Claim-jumping at heart of Mayo Fine Gael rivalry - but it's nothing new!

Fine Gael's problem is that it can't walk past a sleeping dog without giving it a kick, as the late John Kelly TD and former minister famously said.

There is an inherent ability within the party to drag old issues back up and let them appear and reappear without any decision or resolution ever being reached.

The gloves-off documented rivalry between Fine Gael's Alan Dillon and Senator Mark Duffy is nothing new.

It is the same story that played out between the Westport-based former deputy and party grandee Michael Ring and Dillon's predecessors on the ticket, and it will go on being told, generation after generation, ad infinitum.

Claim-jumping is nothing new either.

It's a fact of political life, and it's often more pronounced within parties than between rival ones. The most opposed can be the best of friends, because they know they're drinking from separate barrels.

It's always a danger in any constituency, and especially so in a rural multi-seat one, where a whole host of seats are up for grabs and the boundaries of who owns what are drawn in pencil, not ink.

Senator Mark Duffy comes from a different political background to his party colleagues.

As an independent, he had to paddle his own canoe, and seemed more than happy doing so right up until the 2024 general election, when he made the shock decision to join Fine Gael and compete among a pack of four: Alan Dillon, the incumbent and captain of the Fine Gael ticket; Martina Jennings; Keira Keogh; and Duffy himself.

Fine Gael now hold three of those four seats in the Oireachtas - Dillon and Keogh in the Dáil, Duffy in the Seanad, it is a healthy return, with a council seat in Ballina thrown in via Duffy's old patch after his accession, ensuring the deal has run smoothly for the party, or has it?

Minister of State Alan Dillon is a busy constituency worker who has built a deserving reputation through jobs done and covered from his Linenhall Street office.

Dillon came into politics just as Michael Ring was at the twilight of his - another man who thought little of the unwritten rule of inner-constituency boundaries but followed the rules of arithmetic well. Duffy, in his short two years in Fine Gael, has built a cohort of his own. He has strong relationships with councillors in his party, both in his hometown and in Castlebar, and his seat on the Oireachtas Transport Committee is an increasingly useful one, not least now that the new school year has queries mounting from parents over bus routes, roads left out, and children walking or being dropped a considerable distance from home.

The major schism of late has been the prolonged saga of the withdrawal of bus services from Straide and Breaffy, after Bus Éireann discontinued its Route 52 service earlier this year.

Right in the bailiwick of Transport Committee member Duffy, he set about representing the discommoded constituents, making a series of representations to Citylink and the NTA with the eventual goal of having the stops reinstated. Dillon did likewise, with press releases and videos from the Minister out before Duffy. Still, two campaigns on social media emerged, Dillon solo but thanking all of his colleagues, Donna Sheridan and Duffy in tandem.

No one wanted to miss the bus on this one.

The Breaffy stop returns on the Ballina-Galway Citylink route from August 31, squarely in Alan Dillon's strongest territory, while Straide's will follow once roadworks on the N58 at Ballylahan are complete.

Duffy was duly thanked by the county town minister of state for his work alongside local councillors. The senator in his social media video only thanked councillors Neil Cruise and Sheridan. It was a good news story - but no good deed goes unpunished.

A plethora of bus timetables bearing Senator Duffy's branding soon arrived at doors in Breaffy, in a not so subtle nod as to who ‘hijacked’ the campaign.

Breaffy and Straide both sit in Alan Dillon's strongest heartland but the quarrel between them on this topic alone points to ructions.

Dillon may well see Duffy as a viable threat to his political life, while the Ballina man knows he needs to expand his geography beyond the crowded, contested confines of north Mayo.

At the next general election there will be only three Fine Gael candidates running, Dillon, Keira Keogh and Duffy.

There will be even more space and territory to carve up between them. Will that satiate them?

Will it ever.