Dublin transfer patterns may reflect the mainstreaming of the party in voters' eyes, writes Patrick Smyth
Sinn Féin's success in the European and local elections in significantly boosting its first preference vote at Fianna Fail's expense has also been reflected, it has been suggested, in improved subsequent transfers from across the board to a party that has had trouble in the past attracting lower preferences.
The evidence is still uneven and a full picture will have to await full analysis of the local transfer patterns. But, particularly in the case of its successful Dublin European candidate, Mary Lou McDonald, the results appear to suggest the party is being perceived by voters as more mainstream than in the past, a respectable place to transfer one's preferences, whatever its past.
Sinn Féin is coming in from the cold, however slowly and partially.
This reality, among its core supporters, is reflected in what tally sources suggest is a decline in the practise of plumping on the ballot paper for only Sinn Féin candidates and refusing to transfer - the political equivalent, some have said, of refusing to recognise the court.
At the 2002 general election, Sinn Féin voters were still much more inclined than other party supporters not to transfer. This tendency, manifested by one fifth of its voters, though down on previous elections, still remained double the rate of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael voters, and just less than double the national average. In the South constituency, however, the tendency is clearly still strong - on the final joint elimination of the Sinn Féin and Labour candidates, 45 per cent of their 59,791 ballots were found not to prefer either Gerry Collins (FF) or Kathy Sinnott (Ind) and were thus non-transferable.
And if many Sinn Féin voters had no time for other parties, other parties' voters have been historically similarly dubious about passing on preferences to Sinn Féin. Although party solidarity is the norm in transfers - for example, 52 per cent of Fianna Fáil transfers in 2002 went to a party colleague - Sinn Féin did particularly poorly in picking up spare transfers. An analysis of Fianna Fáil transfers showed Fine Gael picking up eight times as many (16.5 per cent), and Labour four times as many, as Sinn Féin.
Fine Gael voters, not surprisingly, tended to reciprocate by favouring Fianna Fáil substantially after their own candidates.
The result is a well-recognised process of transferring towards the political centre and away from what voters have regarded as the extremes of politics. The pattern of transfers from the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins in the 1999 European elections illustrate the process - while his elimination resulted in 12 per cent of his transfers going to Sinn Féin, the more centrist Greens and Labour took 33 and 30 per cent respectively.
And it is partly for this reason that parties of the centre benefit disproportionately with a bonus in their final seat allocations.
To benefit fully from the PR system, Sinn Féin thus has to reposition itself in the minds of voters away from "fringe" politics. Its success in Friday's elections are a reflection of that rebranding process, epitomised perhaps best by the New Sinn Féin product that was the quintessentially middle-class, scrubbed up and polished candidacy of Mary Lou McDonald.
In the locals, the tendency for other voters not to transfer to Sinn Féin appears to have persisted to a greater extent. Where its candidates have topped the polls, as they have in a number of Dublin constituencies, this does not matter or is not apparent immediately. But in Cork City, where the party was battling for the last seat in five of the six constituencies, it only took one of these, and that because of transfers from the Workers' Party and the Greens. Old habits die hard and transfer rates from the more conservative parties are still very weak.
In Dublin, however, Ms McDonald, who more than trebled the party's first preference vote, also made inroads into the support base even of conservative parties. Some 5 per cent of Gay Mitchell's voters were willing to give her a second preference ahead of all others.
And, as four independent candidates were eliminated, she outpolled Higgins, Proinsias De Rossa (Lab), Ivana Bacik (Lab) and even Royston Brady (FF) in the share-out of their transfers. When Higgins was eliminated this time, unlike her party colleague Seán Crowe in 1999, McDonald pulled more transfers than any other remaining candidate, hoovering up 26 per cent of his votes, double the rate of the 1999 election and, again unlike 1999, eclipsing Patricia McKenna. McDonald would then take one in 10 of Royston Brady's transfers, beating both Bacik and McKenna on the distribution.
But Sinn Féin's candidate in the South, David Cullinane, was far less successful in attracting transfers, adding only 8 per cent to his vote before elimination, while Labour's Brendan Ryan, with whom he was eliminated, was able to add 22 per cent from a far lower start.
In East, John Dwyer could only attract 3 per cent of the Mairead McGuinness surplus (although Fine Gael sources suggest many of his own seconds went to her). He picked up only 8 per cent of the transfers of the first four Independents eliminated.
Sinn Féin in the North West was expected to benefit substantially from geographical factors, most notably the Donegal base of both Minister of State Jim McDaid (FF) and its candidate, Pearse Doherty. But in the McDaid elimination, Doherty was able only to secure the same 6,000 transfers that would go to Dana Rosemary Scallon (Ind), just above the 5,400 that Marian Harkin (Ind) would get.
And in the elimination of Scallon he would get less transfers than all remaining candidates, leaving Fine Gael's Jim Higgins pipping him at the post, with a lead of 6,000 votes that could have been bridged if Sinn Féin could match mainstream parties' transfer-securing abilities.
If the Mary Lou touch could only be bottled!