived to Ireland in the early 2000s seeking refuge. Her late husband, Sunny Orji-Ogbu, was killed while running for a seat in Nigeria’s National Assembly in 2016. He was 45.
“Transport, traffic, housing – of course – and the cost of living are my priorities for Galway West,” Ogbu says. “Transport in particular is something that Galway’s five TDs could deal with together, as the congestion is only getting worse,” she told the Advertiser. “My approach is collaborative.”
Ogbu was eliminated on the 8th count in the 2024 general election, with most of her 2,600 votes redistributed to Eibhlín Seoighthe (SD ) and Catherine Connolly (Ind ).
Bacik urged the first-time councillor to stand in the contest necessitated by Catherine Connolly’s election to the presidency, and it is expected the Dublin TD will appoint a well-known director of elections to run Ogbu’s campaign in Galway.
Former party leader Alan Kelly is understood to have expressed interest in managing the Galway West campaign, while Labour’s only west of Ireland TD, Limerick’s Conor Sheahan, has also been mentioned by party insiders.
Labour has not had a TD in Galway since Michael D Higgin’s successor, Derek Nolan, lost his seat in the 2016 general election. Previously, Michael D was Labour’s Galway West TD for one year in the early 1980s, and then held the seat from 1987 to 2011.
Catherine Connolly was a Labour Party city councillor, but had left the party when she won a Dáil seat in 2016 – a seat the independent left-winger held until 2025, when she was elected president with the largest mandate in the history of the state.
With a fragmented left in Galway West after Connolly’s departure to the Áras, Ogbu is seen by many observers as an experienced grass-roots operator, and credible threat to Sinn Féin hoovering up the constituency’s left-wing votes, especially those in Galway city and its outer suburbs.
Catherine Connolly’s former Galway campaign manager, and now candidate, Sheila Garrity, is so far an unknown quantity, while fellow non-party candidate, Mayor Mike Cubbard, is expected to position himself left-of-centre to win over former Connolly voters across the city, if he runs. The Social Democrats have not confirmed a candidate, although leader Holly Cairns said she will.
Ogbu says she is a member of Tonn na Clé, a new leftist grouping in Galway, and that she has had informal discussions with Garrity about vote transfers, but no pact has been agreed.
The Green Party’s Niall Murphy is also in the mix, and a growing number of WhatsApp-based left-wing alliances in Galway are increasingly discussing informal voting pacts to help push a leftist candidate over the line.
Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas, formerly a Fianna Fáil county councillor, has been widely tipped by national media as the favourite in Galway West, as he narrowly missed out on a Dáil seat in the 2024 general election. The entrance last week of his popular Connemara neighbour, Councillor Thomas Welby (Ind ), into the by-election fray, may now dilute that support.
However it is Sinn Féin which comes to the by-election with most electoral weight behind it. Mairead Farrell TD’s 8,164 first preference votes in 2024 came from right across the vast constituency. Other successful candidates at the last general election – John Connolly (FF ), Noel Grealish (RIG ), Catherine Connolly (Ind ) and Hildegarde Naughton (FG ) – all relied, to varying extents, on geographically concentrated pockets of support.
Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and the Social Democrats are expected to reveal their candidates over the coming weeks.
