Laois man elected president of Geographical Society of Ireland

A Laois man has been elected as the new President of the Geographical Society of Ireland.

Adrian Kavanagh lectures in the Department of Geography in Maynooth University, where his main research is on elections.

He was elected at the AGM of the Society, at the 50th Conference of Irish Geographers in Maynooth University.

A Colt native now living in Portarlington, at the election Mr Kavanagh paid tribute to his late father Tony who had passed away a week earlier.

“My Dad was not an academic, but he was always interested in knowledge and information about places and he used to quiz us regularly about towns and counties for fun. His memory remained excellent up until his final illness and his knowledge about obscure places around Ireland put mine to shame. I think he would have got a kick out of me being elected as President of the Society today,” Mr Kavanagh said.

One of four children of Tony and Anne Kavanagh, Adrian Kavanagh attended Raheen NS and Heywood, and gained his BA, MA and PhD in Maynooth University.

He is well known for his expert analyis of elections, and last week spoke on RTE radio about the abortion vote. He explained his interest to the Leinster Express.

“I am fascinated by how geographical elections are, whether it has to with the candidate or party support, where they do well or not so well, and voter turnout. The impact of electoral boundaries and the ways in which political parties use geography when it comes to candidate selection and planning campaigns,” he said.

He is also a fan of Eurovision number crunching and is preparing to study the recent contest.

“This year obviously was an interesting one for Ireland, as we got to the Final. There were very big differences this year between the jury votes and the public televotes. When I get time to do research over the Summer, I’ll try and drill into the numbers, to make better sense of what happened,” he said.

He also gives an expert view on when the next general election might happen.

“It really looks as if would not take much to collapse the current government and cause an election. The main political parties now have most of the election candidates selected, so it would not take much for them to go a full “war footing”. I would not be surprised if there was an election before the end of the year. If not, it could happen early in 2019,” he said.