KILKEE based Dr Tom Nolan has been selected as a second Fine Gael candidate in Clare for the General Election.
Senior officials from Fine Gael headquarters met with Dr Nolan on Thursday and on Sunday morning confirmed his candidacy alongside first-time candidate Leonora Carey (FG).
The Clare Echo understands that top brass in the party are still in talks with another potential candidate.
Nolan has lived and worked in West Clare since 1980, specialising in musculoskeletal medicine in Kilrush and Ennis in recent years. “My work has presented me with a unique opportunity to know and understand the people of Clare and to develop a relationship based on trust, this is something I have always held dear,” he said.
Dr Nolan outlined, “Politics for me is a means of securing social justice and ensuring ‘cothrom na feinne’; a fair crack of the whip for all. To this end, I served as a Town Commissioner for 10 years. I was one of a group of seven, – hugely backed by the people of the Loop Head Peninsula – who fought against the imposition of the Loran-C mast, and not only won a victory at the Supreme Court but brought about legislative change.
“As part of the Kilkee Planning Development Group, I resisted the overdevelopment that blighted Kilkee in the late 1990’s. With the late Peadar McNamara and Dr. John Barton, I formed and was secretary of the Health Services Action Group, which campaigned to resist the downgrading of local hospitals, as proposed by the Hanly Report. While our A&E department closed in 2009, we succeeded in ensuring that Clare was one of the first areas nationally to get the new Paramedic service,” Nolan added.
Putting his name forward for Fine Gael “is an opportunity for me to fulfil my ambition to finish the job of restoring acute medical services to Ennis Hospital and to improve Primary Care, especially in out-of-hours services. In tandem with this, I am committed to making our streets and rural communities feel safer and I am also committed to listening to what our farmers propose in mitigating the effects of climate change. I look forward to the campaign ahead and to meeting the people who live and work in Clare, and who make it the special place that it is”.
In 2011, Dr Nolan hit out at then Government Clare TDs, Joe Carey (FG), Pat Breen (FG) and Michael McNamara (LAB) on the lack of work they did to highlight the difficulties caused by the removal of emergency services from Ennis and Nenagh hospitals. He said neither of the trio had “ruffled the feathers” of then Health Minister, Dr James Reilly (FG) regarding the impact of reconfiguration.
He had been an Independent member of Kilkee Town Council from 1999 to 2009.
