A volume containing the full results of last June's county and county borough elections has finally been published by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, notes Garret FitzGerald
It is not clear why this process should have taken 11 months, but it has to be said that the department has eventually produced an excellent publication, which in addition to the detailed results of all the individual counts offers some very useful statistical analyses of the data.
These detailed tables make it possible finally to investigate the mystery of how in those elections Fine Gael, with a first-preference vote almost five percentage points below that of Fianna Fáil, came to secure a number of seats that was only 1 per cent less than the total won by its rival party.
It had always seemed to me unlikely that this result could have been due to later preferences passing to Fine Gael from other Opposition parties, because no agreement had been made between them for this purpose. And an examination of the results from the 180 constituencies into which our 34 counties and county boroughs are divided now confirms that this was not the explanation for Fine Gael's unexpected success in securing, with 27.6 per cent of the votes, no less than 33.2 per cent of the 883 seats on the councils - 293 seats against Fianna Fáil's total of 302.
In fact I have been unable so far to identify any case where a Fine Gael candidate actually won a seat in those local elections through preferences passing to him or her from other Opposition candidates - although, oddly enough, I found two cases where Fine Gael seem to have won seats from other Opposition groups because in a late count its candidates received more preferences from Fianna Fáil than did candidates of a rival group.
It had, of course, been a great surprise that Fine Gael, credited with only 21 per cent support in a poll a couple of months earlier, actually mobilised 27.6 per cent of the votes on polling day.
How, on top of this, did this vote come to yield a share of seats more than five percentage points higher again than that unexpectedly high vote would seem to have warranted?
The answer is quite complicated, and seems to lie in the fact that in many constituencies the Fianna Fáil organisation made a mess of its candidate selection process - while on this occasion Fine Gael had a much tighter operation.
The problem for Fianna Fáil seems to have been that, although it should have been alerted by the decline in the party vote forecast by the opinion polls, nevertheless in many constituencies it did not sufficiently allow for this factor by curtailing the number of candidates nominated.
Quite simply, by fielding five or six candidates in many constituencies where their vote proved insufficient to win more than two or three seats, Fianna Fáil increased by more than half the diversion of first-preference votes following the elimination of many of their candidates. Moreover, the proportion of these second preferences that failed to pass on to Fianna Fáil colleagues was greatly increased - rising from 45 per cent in 1999 to 55 per cent of the total in 2004. The traditional solidarity of the Fianna Fáil vote has clearly greatly weakened.
When party morale is low, or when leaders are too preoccupied with other matters to exercise adequate control over their constituency organisations, there is a danger of too many candidates being nominated. And this can help to lose seats, because while voters can cope with a list of three or even four candidates belonging to the party of their choice, they have difficulty in memorising five or six different candidate names so as to pass their votes right along the party line.
Too large a "ticket" increases the chance of party preferences "going astray", especially where, as in this instance, the party vote was in the process of contracting quite sharply.
By contrast, in this local election Fine Gael, with what seems to have been tighter control of its organisation, was successful in selecting in most constituencies a number of candidates more appropriate to its voting strength. The truth is that many of the preferences from eliminated candidates that pass on to other parties are in reality personal votes which have merely been lent temporarily to a local candidate by voters whose underlying party loyalty lies elsewhere - namely, with candidates of those parties to which their second-preference votes (which in such instances are the really effective votes) are directed.
In last year's local elections this meant in practice that Fianna Fáil's core vote (the vote that stuck with that party throughout the various counts) was smaller than appeared from the first-preference figures - down to under 30 per cent, and thus much closer to Fine Gael's 27.6 per cent than appeared on the surface to be the case.
And it was because the real difference between support for the two main parties at these local elections was less than 2 per cent that Fine Gael secured only nine less of the 883 local authority seats than Fianna Fáil.
It needed only a little luck for Fine Gael to narrow the gap in seats between it and Fianna Fáil to only one percentage point - the kind of luck that enabled Fine Gael to win, for example, five more seats in Cork and three more in Waterford than its share of the vote warranted. The remarkably small margin of difference between support for these two parties in this election was partly explained by the fact, that unhappily for the Government, those local elections coincided with its lowest ebb in terms of popularity.
Already there are signs that Fianna Fáil has recovered somewhat from that situation, and the Opposition parties must be well aware that they cannot count on repeating this performance in a future general election.
Nevertheless, one lesson that can be drawn from this electoral data is that while Fine Gael should not allow itself to be misled by the remarkable results of these local elections - much water has passed under the political bridge since June last year - the fact that preferences passing between the Opposition parties played no part whatever in Fine Gael's local election success last year means that this is a card that remains to be deployed effectively in the next general election, following the presentation to the electorate of a joint programme by Fine Gael and Labour.