Phil Prendergast
Irish politician
Phil Prendergast (née Foley; born 20 September 1959) is an Irish former Labour Party politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the South constituency from 2011 to 2014, Leader of the Labour Party in the Seanad in 2011 and a Senator for the Labour Panel from 2007 to 2011.
Early and private life
Phil Foley was born in County Kilkenny. She was a midwife at South Tipperary General Hospital for more than 20 years, having trained in Waterford Regional Hospital. She is married to Ray Prendergast, a psychiatric nurse, and has two children.
She is a former local branch officer with the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, on the executive board of which she served in 1994.
Political career
Local
Prendergast served on Clonmel Borough Council and South Tipperary County Council from 1999 to 2007, where she was elected originally as a member of the Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG).
National
She first contested an election to Dáil Éireann in June 2001, when she stood on behalf of the WUAG in the Tipperary South by-election that followed the death of Theresa Ahearn; she polled 7,897 first preference votes. In June 2005, she left the WUAG to join the Labour Party. She was a Labour candidate at the 2007 general election in the Tipperary South constituency; she was unsuccessful, but was subsequently elected to the Seanad by the Labour Panel.
She caused some controversy within the local Labour Party branch when she tried to nominate a family member to replace her on the council.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Phil Prendergast” is irish politician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Phil, Prendergast and Irish, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q509840. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2011, 2014 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Phil Prendergast” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.