A general election could come at any time in the 12 months to October 2011, writes GARRET FitzGERALD
THE IRISH electoral system is broadly proportional: the number of seats each party secures at a general election normally bears a reasonable relationship to its share of first preference votes.
But this relationship is imperfect because many of the votes cast for candidates of smaller parties or for Independent candidates prove insufficient to elect them and pass on, usually to Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, thus giving these two parties a “seat bonus”.
Very occasionally this works disproportionately to the benefit of one of these two parties as against the other.
Notoriously that happened in 2002 when, instead of securing its normal “seat bonus”, Fine Gael won half a dozen fewer seats than would have been warranted by its share of first preference votes.
Another factor that can distort election results is an attempt by a party to make a major breakthrough by putting up candidates to win votes in constituencies where they have too little support to have any chance of winning a seat. In 1969 this happened to Labour, and much the same thing happened to the Progressive Democrats in their first general election in 1987.
Finally, the number of seats won by very small parties can sometimes bear little relationship to the votes they secure.
The classic example of this is the fact that with 3.68 per cent of the first preference vote in 1992, the PDs won 10 seats – but with precisely the same share of the vote they secured only four seats in the following general election in 1997.
So the share of the vote that a party secures in a general election can be a very imperfect indicator of how many seats it will win for that can be influenced by a multitude of local factors in individual constituencies.
As it happens we currently have the data to make a tentative assessment of how an election held in the middle of this year might have turned out in each of our 43 constituencies. It is derived from a combination of the results of last year’s local elections and of this year’s April to June Red C polls in four parts of the country: Dublin, rest of Leinster, Munster and Connacht/Ulster.
As there is often no relationship between the local and Dáil constituency boundaries, the process of deriving from over 170 local election areas the votes cast that related to each of the 43 Dáil constituencies is a very laborious exercise – best undertaken, I found, in the leisure time of a holiday period.
A particular difficulty can be that of allowing for the much smaller role that Independent candidates play in Dáil elections, as distinct from those for local authorities.
Because of the small monthly samples for each region, figures derived from any one monthly poll are not reliable. But by combining the figures for the three months from April to June last, one can derive a reasonably consistent picture of the changes in regional party support over the 12 months ended June last.
What these polls suggest is that most of the swing to Labour in the 12 months to June occurred outside Dublin – most strikingly in Munster – and three-quarters of this was at the expense of Fianna Fáil. By contrast, in Dublin Fianna Fáil seems to have won back some fraction of the support it lost in the local elections when its 2007 general election vote had been more than halved to 17 per cent.
What does all this add up to when these poll trends are applied to last year’s local election vote pattern?
Looking at the 43 constituencies individually it suggests that if an election had been held in the early summer of this year, with the aid of a continuing substantial “seat bonus” Fianna Fáil’s 23 per cent of the vote might have secured that party around 50 seats, (30 per cent of the total) – as against about 100 for the two Opposition parties.
The division of those 100 seats between Fine Gael and Labour would have depended upon the precise scale of Labour’s surge in support in different parts of the country since mid-2009.
If the polls have correctly measured the rise in Labour’s support outside Dublin, Labour could secure almost 40 seats – as against just over 60 for Fine Gael.
But increases of 60 per cent in the Labour vote outside Dublin since June last year are hard to credit, and a somewhat less dramatic swing could leave Labour closer to 32 seats and Fine Gael nearer 70. What is clear is that in quite a number of constituencies the toughest battles for the last seat may be between Fine Gael and Labour.
Another feature of the voting pattern suggested by this detailed constituency analysis is that Sinn Féin might secure up to nine or 10 seats in struggles with Fianna Fáil or Labour, but such an outcome would be vulnerable to statistical quirks.
Finally, these data also suggest that some half a dozen seats might fall to surviving Independents or to candidates put forward by left-wing groups.
Of course, all this could be overturned if there were to be significant shifts in political support between now and the election.
That election could come at any time in the 12 months to October 2011 but probably no later than then. For, given the effective exhaustion by that time of most potential current spending cuts, the October 2011 budget – as well as those to which we are committed in the following two years in order to sort out our huge current budget deficit – look like being dependent on a long-overdue tackling of our massive under-taxation. Fianna Fáil – if it can even get as far as October 2011 in Government – is likely to prefer to leave that unpopular task to their successors in office.
If the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance were seriously contemplating holding out until 2012 they should be seeking a fiscal adjustment in excess of €4 billion in next December’s budget to facilitate a less tough pre-election budget in December next year. The fact that there is no sign of any such strategy suggests it may already be planning an earlier exit, by October 2011 at the latest.