Good morning. The people have spoken, but what have they said in election 2024? With 39 of the 43 counts complete, a couple of things are clear.
Ireland has bucked a clear trend in 10 western countries which has seen incumbent governments chucked out of office over the past 12 months. Not here.
Fianna Fáil has had the better of it. It won the largest share of the first preference vote, with 21.9 per cent, ahead of second-placed Fine Gael on 20.8 per cent and Sinn Féin on 19 per cent.
With 79 seats between them at the time of writing, and 12 seats yet to be filled, the only question is how close to the magic number of 88 Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will get? They did not have it all their own way, losing Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly in Wicklow on Monday morning.
They may be just a couple of seats short in the end, which could dramatically change the dynamics of government formation, as it would mean they could seek to form a coalition with a fewIndependents, rather than a third party.
[ Live coverage of day three of the election count Opens in new window ]
For a range of reasons this may appeal.
Both Labour and the Social Democrats were being coy last night, not explicitly ruling out joining a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-led coalition, saying they first intended to talk to each other, and to other parties.
There is a notable caution among both these parties about the costs of going into government with a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-led coalition – especially after the Greens’ shellacking – and the realistic price that could be extracted. With every extra Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael seat their leverage declines.
A standout narrative from the election is – as Justine McCarthy notes in her column – the remarkable resurrection of Fianna Fáil and its leader, Micheál Martin.
He watched as his party lost 59 Dáil seats in the February 2011 general election after Ireland had ceded economic sovereignty to the troika. At that point, it was hard to envisage any Fianna Fáil Taoiseach in the near future, never mind Martin.
He managed it in under nine years – in spite of a recalcitrant parliamentary party at times unconvinced by his leadership – and now looks set to lead Fianna Fáil back into government with the highest number of TDs. They currently have 43.
For every election redemption story there are inevitably losers. The undoubted losers in Election 2024 are the Greens, who lost 11 of their 12 seats. Only party leader Roderic O’Gorman survived.
As the effects of climate change become more unavoidable and disruptive in Ireland, and around the world, due to changes to weather patterns and more extreme weather events, Irish voters have chosen to decimate the party which has spent two decades warning about it, and then trying to do something about it in government.
That is the electorate’s right. How it sits with the exit poll finding that half of voters thought the government had not done enough on climate action is one for analysts to ponder. It seems unlikely that the voters were punishing the Greens for not doing enough about climate change. Perhaps more likely is that they suffered as other parties sought to scapegoat them by linking cost-of-living pressures to climate measures.
So what now for the Greens? This is not the first time the party has been hammered in a general election. The bailout election of early 2011 saw the party lose all its seats and State funding. It recovered and in 2020 won 12 seats. Now it’s back to square one; with O’Gorman the sole survivor. A salutary lesson in the realities of Irish politics.
Watching the Green demise with a sort of horrified fascination were all the potential government partners. What lessons will they take about the perils of power?
Elsewhere in the opposition, Independent Ireland has established itself but will not make the sweeping gains it had hoped for. Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín will have company in the new Dáil after his party exceeded the 2 per cent threshold for State funding and won an extra seat.
Labour and the Social Democrats both had highly successful elections, with Marie Sherlock’s victory over Independent Gerry “the Monk” Hutch in Dublin Central perhaps the standout moment of the weekend.
And finally, what conversations are happening among Sinn Féin TDs and back room staff today? The party’s exuberant celebrations and ubiquitous expressions of delight this weekend may well be spontaneous, or they may be an effort to distract attention from a rather dismal showing.
Sinn Féin has dropped by 5.5 percentage points since its 2020 result, though it may ultimately return with more seats than in 2020 (in a larger Dáil). That cannot be painted as anything other than a bad result.
The party is entitled to take solace from the fact that this result could – and for a long time it looked like it would – be a lot worse. But the reality is they failed to capitalise on clear vulnerabilities among the Government parties on the issues of housing, the cost of living and health, which our exit poll identified as the key issues for voters in this election.
Mary Lou McDonald dragged her party out of the doldrums after a disastrous local and European election result. But while she is a natural campaigner on the stump, McDonald stuttered in some of the interviews and debates, finding it hard to spell out the answer to the real question of a party offering “change”: what exactly does “change” mean? Will its “change” message now apply to its own approach?
After a long count weekend and with the exact nature of the future government yet to be determined, the will of the Irish electorate is clear: they want more of the same.
Best Reads
- Labour and Social Democrats wary of joining Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael coalition
- Miriam Lord: For much of the time in the RDS, one of the big questions was: what the hell is going on?
- Are parties of soft left ready for scrutiny and relentless demands of government?
- Una Mullally: Politics is an attention economy and Gerry Hutch garnered plenty of it
- How did one of Ireland’s most notorious gangland criminals almost take a seat?
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