After a few months of a slow burn, the Presidential election has burst into life.
The October 24 election is one of the strangest election races Ireland has had in quite some time; the withdrawal of one prospective candidate (Mairead McGuinness) and one confirmed candidate (Jim Gavin) has upended the race from the government’s perspective.
October 24 is gearing up to be the rarest of things in Irish politics; an election where it’s essentially first past the post.
Transfers won’t be as big a factor in this election compared to a typical Irish one; it’s a straight shoot, and whoever has the most votes wins.
When the counting begins on the morning of Saturday, October 25, the votes will be counted on a Dáil constituency basis, and last year’s general election results offer us a little hint into how the race for the Áras will pan out.
Using November 2024’s general election as a base, the opposition had a bigger combined vote total than the government parties in all but two of Dublin’s 12 Dáil constituencies (Dún Laoghaire and Dublin Rathdown).
This was most apparent in Dublin North-West; the five parties backing Connolly had a combined vote share of 59% last November, whereas the combined Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael vote stood at 25.5%.
In Dublin Central, the government party vote came to exactly 24%, a full 30% off the combined opposition total of 54.6%.
In terms of the government’s Dublin strongholds, Dublin West was among their best performances; their combined vote in Dublin West was 37.7% last November (but fell short of the combined opposition’s 47.1%) and Dún Laoghaire is the most government-friendly constituency on an electoral map of Ireland.
In Dún Laoghaire alone, Fine Gael racked up 36% of first preferences with Fianna Fáil scooping 15.9%, a clear 51.9% majority for government parties.
It was a similar story in the nearby Dublin Rathdown; the FF/FG vote was a healthy 48.7%.
Those are roughly the same margins that the Humphreys campaign would need to win on October 24.
Indeed, the government will be betting on strong support from outside the Pale to deliver a victory for Heather Humphreys, and constituencies like Clare, Cork North and South Central and Wicklow/Wexford were the highest vote getters for the government camp last November.
The opposition’s strong performance in Dublin last November is surely a factor in the Connolly campaign making frequent visits to Dublin, with representatives and supporters from the five opposition parties dividing and conquering.
Using June 2024’s election to Dublin City Council as an example, the combined Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael vote came to 28.7%.
The combined Sinn Féin/Social Democrats/Labour/Green/People Before Profit vote, the five parties backing Connolly, came to 46.6%.
A figure in the mid-40s in the first round for Connolly would all but assure victory.
Turnout is always lower in Presidential elections, and as the last few weeks have reminded us, people do vote on party lines, but the personality vote is also just as important.
The final 10 days of the campaign have seen more personal attacks from both the Connolly and Humphreys campaigns as the undecided voters look to make up their mind.
Which brings us to the stakes of the race; there were no immediate consequences following the election races in 2011 and 2018, but the results of the 1990 election ended up having major consequences for Irish politics.
In the aftermath of Mary Robinson’s victory in 1990, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had their leaders, Charles Haughey and Alan Dukes, deeply wounded by the election results.
In the case of Fianna Fáil, Haughey was gone just over a year and change from the election following a leadership challenge in 1991, and in the case of Fine Gael, Dukes resigned as leader mere weeks after the election result.
In the case of Labour, the main opposition party at the time, it marked the first time a candidate who wasn’t from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael held the Presidency and foreshadowed electoral success in 1992.
Should Connolly win, it would mark the first time a candidate backed by Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, and People Before Profit has won the presidency (Labour and the Greens backed Robinson in 1990).
The Social Democrats were the first party to officially back Connolly; indeed, they gave their backing to the Galwegian on July 11, a full 71 days before Sinn Féin finally announced their plans to back Connolly.
Despite some initial sniggering from Official Ireland, Sinn Féin’s endorsement of Connolly has made a difference and campaigning with Connolly has allowed the party to capture some of the Corbyn-esque energy from 2020 that was mysteriously absent last November.
Much has been written about Micheál Martin’s political future and how he spent significant political capital on a campaign that was a bust.
While Martin’s safety is guaranteed for the immediate future, the government parties losing to a unified opposition bid could be enough to begin a similar downfall ala Haughey in 1990.
Martin pushing Gavin over Ireland South MEP and former TD Billy Kelleher has especially rankled some in the party, with a loud cohort within the party believing that Kelleher’s expertise on foreign policy would have been a major benefit against Connolly.
Within Fianna Fáil, there was a belief that they could repeat the same trick they did with Mary McAleese in 1997; pick a non-politician with a strong public profile and let Ireland’s centrist majority work its magic.
Appealing to the centre delivered Fianna Fáil its best set of election results since 2007 last November, so the logic of picking Gavin was sound (until it wasn’t).
Gavin will appear on the ballot as he withdrew after the ballots went to the printers, and people can still vote for him, but it will, in essence, be a spoiled vote.
It is understood that Fianna Fáil stand to recoup a certain amount of their expenditure on the campaign if Gavin hits a certain percentage of the votes.
Losing any referendum or election is bad for any sitting government of the day (the defeats of the March 2024 referendums on Family and Care were, in hindsight, the death knell for the Varadkar era,) and the government losing to a unified opposition front will be sure to cause shockwaves in Cabinet.
Since this article appeared in print over the weekend of October 18th/19th, Fine Gael made the decision to criticise Connolly for her past as a barrister defending the banks in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, a move which has been called “desperate” by the opposition and has led to an annoyed Jim O’Callaghan telling his coalition colleagues that in the legal sytem, legal professionals cannot pick and choose what cases they can take up based on moral or political grounds, a principle which is taught at school level.
In the event Connolly wins, that will be a headache for the coalition to deal with; one half of the coalition has a fundamental misunderstanding of how the law works, and the other wants to uphold the spirit of the law.
For the opposition, the prospect of a pan-left campaign coming together to stop the government in its tracks could have huge implications for the future of Irish politics.
On the evening of October 20th, a selfie featuring Mary Lou McDonald, Ivana Bacik, Ruth Coppinger, Holly Cairns and Paul Murphy did the rounds; the opposition TDs were all enjoying a night of music at Vicar Street in support of the Connolly campaign.
The opposition has shown a united front in the last few weeks of this election, when it was pointedly absent last year.
Should Connolly win, it could lay the groundwork for a major shift in Irish politics in the next general election.