Taken ill on the night of the election, 25 January 1906, he died as the result of a heart attack in Guy's Hotel, Tuam, at 1.30am the following morning.
As was widely expected, Higgins topped the poll at the election count, which was held later on the day of his death, beating the incumbent MP, John Philip Nolan, who had stood as an Independent Nationalist. Higgins, who received 2,685 votes (Nolan took 1,064), was posthumously declared elected by the county sheriff, the returning officer.[3][4]
The remarkable circumstances surrounding the election led the Irish Independent to comment that "candidates have died before the actual election, but we doubt if ever such a case as the present has occurred before, where a candidate has died after the poll has been taken and before the result has been declared".[5]
This circumstance of a candidate winning a seat posthumously occurred again to Noel Skelton in 1935, and to Sir Edward Taswell Campbell and Leslie Pym in 1945; however, all of them were candidates for re-election. Thomas Higgins is the only MP to be newly elected posthumously.
^"General Election 2015 explained: What are their backgrounds, gender". The Independent. 14 April 2015. Archived from the original on 7 May 2022. Retrieved 4 June 2020. It is not absolutely essential to be alive in order to be a successful candidate. Candidates who have been elected to Parliament despite being dead include: John Kirkman (who died while polling was in progress in his City of London constituency in 1780); Thomas Higgins (who died while votes were being counted in Galway North in 1906)...