Born: March 4th, 1964
Died: January 23rd, 2026
Brian Crowley was probably the most phenomenal vote-getter in the State’s history. He topped the poll in five successive European elections, winning an incredible 180,329 votes in the newly created Ireland South constituency in 2014. It was the last election he contested.
Just as remarkably, he managed to achieve this extraordinary level of popularity while confined to a wheelchair, having been paralysed after falling from a building when just 16 years old. Despite his disability, he always appeared cheerful and upbeat, with never a hint of self-pity.
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European Parliament colleagues and journalists marvelled at how Crowley maintained his good humour on the wearying monthly trek to and from Strasbourg, which left everybody else tired and irritable. Given his disability, he was required to be the first on the plane and the last to disembark, but he never complained.
He fell out with Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, who thwarted his ambitions to run for the presidency in 2011, and he was later expelled from the parliamentary party for leaving the liberal ALDE group in the parliament to join the conservative ECHR. He was always emphatic, though, that he remained a member of the Fianna Fáil party.
Brian Crowley was born in 1964 and raised in Bandon, Co Cork. His father, Flor, was a Fianna Fáil TD for west Cork from 1965 to 1982 and Brian was fascinated by politics from an early age. He attended school in Bandon, but his education was interrupted at the age of 16 by the nature of his injuries.
He spent long periods in the National Rehabilitation Centre, Dún Laoghaire, following the fall and his brother Niall revealed at his funeral that a consultant at the hospital had told his parents that Brian would probably not survive beyond the age of 25.
Instead, he lived life to the full. As Niall said in his eulogy, Brian’s life “could be summed up in the four Fs – family, friends, faith and fun”.
He brought that sense of fun and joie de vivre to politics. He was active in Fianna Fáil from an early age and appointed to the Seanad by then taoiseach Albert Reynolds at the age of just 25 in 1993. Reynolds was an old friend of his father and it was widely assumed that Brian was being groomed for a run at winning a Dáil seat in his native Cork South-West.
Instead, he set his sights on the European Parliament and after just a year in the Seanad, he won a place on the Fianna Fáil ticket for Munster, alongside the vastly experienced former minister for foreign affairs Gerry Collins.
As the campaign developed in the early summer of 1994, it became clear that Brian Crowley had an instinctive empathy with the electorate. While his disability generated media interest, it was his open-hearted personality that was the main appeal for so many voters.
He topped the poll with 84,463 votes, 23 per cent of all votes cast in Munster. It was an astonishing achievement for a 30-year-old novice politician in his first electoral contest. The Munster constituency was later widened to include a large chunk of south Leinster, but he continued his poll-topping performance in every European election he contested.
He suffered severe personal blows when his father died at the age of just 62 in 1997 and his brother and campaign manager Flor jnr (42) was killed in a car crash in 2009.
Having been close to Reynolds, Crowley never developed a similar rapport with Bertie Ahern. When Reynolds told him during the presidential selection convention in 1997 that Ahern had shown him his ballot paper to prove he had voted for him against Mary McAleese, Crowley famously remarked: “That means you’re f***ed.”
That was just one instance that demonstrated his shrewd grasp of politics. At the European level, he established himself among the leading members of the Union for Europe of the Nations group which emphasised national sovereignty as well as commitment to the social market economy.
Crowley was co-president of the group until 2009, when Fianna Fáil left it and joined the liberal and more influential ALDE group. He opposed the move as he did not consider himself a liberal in either the social or economic fields, but was overruled by the party leadership. That led to a growing rift between him and Fianna Fáil headquarters.
That rift was exacerbated by Martin’s refusal to allow him put his name forward as the party’s presidential candidate in 2011. At that stage, Fianna Fáil had suffered devastating losses in the general election of that year and Martin wanted to focus on rebuilding the parliamentary party. Crowley and his supporters believed that a run in the presidential election would be the ideal springboard for a party revival.
In the event, Fianna Fáil did not put up a presidential candidate for the first time in its history and the office was won by Michael D Higgins. Many in Fianna Fáil believed that, despite the party’s travails, Brian Crowley would have been capable of winning the contest.
In the 2014 European election, he again topped the poll with an astonishing 34 per cent of the vote in the new constituency of Ireland South. He was the only Fianna Fáil candidate elected that year. On his return to Brussels, he refused to continue as a member of ALDE and joined the European Conservative and Reformist Group which also contained the British Conservative party MEPs.
Brian Crowley insisted that his new group more closely reflected his views than the liberal ethos of ALDE, but the party leadership was angry at the move. He was expelled from the parliamentary party but always considered himself a Fianna Fáil representative.
In the following years, he suffered repeated illnesses as the impact of his condition took its toll. He was unable to attend the European Parliament for long stretches and there were calls from some in Fianna Fáil for him to stand down and make way for someone on the party’s substitute list.
He refused to bow to the pressure, but in January 2019, he announced that he would not contest the European election scheduled for May of that year.
Brian Crowley was a truly remarkable politician. Writing in 2014, the late political commentator Noel Whelan summed up his electoral achievements. “Crowley is actually the most successful Irish election candidate ever. While a few have, in presidential elections, for example, got higher votes in individual contests, nobody has matched Crowley for sustained vote share over multiple elections.”
That incredible vote performance was a tribute to his open, sunny personality and his ability to rise above his physical disability and enthuse others with his joy for life.
Brian Crowley is survived by his mother, Sally, brother Niall and sisters Maeve, Deirdre and Fiona.
