Ireland by-elections, 2014

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Left-wing independent Patrick Nulty, who got into the Dáil at the 2011 by-election, is out again. It's a pretty sordid story.

Dublin West will go to the polls this year. One of the government's electoral reforms means the writ must be issued some time in the next six months. The probability of a second Labour victory is, shall we say, low.

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Fianna Fáil saved the seat in 2011 because this constituency has lots of well-off professionals but a weak Fine Gael presence. Apart from Leo Varadkar, FG don't have much going on here. Consider the below-average increase in the FG vote in 2011 and their worse result in the by-election that year. This was an area where the PDs were able to consistently elect councillors and that vote may have gone to FF along with their final representative.

FG elected 1 out of a total 7 councillors in 1991. He then defected to the PDs, leaving FG with none in 1999, 1/8 in 2004 (Leo) and 2/9 in 2009, which is pretty low even compared to the rest of Dublin. They ran one of their councillors with Leo in 2011, where he didn't do so well, and they ran the other in the by-election, where she did worse. So they seem to be exhausted.

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Have FF managed to recover from being shut entirely out of Dublin?

There's been no election in Dublin since 2011 but their national recovery has probably happened there too, if to a lesser extent. Note that their 2013 recovery ebbed in most recent polls to 21-24%, which is only 4-7% above 2011 and would still be their second-worst ever result. Irish politics haven't snapped back to the old alignment. Far from it.

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in answer to my qeuestion, about FF recovering in Dublin: apparently not.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/fianna-fail-struggles-to-mount-any-kind-of-revival-in-the-capital-30117071.html

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I think it's Fianna Fáil policy to consolidate branches in Dublin, which is why the numbers are small. Those huge branch numbers are in counties with sparsely-populated areas where consolidation wouldn't be tolerated.

As for the national church-gate collection, they haven't done it in Dublin in recent years, in favour of more secular fundraisers. It's unpopular among donors, churches, and party members, more so in Dublin than elsewhere, but also, low and declining attendances at Masses in the capital mean you don't get many passers-by.

However, the point is pretty clear, the way the party does its business is less-favoured in Dublin nowadays.

Demographic breakdowns aren't worth much in Irish opinion polls because they're so rare and volatile. Perhaps because of that volatility, companies don't usually publish them - they just let the newspaper publish what they want! For what it's worth, here are recent poll figures:

REDC, 6-8 January 2014: National 22%, Dublin 14%
Behaviour and Attitudes, 11-19 February 2014: National 19%, Dublin 10%
(General election, 25 February 2011: National 17%, Dublin 12%)

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Box-by-box tallies for Longford-Westmeath from the 2011 election:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By9DLhLl2w63QzQ3VkZ3ZFlNSFU

In short, FG won almost everwhere.
Only exceptions are in Longford EA. More specifically, a tie in Glack with Labour, and Labour wins in Longford Rural and Longford Urban Central.

These places are all in Longford Town. They voted Labour because Mae Sexton (Labour) is from Glack. I'm sure they also voted for Mae Sexton (PD) in 2002 when she got elected on the other side of the political spectrum. This is a good illustration of how weakly party affiliation determines voting in Ireland, especially in rural areas.

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I realise now that my choice of language was poor. Longford town isn't very rural, though Sexton's electoral base is more the rural outskirts rather than the estates of resettled Dublin council tenants; I should have said "areas of Ireland outside major cities" tend to overlook party affiliation.

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She began as an Independent, the PDs just added her to their ticket as they added other independents across the country, and she was only in Labour for the blink of an eye.

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The Irish Times reports that a prospective Labour candidate pulled out of the Longford-Westmeath by-election. It doesn't refer to the student Ennis; I think it could be an unnamed predecessor to him. The Westmeath Examiner says he will be confirmed on Monday. All credit to him for taking on an unpopular berth.

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They aren't going to win either seat, but to be fair, it would be unsurprising in... practically any other European country, I think, for a party chairwoman to be a candidate in a constituency that wasn't her home. It's only in Ireland that we demand Local Man For Local People Locally everywhere, and we can hardly say that attitude has helped us, can we?

