Main Points
- The margins between success and failure could be wafer thin, says Pat Leahy
- Counting began at 9am with results expected by early evening
- Click for live coverage of the Galway West byelection count
Key Reads
- What are voters’ five big issues in Dublin Central and Galway West byelections?
- In the News podcast: Who will win the Dublin Central and Galway West byelections?
- Polymarket betting on Dublin Central byelection to be examined by officials
- Opinion: We finally know how much money shapes Irish elections
- All Irish Times polling coverage and data, including the most pressing issues for voters, can be accessed here
Virgin Media’s political correspondent Gavan Reilly has built a spreadsheet that compares the exact boxes from the 2024 General Election to those currently being tallied in the RDS.
Why does that matter, you ask?
Well, tally data is great - but it suffers from a bit of a geographical bias in real time as we can’t tell to a high degree of certainty which polling centres are feeding into the live tally, so it could be heavily weighted towards areas where a particular candidate is strong or weak. This makes it harder to infer a complete picture until the tally is complete.
But if you compare the same boxes today to those from 2024, you can see how a candidate is performing against the relevant indicator from last time out.
Here’s a screenshot from Gavan’s spreadsheet, as of 9.50am.
Our own political correspondent Jack Horgan-Jones writes that it shows Sinn Féin is struggling to match its 2024 showing, currently running some seven points off the combined Boylan/McDonald vote in 2024, while Daniel Ennis is slightly overperforming Gary Gannon’s totals for the same boxes in the general election.
This only tells us first preferences, but we fully expect Ennis to be more transfer friendly than Boylan. On these numbers, they’ll be tightly bunched at the top, which spells trouble for Sinn Féin.
A couple of other talking points:
The Hutch vote is growing, but on these numbers, only a little. The growth for Steenson, the anti-immigration councillor, is more pronounced.
As it stands, Ray McAdam is down on Paschal Donohoe’s vote - but that’s to be expected.
John Stephens (Fianna Fáil) is nowhere.
Janet Horner (Green Party) is, as it stands, improving significantly on the 2024 showing.
Now - even by the time you read this, this picture will have changed - but interesting straws in the wind.
Kevin Humphries, the former Labour TD famed for his powers of prediction at the count centre, is bravely already calling Dublin Central for Daniel Ennis of the Social Democrats.
With counting underway, Humphries told The Irish Times: “It’s over, Ennis has it”, predicting that Janice Boylan (Sinn Fein) would top the poll by around three points - but that she would need four to five points of a gap to stay ahead of Ennis, who is predicted to be this contest’s transfer magnet.
Boxes have been officially opened at the RDS. Let the fun begin!
Boxes due to be opened imminently at the RDS.
The race is expected to come down to a battle between Sinn Féin’s Janice Boylan and the Social Democrats Daniel Ennis, based on our polling (the usual health warnings apply - higher margin of error, and the fact that we’ve had some campaigning between now and then).
Everyone will also be watching out for how veteran criminal Gerry Hutch gets on - can he build on his 2024 figure?
Here’s our full polling results.
Talking to one person in the Social Democrats late last night, their feeling was that the leafier suburbs of Glasnevin and Drumcondra doing well on turnout was promising, and the lower inner city turnout may hurt Hutch - while Cabra West going well on turnout was good for Sinn Féin.
But with a lower turnout, it also matters how much it’s down and where - this could make a really important difference.
Political correspondent Jack Horgan-Jones says these are the things he will be watching out for:
Hutch and Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin are likely to struggle for transfers relative to Ennis, so they need their heartlands, like around Cabra, to turn out strongly - and for a strong showing in the inner city.
Signs of them matching or exceeding Mary Lou McDonald’s 2024 percentages in these boxes will indicate if Sinn Féin’s ‘get out the vote’ effort has succeeded or struggled.
It’s a similar story for Hutch - how is he performing against Sinn Féin in these areas - is he building his 2024 vote, is the gap to Sinn Féin bigger or smaller? Has he managed to mobilise his vote?
This also matters for the larger party, whose anti-establishment vote is vulnerable to any Hutch surge (true to a lesser extent for Malachy Steenson, the independent anti-immigration councillor running in the election).
Fine Gael and Ennis
If Daniel Ennis outperforms the rest of the left (Labour, Green Party and People Before Profit) as is expected, an interesting question is how he performs relative to Fine Gael’s Ray McAdam in the likes of Drumcondra, Phibsboro and Glasnevin - places where Paschal Donohoe pulled in a lot of his vote. But the sitting TD for the Social Democrats, Gary Gannon, also builds a vote here.
So, is Ennis matching or even out-performing McAdam, who is expected to do OK but not come into the final reckoning? This will be a bellwether.
How far can Fianna Fáil fall?
John Stephens, the Fianna Fáil candidate, is not expected to do well in a constituency where the party hasn’t won a seat since Bertie Ahern’s era. But just how will he get on? And what will that mean for the rumblings of discontent in Fianna Fáil about Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s leadership?
What happens next?
Once the votes start being counted, we’re expected the parties to run a combined effort to tally votes (an unofficial but pretty reliable count) - so early snaps of individual tally sheets in the RDS will be overtaken by data from that as it’s built out.
We had a 100 per cent tally in 2024 around 12.30pm, that’s going to be a pretty reliable indication of how the first count will shake out, which will come a little while after that.
We’ll keep you up to date throughout the day on this live story, and the results as they come in will be available here.
Good morning - it’s count day in Dublin Central and Galway West. In the capital, boxes will be opened from around 9am at the RDS in Ballsbridge in the race to fill the seat vacated by former Fine Gael minister Paschal Donohoe.
Political correspondent Jack Horgan-Jones has been looking at what we should be watching out for in the very early stages of the count.
The official turnout estimate for Dublin Central is the first bit of data we have, he writes. Across five polling stations, here’s the figures from the returning officer last night:
St. Paul’s CBS, 25 per cent: Sean O’Casey, 37.5 per cent; St Finbarrs NS, 48.6 per cent; Deaf Village, 40.3 per cent; Glasnevin NS, 46 per cent.
Average turnout: 39.48 per cent.
So, turnout is down on the General Election 2024 figure of 52.27 per cent. This is to be expected - turnout is almost always lower in byelections than general elections. It also looks to be down on the last byelection held in the constituency in 2009, when turnout was 46.3 per cent.
What counts as good and what counts as bad? We’ll turn to the ever-reliable Adrian Kavanagh for a quick look:
The picture is slightly complicated by the fact that the Electoral Commission has been hard at work cleaning up the electoral register, while there’s also been a slew of new voter registrations.
You can read a bit more about this here.
