THERE’S waiting, and then there’s the Galway City Council local election count.

At lunchtime yesterday, the first ballot box out of 64 finally arrived after being transported from Leisureland in Salthill (where the rest were bieng opened and tallied) to the Westside community centre where the count was taking place.

By early evening the count had yet to begin. Instead, bored count workers sat around a hall underneath a slide show projection of images from the Volvo boat race in the city, as the vessels left yesterday. Maybe the rest of the boxes were on board.

Eventually it started, although the first count didn’t come in until after 6pm. Independent candidate Terry O’Flaherty topped the poll in Galway City East, but failed to reach the quota of 1,257 votes with 1,139.

Behind her was independent candidate Declan McDonnell with 1,094 and Fianna Fáil’s Michael Crowe with 1,045 followed by Labour candidate Derek Nolan with 995, Fine Gael’s Brian Walsh with 979 and Labour’s Tom Costello on 777.

Outgoing Fianna Fáil councillor Mary Leahy is now in danger of losing her seat as she trailed seventh with a poor showing of 758 first preferences after the first count. There are seven outgoing councillors in City East with six seats to be filled. But extra votes for Fine Gael and Labour candidates are not neccesarily translating into seats.

The tallied share of the vote actually shows Fianna Fáil up from 19% in 2004 to 20.4%. Fine Gael are up 3% from 17% to 20% and Labour made a massive jump from 16% to 21.5%.

The Green Party is also up in the tallied percentage of the vote from 2% to an estimated 5%. Meanwhile, the Sinn Fein vote in Galway City has collapsed from 8% in 2004 to just 2.8%. Independent candidates received approximately 30% of the tallied vote.

The count in Galway City was one of the latest to start in the country with the first count for Galway City East only coming in at 6pm yesterday.

Before the election, Fianna Fáil held just three outgoing seats, the same as Fine Gael and Labour, with the Green Party holding one and independents and former PDs making up five. With exit polls nationally projecting that Fianna Fáil would secure less than a quarter of the vote nationally, getting even close to that in Galway City Council was always going to be impossible, as Fiann Fáil got merely 19% of the local election vote in 2004.

Throughout Galway City, Fianna Fáil ran a relatively poor campaign, disorganised and without coordination between party candidates which no doubt will have an adverse effect on where their transfers will go. The biggest issues facing the 47,800-strong electorate in the city are cutbacks in the health sector, education, water quality and intense overdevelopment which has seen a 26% increase in the population in ten years.

At 11.30am, an African family walked up to the community centre enquiring about the weekly basketball club, only to be told it was over for the summer. That said, they might as well have gone in to shoot a few hoops because there was nothing else going on inside. A few community centre workers discussed heading out to see the boats leave for Sweden. “There’s a nice off-licence over there,” one mused, “go over and get yourself a couple of bottles of chardonnay,” he suggested to the Sunday Tribune as a method of killing time.

After midday, there was still no sign of the boxes. An elderly woman approached the door of the centre and eyed up a sign outlining the restrictions for entry, “only people belonging to the party allowed in?” she questioned to a nod from a garda, “well thanks be to God I don’t belong to any of them”, she remarked before walking away.