Irish general election, 26th Feb 2016

[Zanas]

Close of nominations was noon yesterday.

Below are my numbers cobbled together from various sources... E&OE

Included also is the number of female candidates. For those unaware, rules regarding State funding for parties changed since the last election. Parties running greater than 70% of their candidates of one gender would suffer significant financial penalty under the new rules.

	Candidates	Candidates
Party	Total	Female
Fine Gael	88	27
Fianna Fáil	71	22
Sinn Féin	50	18
Green	40	14
Labour	36	13
AAA-PBP	31	13
Renua	26	8
Independent Alliance	21	5
Direct Democracy	18	3
SocDems	14	6
Independents 4 Change	5	2
Workers	5	2
People’s Convention	4	1
UnitedPeople	3	1
Catholic Democrats	3	2
Irish Democratic Party	2	1
WUAG	1	0
Fís Nua	1	1
Communist	1	0
Independents	131

Wow what a sexist country. I mean not even the anticapitalists or Green make the effort to throw in as many females as males. Sad.

[Zanas]

So SF polled high for the best part of last year, and started the campaign pretty high, and are now slowly drifting to lower double digits. Is it just a case of "reality strikes the voters", or have they campaigned very poorly ?

[Zanas]

Your post about the Western islands prompted me to look into their history and discover the notion of the Gaeltacht, of which I was unaware. Who usually wins the Gaeltacht parts ? SF or FF ? I would guess it would not be FG or Labour territory, maybe Independents ?

[Zanas]

Well thanks for that, I love you pal ! Glad that my assumptions were somewhat correct, as I generally don't know very much about Ireland. So some of the Independent vote in Connemara is actually more radical SinnFeinism ? I didn't even know it was still around.

[Zanas]

Looking at transfers in a number of constituencies, it seems that transfers between and SF and FF in both ways were somewhat decent, transfer from the Greens were all over the place. The Green constituency seems to really be from across the board, which I guess makes sense. Also, SDs got decent transfers from the left, even the AAA-PBP. Finally, STV has the advantage of being able to label independents from their transfers, even though you haven't followed closely.