Water obsessives beat fake radicals in Dublin South-West.
Roscommon likes turf.
As I said earlier, the FG-voting matrons of Templeogue will hold their noses and transfer to the privately-educated middle-class Trotskyist ahead of the dreadful working-class Shinner.
The Socialist Party has strengths in by-elections Sinn Féin doesn't have:
- it's a much more irresponsible party able to promise even more left-wing, more protesty stuff than Sinn Féin, because they genuinely don't care about government and everyone knows it;
- it has been identified with anti-water charge politics since its pre-history in the Joe Higgins by-election campaign of 1995, now fighting a by-election in the month that water charges were finally introduced to Dublin (and non-farmers elsewhere in the country; farmers have been paying for years);
- their party is almost entirely urban, almost entirely Dublin-based in fact, and wasn't trying to win two by-elections on one day;
It's not a class issue, as the Paul Murphy vote suggests, so much as SF's being a more polarising party than the other parties in Ireland. If you're not sympathetic to either SF or SP, there are a lot more obvious reasons to transfer to the latter, like the ever-worsening record of Gerry Adams. It will matter less at a general election when there are multiple seats to be filled and transfers matter a lot less. But there are 5 seats in the new constituency and the Socialists could still win one, whereas Sinn Féin now appear quite likely to win two, not one or three.