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You are right. Fianna Fáil had the opposite problem to Labour's problem - too many people wanted to run relative to the party's prospects. Those Fianna Fáil TDs had nothing to lose by running in 2011 - other than public opprobrium on the canvass for destroying the Irish economy/sovereignty/whatever - whereas Labour councillors could lose their seats by running in the no-hope by-election. It would be foolish to run a councillor in their circumstances - whereas if you were a real no-hoper or a cert for a seat, you wouldn't mind taking time out to increase your profile.

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Box-by-box tallies for Longford-Westmeath from the 2011 election:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By9DLhLl2w63QzQ3VkZ3ZFlNSFU

If shapefiles exist somewhere, I would be happy to map this

Unfortunately, boxes aren't the same as electoral divisions, which are indeed available in an easily-mappable format from the Central Statistics Office. However, there is usually a close relationship between the two. I'll see if I can generate a "mapping" for you (if you'll pardon the pun).

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I've checked. As you can see from the polling scheme at this link, the electoral divisions in the Longford part of this constituency are very much split across polling districts. Westmeath is similar. It is beyond my local knowledge of the area to do this mapping. Apologies.

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Here are the aggregate votes by Local Electoral Area. So many parties are green. I wish someone would go for shocking pink, or Mullenesque clerical purple.

Bannon, Burke, McFadden: Fine Gael
Hogan: Sinn Féin
Kelly, O'Rourke, Troy: Fianna Fáil
Moran: non-party, ex-FF
Penrose, Sexton: Labour

Boland (non-party) got just over 2% in his home area. Nobody else got over 1% in any area.

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As for Dublin West, here is a map to show you why people in River Forest were one of the biggest (successful) groups of complainants to last year's Constituency Commission.

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I have no information for the actual districts covered by each polling station, except for their actual addresses. I tried to approximate their boundaries using electoral divisions. Treat this as a very rough guess of the boundaries, but the general areas should be about right.

As before, notable results by other candidates included McGuinness (Fianna Fáil), who won over 5% in the two polling stations just north of the Navan Road. O'Gorman (Green) and Esebamen (non-party) didn't surpass 5% in any polling station, though Esebamen did get 5.3% in one ballot box.

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Of course, it's important to note that these are ALL approximate figures to a couple of percent, because tallies are based on unofficial observations of ballot papers on count day.

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Thank you for the link and for the new signature photo, which looks like a strange instance of the damned looking forward to oblivion.

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In fact, you have hit on part of the answer. The only recent by-election at the same time as a council election was in 2009. There were two of them and Labour ran two senators, one of whom was Bacik and the other of whom was the local candidate (now a TD). No county councillor ran in Dublin South for any party. Three ran in Dublin Central, one of whom won the by-election and one of whom lost his seat. So if you are a Labour councillor, you would have to deal with both a dodgy record of keeping council seats while running for by-elections, AND a strong running mate in Joan Burton who will keep the Labour vote for herself while you get thrown out of the Dáil and are left with no seat at the council. In other words, it's a losing berth.

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Winners are Coppinger (Socialist) in Dublin West and McFadden (Fine Gael) in Longford-Westmeath.

The most interesting statistic is the tiny Labour/Green to Sinn Féin transfer rates, particularly in Dublin West. Anyone still voting Labour is now pretty firmly non-sympathetic to Sinn Féin.

These results were expected. However, the interesting local election results were not. The changes are as radical as those in the 2011 general election. Unfortunately, that thread has been locked.

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With the results of the EP elections now mostly in we now know that there will be two by-elections some time later this year: one to replace Brian Hayes (FG) in Dublin South-West and the other to replace Luke 'Ming' Flanagan (IND) in Roscommon-South Leitrim. I might go into detail later but given the local election results money would be on SF in the former and FF in the latter but, again, as this is Ireland a lot will depend on candidates.

