A survey of students using mobile telephone text messaging has found almost a third do not intend to vote.
Some 50,000 people were sent a text message by the media company Oxygen yesterday evening and invited to text back information on their voting preferences.
To nominate their political choice they simply replied to the text message with numbers that identified a political party. A spokesperson said: " The bulk of the replies came within the first hour and tailed off after about two hours."
By 7.45 p.m. yesterday evening, 2,792 students had responded to the survey. Some 28.4 per cent of respondents said they were not going to vote.
Of those who were going to vote, 37.7 per cent said they would vote for Fianna Fáil, 17.2 per cent for Fine Gael. The next biggest winner was Sinn Féin who with 12.6 per cent were ahead of Labour at 10.7 per cent.
The Greens with 9 per cent did better than the Progressive Democrats who garnered 4.8 per cent. The "others" category received 8 per cent.