With tallies completed and local election results beginning to roll in from around the country, we are starting get a firmer sense of the picture that is taking shape. There are three principal elements to it.
It is certain now that Sinn Féin faces a difficult weekend. Just how difficult is not yet apparent, and may not be until late into tomorrow, as later counts proceed in the local elections and first counts approach in the Europeans. But, if anything, the picture for the party looks gloomier than it was this morning.
Because Sinn Féin chose its election tickets when it was hitting the early- to mid-30s in opinion polls, it has found itself with too many candidates for the support it has in some places, especially in the six- and seven-seater local electoral areas in Dublin. At the last general election, Mary Lou McDonald was criticised for running too few candidates to capitalise on the votes Sinn Féin won; now she may have run too many. If that proves to be true, it will compound the electoral damage.
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After a very poor local election in 2019, Sinn Féin will gain seats – it is important to say that. But with estimates of its first preference vote in the local election hovering in the mid-teens, the party will have to figure out how and why it lost 20 percentage points of support in the last 12 months. Perhaps more worryingly, the decline seems to have accelerated in the past week.
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Secondly, the Government parties are doing okay. Fine Gael is set for a very good day in Dublin, where many middle-class votes seem to have “come home” to the party. Overall seat losses are still expected, but nothing like what the party might have feared even a few months ago.
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Fianna Fáil will also lose seats, especially in Dublin, but again that had been expected. At present, it is not clear which party will have the higher first preference vote, or the highest number of councillors. Either way, the margins will probably be tight. Whoever comes second will have the consolation of knowing that Sinn Féin is a distant third.
The Green Party will also lose seats, but at this stage it does not look like the massacre of party councillors that some had predicted. It will take until well into tomorrow and the later counts before we see how many Green incumbents can hang on, but the signs in Dublin are not dreadful.
Earlier, party leader Eamon Ryan conceded that Ciaran Cuffe was in danger. But sure, we knew that. It’s hugely important for the party that he hangs on. At best, that’s touch-and-go. For the Coalition as a whole, though, their combined support is probably going to be somewhere in the mid-40s. For an incumbent Government, that’s not bad.
Finally, biggest win goes to the Independents, who are winning seats all over the country and will almost certainly be the largest single political grouping. But of course, they are not a single political entity – they encompass people from all ends of the political spectrum, from the far right (and a few of these, only a few, will probably be elected) to far left. Many are somewhere in the middle, and will work happily with the other parties on local authorities.
What does the huge vote for Independents tell us? That will take some time to figure out. But it may be instructive that at a time the main opposition party flopped, the Government parties did not see any gain. Instead, the benefits went to another part of the Opposition. Voter volatility and its first cousin, declining party loyalty, are more and more prominent in our politics.
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