In the aftermath of the Labour election losses, the party leader stepped down and is now being promoted by his colleagues as the country's next European Commissioner. The other prominent name is also a TD; therefore, in addition to these two by-elections, a third is likely. Furthermore, there is a Europe-related Seanad vacancy but the procedure to fill this is non-electoral.

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Phil Hogan (FG, Carlow-Kilkenny) is nominated to the European Commission; if confirmed, he will cause a third outstanding by-election.

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Mostly, they became independents. Two of Fine Gael's new 2011 TDs were PD local councillors at the last general election. At least two others had been members, if briefly, in the 80s. Several FF councillors, and at least one FG councillor, in Dublin were active members in the 2000s. Elsewhere in the country, I think a handful of their politicians joined Labour but most retained their seats as independents. As for the membership - bigger than Labour's, if I recall correctly - it's hard to generalise but I would guess the vast majority did not join another party and voted FG or Independent in 2011.

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Here are some maps of the seats up for grabs. The social-class indicator is the percentage excess of professional, managerial and technical workers over manual workers, a favoured indicator because it classifies farmers (farm size) in the same groups as urban workers. Among Dáil Éireann constituencies, it has a range of -11% to 42% (Donegal SW to Dublin S) with a median of 1% and a mean of 5%. It's 1% in Roscommon-South Leitrim and Carlow-Kilkenny, and -6% in Dublin South-West.

Dublin South-West


Urban, largely working-class, ignore the hills in the big empty area to the south. Tallaght comprises over half of this constituency, both the traditional area in the middle of the constituency and the newer Jobstown developments to the west. We talked about Tallaght here; to simplify, think of banlieues of Irish people in two-storey terraced houses. To its north-east across the motorway are established suburbs closer to the city, working-class Greenhills and bourgeois Templeogue, while to the south-east of Tallaght are Ballycullen and Firhouse, which are newer, more peripheral, middle-income suburbs.

First contested in 1981. Like many working-class areas, it became more competitive and "class-conscious" in that decade. Labour began the 1980s as the sole party here other than FF/FG, and got 18%; by 1989, the combined left reached 46%. In the interim, Mary Harney and the PDs shattered FG's support here as in the rest of west Dublin. Even FF held only one seat here from 1989 until the capital's love affair with Bertie began, then lost them all afterwards. In short, it has been very competitive, due as much to strong population growth (which weakened incumbency) as to changing class loyalties.

Dublin South-West's current representatives are 2 Labour, 1 Fine Gael and 1 Sinn Féin; Pat Rabbitte (Lab) was in cabinet and Brian Hayes (FG) was the ranking sub-cabinet minister. Hayes was elected to the European Parliament in May and Rabbitte was sacked in July. So now they will have no minister and, perhaps, two Sinn Féin TDs. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are nominating candidates from the well-off areas. Prosperous Rathfarnham to the east will be added to the constituency at the next general election, so there should be two seats available for this pair in Templeogue/Rathfarnham/Firhouse and three for everyone else in Tallaght. Paul Murphy, former MEP, will stand for the Socialist Party (I don't know what they are called any more). Labour have a candidate, but who cares?

Roscommon-South Leitrim


Here the vacancy is due to the European Parliamentary election of the radical Ming. Very socially libertarian, mildly populist, notable for his turbary rights advocacy, his long-term cannabis legalisation advocacy, and (more recently) his strongly anti-EU, anti-euro stance. Hard to politically classify other than Eurosceptic; he went far-left in the European Parliament but could as easily have shacked up with the Greens or Nigel Farage. Think Beppe Grillo, but limited to one constituency by the nature of STV.

After Roscommon and Carrick-on-Shannon, there are no towns with more than three thousand people. The suburbs of Athlone, Co. Westmeath in south Roscommon may be the single biggest urban area in the constituency. Very much the middle-Ireland of one's imagination - though note the increasing poverty in rural Leitrim and west Roscommon near Co. Mayo, where the land is stonier and farms are smaller, which is balanced by the professional profile of the outskirts of Athlone and Carrick-on-Shannon. Roscommon dominates the constituency in population terms; Leitrim, the smallest county in Ireland, was partitioned at recent general elections, leaving them with no representation in 2007-11, akin to anathema for one's county in the clientelist world of Irish politics!

