Page "Fianna Fáil" Paragraph 5

Fianna Fáil's success was credited by The Irish Times to its local structure.

The basic unit was the cumann ( branch ) which were then grouped into comhairle ceantair ( district branch ) and a comhairle dáil ceantair ( constituency branch ) in every constituency.

At the party's height it boasted 3, 000 cumainn, an average of 75 per constituency.

The party claimed 55, 000 members in 2004, a figure which Eoin O ' Malley, a political scientist, considers exaggerated compared to membership figures for other parties.