Ireland Elects: Labour Party on course to be completely wiped out in Irish politics as left wing voters coalesce around Sinn Fein. Seat Projections = SF 61 (+24), FG 38 (+3), FF 35 (-3), SD 6 (nc), S-PBP 5 (nc), GP 2 (-10), LP 0 (-6), Ind 12 (-7).

34 comments

  3. I’m not a left-wing voter, but it would be sad if a party like SF (who remind me of FF of the 1970s, narrow-minded, clannish, insular and quite right-wing in reality) put an end to a decent party like Labour. I think Labour made a mistake going with Bacik as leader, they needed to go back to their working class roots.

  8. So FG, FF and Greens need to persuade 6 independents to enter government with them to form a new government based on the numbers. SF need all of the left leaning parties in addition to 9 independents to form a government. The left are notoriously hard to negotiate with so SF would have their work cut out for them if the numbers end up like this. It would be much more likely for FF, FG and Greens to form a government than SF.

  9. So FG, FF and a handful of independents will be the next government then. They won’t want to be burdened by the greens who are an awkward party to deal with so they will be out.

  12. The fracture on the left will scupper any advances from SF imo, and the SDs laughed at them the last time too.

    FF would be incredibly stupid to entertain SF.

    And SF portraying themselves as an alternative then immediately installing FF back into govt would be hilarious. Especially a FF with Bertie on board.

  15. Question from an outsider for ye lads, why has Labour completely collapsed in Ireland? Is it the case of pasokification like in the rest of Europe or is it uniwue to Ireland? Also why are the Social Democrats so small? I feel like their endorsement of the Nordic model would be popular with leftist voters.

  16. Problem with doing a straight line projection of polling numbers to seats, especially with small parties, is that it ignores potential concentrations of support in various constituencies.

    To take Labour as an example, if they can’t rise in the polls then they’ll lose some seats. They’re unlikely though to lose all of their seats. Sean Sherlock is in a strong position in Cork East and unlikely to lose his seat. Similarly Brendan Howlin only loses his seat if he doesn’t run again – and George Lawlor who’ll take over from him managed to poll 20% on his own in the 2019 by-election. Similarly Alan Kelly will keep his seat if he runs (and the rumour is that he will) particular given that Tipperary looks like it will be split in two with an extra seat overall. Ged Nash is indeed in danger.

    The Dublin seats are harder to predict because they’ll probably be subject to boundary changes. That said, you can look at Aodhan O Riordain will be happier than Cian O’Callaghan, for a very simple reason that generally applies to Labour: he didn’t benefit from SF transfers nearly as much as O’Callaghan did. Those transfers won’t be there next time out. Mitchell had close to two quotas, she’ll bring in a running mate. Those transfers that went heavily to O’Callaghan, about half of that via PBP and indos, won’t be there.

    That doesn’t mean he’s safe, but if you were picking between his position and O’Callaghan’s you’d prefer to be in Aodhan’s starting position.

    Duncan Smith will be in trouble depending on the boundary changes.

    Bacik will be in a battle for the last seat with Jim O’Callaghan and Eamonn Ryan.

    The strategy with Bacik is to try to expand into the ground being ceded by the Greens, Fianna Fáil, and Fine Gael by being in government. She’s a “liberal” moreso than a lefty, at least in style. They’re not going for working class votes, they’re going for the lads who would have voted Green or Fine Gael but can’t bring themselves to vote for the Government (because housing) but don’t like Sinn Féin (because IRA).

    That’s pretty clear if you look at the seats they’re clearly targeting for pick ups. For Kildare South they’ve put Mark Wall in the Seanad, who narrowly missed out. If he can keep ahead of Cathal Berry this time he’ll get in, and Cathal Berry has been a stout supporter of Government. He’ll also hope some voters come home from SF’s Patricia Ryan given that she’s now proven herself a bit of an embarrassment.

    They’ll run Senator Rebecca Moynihan in Dublin South Central and again hope to take the liberal votes off of Patrick Costello – who knows this and so stays to the left of Government. Again she didn’t get much SF transfers so their second seat there won’t bother her (but will bother Bríd Smith).

    They also have a prospect in Ciaran Ahern in Dublin South West who’ll be looking to take Frances Noel Duffy’s seat.

    Really Labour’s future is less what their national polling is like at this point, but how they are polling in Dublin, and to a lesser extent in their handful of “safe” seats.

  18. These results seem strange to me. I looked up their website, and they say they’re aggregating ten recent opinion polls. However, Labour consistently poll between 3 – 5% in all the ten polls they suggest, so it’s not clear why they’d not win a single seat.

    Similarly, I don’t think the Inds will lose so many.

  20. The biggest fuck you they ever gave us was when we eventually ran out of patience and decided to replace FF with FG, the contemporary opposition, and then FG just straight up merged with them the second they got a sniff of power.

    Either that or the way every election they bring up some secret about sinn fein they have known for 30 years but hid away until it was useful to them. How many more secrets are they hiding? I guarantee we will be hearing about some new shit from the 90s next time around that DF and FG knew about in the 90s but are absolutely appalled by in the 2020s.

  21. Hung dail….there isn’t enough Mattie McGrath’s/healy-raes to prop up FFG indefinitely

    Nearly certain there is to be extra TDs in the next dail as some constituencies havnt enough

  22. It’s a bit hard to predict the seats for the next Dáil prior to the constituency commission which will add between 11 and 21 seats. Exactly which constituencies get those seats and what parts of which constituencies are shuffled around will have a substantial impact. For example, they have SF with 3 out of 5 seats in Donegal. It’s highly likely Donegal will be back to two three seaters in the next election. It’s very possible that SF would get 4 out of 6 seats in such a scenario.

    Also, if generally there’s a move towards more five seat constituencies than there is at the moment, there’ll be more independents.

  23. FG haven’t gained any seats in an election since 2011, have a large number of seniors resigning, and aren’t particularly popular.

    Where are the seat gains going to materialise from?

  25. Interesting if these numbers were to play out at a GE that SF would make such huge gains without hitting FFG, SD, S-PBP and AON but would be at the expense of LAB and GP wipeouts

  28. Who are the fucking simpletons still in favour of FF and FG?! Like, at this point there must be something wrong with you to constantly vote for the parties that have gotten us here.

  29. Hate that. I thought the Greens were doing a great job. Not the massive WWII style emergency action world governments need to make to avert climate disaster, but fair dues for managing to push some hefty boulders up hills.

  31. This is a shocking methodology. Put absolutely no stock in it, it takes no account for how our voting system works. It ingnores both the ranked preference element and the constituencies.

  33. After London I eventually found myself in Australia. I married an incredibly beautiful Australian girl and we have 3 children. I work as basically a labourer, an “unskilled” person. I return home when I can, when I can afford it. My children are all professional’s, they have smarts that I’m unsure where they got them. Anyhows I’m Paul, and I will always be Irish. Just my opinion.

  34. SF’s recent positioning of themselves as the left wing progressive “we’ll look after you” party is wild.
    Especially considering the way they’ve looked after people in the recent past.

Leave a Reply