Roscommon had been pushed around constituencies for years. Split between the two big parties, it was dominated by the Doherty-Leyden rivalry within Fianna Fáil from the 1970s to the late 1990s, whose vigorous, intra-party competition gave FF two seats until independents made a big breakthrough, first at local level in 1985 and then in the Dáil in 1989. Subsequently assigned to share a constituency with Longford. In my view, Longford-Roscommon was the worst constituency ever created in Ireland because the two counties are only connected by a pair of road bridges far from major urban centres. They both survived and now dwell with other partners. Leitrim, as mentioned, was partitioned North and South. Leitrim elected a Sinn Féin TD in the Sligo-dominated part in 2011 - anti-partition - coincidence?!?!?

2 Fine Gael, 1 independent at the last general election. One of the Fine Gael TDs quit the party over local hospital services and now hangs out in Lucinda Creighton's non-party parliamentary club for Fine Gael expellees. The winner of this by-election? The media are proclaiming it's Fianna Fáil, but who knows? I can't see why Sinn Féin should be ruled out so soon. There's also an independent turf-cutting candidate from Galway likely to stand. That was Ming's big issue here.

Carlow-Kilkenny


I included maps of Carlow-Kilkenny because it might have a by-election if Phil Hogan of Fine Gael is appointed to the Commission, though it would probably be in 2015, I think. The major population centres are the county towns of Kilkenny and Carlow and, to the south, the suburbs of Waterford. Kilkenny has pretty good farmland and the town itself (which would much rather you call it a city, thanks to its now-obsolete Royal Charter of 1609) has a nice castle, a couple of Michelin stars, and is generally well-kept and attractive. Carlow is a more typical Irish town, serving as a small commercial centre for the surrounding countryside.

Both Kilkenny and Carlow follow the usual Irish pattern of having a low social-class profile in the centre of the towns, higher in the peripheral countryside, then trailing off to more mixed or median levels as the rural influence grows. This could have something to do with towns being the destinations for dispossessed younger sons of small farmers in the old days of subsistence farming (i.e. before the 1970s), or maybe just small-town bigshots preferring spacious houses with gardens.

This area had above-average unionisation of farm and industrial labour and therefore was strong for the Labour Party since independence - not at all safe at Dáil level, but always within reach. The big farmers' factions of the 1920s/30s (Farmers' Party / National Centre) did well here, too, whereas the small farmers in the 1940s/50s didn't even stand. Like other 5-seaters, the effective threshold was low enough to let small-party candidates win seats as they became more competitive (Farmers in the 1920s, PDs in 1987, Greens in 2007). Last time, it elected 3 FG, 1 Lab, 1 FF. It was Fianna Fáil's strongest constituency in the country in vote terms, stronger than even the constituencies that elected two FF candidates, but county loyalties ensured Carlow FF voters transferred strongly to the Carlow Fine Gael candidate whom they elected, rather than his Kilkenny FF rival whom he defeated!

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Dublin South-West and Roscommon-South Leitrim expected on 10 October. Carlow-Kilkenny is not yet vacant.

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More candidates:

Dublin South West:

Cathal King (SF), a councillor since 2009 in Tallaght South. His selection was something of a surprise, with the expectation having been that Máire Devine, elected in May in Tallaght Central, would be the candidate.

The surprise was because King had refused nomination a few months ago by declaring that a woman should be nominated, clearly meaning Devine. That lasted until he was apparently urged by other SF members to run. I'm sure it's an old, old story from apparently-uncontested nomination battles around the world.

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There has been no opinion polling and very little journalistic reportage. I think it is fair to say no-one has a clue as to either result, or if they do, they aren't saying, beyond what we know about party strengths from the local elections, as summarised above.