Cootehill goes to Carmel
While Cootehill is in no way a bellweather town, it was an interesting battleground given its proximity to the Farney County.
From the seven booths at St Michael's NS, which include Cootehill town, Cohaw and Tonaghbane, the tallies indicate there were 1,601 votes cast.
This is Carmel Brady's domain and that was borne out by the tallies showing 740 for the Fine Gael first time runner. That's 60 votes shy of half the vote. She needed a strong home performance if she is to edge the race between her and her running mate TP O'Reilly. It's likely the elimination of either Brady or O'Reilly in the hours ahead will be a major transfer boost to the other.
The Fine Gael vote was very geographically disciplined with a mere 14 first preferences seeping south towards TP, and 27 migrating east to David Maxwell.
Sinn Féin did well to amass a combined 372 votes with Pauline Tully taking 206 of those. However with Carthy (122) and Cathy Bennett (44) polling well 45% of the Sinn Féin vote leaked into Farney hands.
Fianna Fáil didn't perform quite as well with Niamh Smyth on 105, Brendan Smith on 91. Considering how Cootehill borders County Monaghan, you would imagine Robbie Gallagher would have hoped for more than the 39 he appears to have got.
Sarah O'Reilly did as well for Aontú with 101 from the tallies as either of her Cavan Fianna Fáil rivals.