Ireland General Discussion

[YL]

RTE has the final count as Doherty (SF) 16,897; O'Neill (FG) 8,182; Ó'Domhall (FF) 8,069.  Doherty elected.

[YL]

Not a headline I expected to see...

Healy-Rae to decide if he will run for president - Irish Times

Would he be able to get nominated?

[YL]

What would be a plausible Government if those figures actually happened in an election?  The most obvious options look like a FF/FG "grand coalition" between FF and FG or one of them inviting Sinn Féin in, but wouldn't either of those be, well, a bit controversial?

[YL]

RedC for the Sunday Business Post:

FG 30 (+2)
Ind/Oth 21 (-5)
FF 20 (+2)
SF 16 (-)
Lab 7 (-3)
GP 2 (-)
Renua 2 (+2)
SP/SWP 1 (+1)
SD 1 (+1)

Given that the Greens, the SDs, the Trots and the abomination that is Renua are listed separately, what does "Ind/Oth" actually mean here in practice?  Healy-Rae junior and friends?

[YL]

First post-LE poll from Behaviour & Attitudes for the Sunday Times:

FF 28 (-)
FG 23 (-5)
Ind/Oth 16 (+4)
SF 12 (-7)
GP 11 (+6)
Lab 5 (+1)
SP/SWP 2 (-1)
SD 1 (-)
Aontú 1 (+1)
Renua 1 (+1)

B&A tend to show sudden shifts from one poll to the next without obvious cause, although the Green surge is following good European and local results. Renua ticking upwards after losing its only elected representative and party leader is less intuitive but I suppose it meant that they got some media attention and any publicity is...

FG will now be looking to the Greens as a potential coalition partner, in no small part because that's where a lot of their lost votes in middle-class Dublin have gone. If you liked Woke Thatcherism, you're going to just love Woke Green Thatcherism. My guess is that a lot of the SF vote has gone to independents as a less specific protest/dissatisfaction option.

I'd have thought the Greens in Ireland would be wary of another coalition after their experience with Fianna Fáil.

[YL]

OK, most recent polls by each of the three regular pollsters.  The RedC one dates from 23 October, the  other two from 13 November.

Ireland Thinks: SF 32, FG 24, FF 17, Soc Dem 5, Greens 5, Lab 4, Solidarity/PBP 3, Aontú 3

Behaviour & Attitudes: SF 37, FG 21, FF 20, Green 5, Soc Dem 3, Lab 3, Solidarity/PBP 1, Aontú 1

RedC: SF 33, FG 25, FF 12, Soc Dem 6, Lab 5, Greens 4, Solidarity/PBP 3, Aontú 2

[YL]

Looking at the RTE live blog suggestions seem to be that in rural areas No is winning both referendums and it's close in Dún Laoghaire, though it's not clear whether the latter applies to both. The implications for the overall outcome are fairly obvious.

[YL]

RTE have found somewhere where one of the referendums is winning:

Elsewhere in Dublin South Central, tallying of boxes in the Kilmainham area has shown 98 votes in favour of 'Yes' and 60 votes in favour of 'No' in the Family referendum.

In the Care referendum, for the same area, tallies show 73 votes in favour of 'Yes' and 78 votes in favour of 'No', making this one of the closest margins of any tally in the Dublin South Central count.

[YL]

With 10 constituencies having declared the Family referendum is losing 66.3% to 33.7%. 9 of the constituencies have voted No, with Dún Laoghaire voting Yes by 50.3% to 49.7%.

Tallying made it clear that the Care referendum did worse.

[YL]

Final result on the "Family" referendum: No 67.7%, Yes 32.3%, turnout 44.4%. Dún Laoghaire was the only constituency to vote Yes.

[YL]

And the final results on the "Care" referendum: No 73.9%, Yes 26.1%. Even Dún Laoghaire was nearly 58% No.

[YL]

No, not really. The Irish Clegg was Éamonn Gilmore.

And the Irish Labour Party hasn't really recovered, and quite possibly never will.

Kelly was inching - well kind of inching - towards refocussing on economic issues, but the problems were a) that he's still remembered and disliked by the general public for his role in the coalition, and b) he lacks even basic manners and thereby antagonised his party colleagues (having met him briefly at the famous long count in Longford-Westmeath in 2016 I can confirm the latter personally).

The Dublin Bay South by-election was an absolutely Pyrrhic victory for them. It's a very demographically odd constituency; a quite deprived working-class minority in council estates in the city centre, a large and very affluent Old Money majority once you travel beyond the canals, and very little in between (and much of what middle-to-lower-income demographic there is is not franchised because they're not Irish or UK citizens). It's rather like Richmond Park or possibly Wentworth (Australian readers can correct me here). It has a self-image (at least in the western parts of the constituency in Rathmines and Ranelagh and the area between the South Circular Road and the canal) of being "progressive" and it suited Bacik down to the ground once she was first mover for the by-election. But the south-eastern quadrant of Dublin is a complete demographic outlier in the 26 counties and Bacik would be absolutely unelectable anywhere else. The by-election gave her an image as a "winner" and the fact that she's personally personable meant that she was then in a prime position to take over when Kelly was ousted, but she has zero, zilch, nada appeal to anyone outside that "progressive" middle-class academic/media/NGO bubble.

PS: And the boundary changes absolutely screw them in that Duncan Smith, who is the only figure young enough not to be associated with the Gilmore years and grounded enough to have possible wider appeal, sees his constituency split in half and redrawn as a 3-seater where his vote last time was about 8%.

How do you see the differences (such as they are) between Labour and the Social Democrats?

[YL]

Varadkar to stand down as Taoiseach and FG leader.

Was this telegraphed at all? Seems to have come out of nowhere.

Will he stand down now, or only when the next election is schedule, March 2025?

Interesting that the 3 European PMs with Indian ancestry, Costa, Varadkar and Sunak, are all poised to leave office roughly at the same time.

As FG leader immediately, as Taoiseach as soon as his successor is chosen.