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Fianna
Fáil and Fine Gael in pole position to form new Irish government
But Sinn
Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald vows to fight for left alliance for government as
Greens face wipeout
Lisa
O'Carroll in Dublin
Sat 30 Nov
2024 15.05 EST
Ireland has
bucked the European trend of elections going against incumbent governments,
with two of the parties in its ruling coalition in pole position to lead the
next parliament.
An exit poll
showed an appetite for change, with 60% backing opposition parties. But the
prospect of an alternative left-leaning government still looks unlikely to
materialise.
The poll
showed leftwing, nationalist Sinn Féin slightly ahead, with 21.1% of
first-preference votes, followed by the two main parties in the outgoing
coalition, centre-right Fine Gael at 21% and centre-right Fianna Fáil at 19.5%.
But with
both those parties ruling out a partnership with Sinn Féin, they remain
favourites to form the next government. They are expected to get between 30 and
40 seats each, which, with a third party, could make the 87 seats needed for a
majority.
The deputy
leader of the Social Democrats, Cian O’Callaghan, said early tallies suggested
it would emerge as the fourth biggest party, with more than eight seats. Making
an early pitch for a role in a coalition, he said: “This is our best election
in our nine years. After the results are all in, we will talk to all parties.
We talked to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael last time, and we will again this time
round.”
Arriving at
the main count centre in Dublin, Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, was met
with a chaotic media scrum.
Flanked by
the party’s leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, she declared her
intention to try to create a government, saying the result had given Sinn Féin
the same legitimacy as the two established parties.
“Two-party
politics is now gone,” she said. “It’s been consigned to the dustbin of
history. That, in itself, is very significant. The question now arises for us:
what do we do with that? And we are clear that we want to change people’s
lives. I believe another five years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is bad news
for society.”
The biggest
upset is expected to be the wipeout of the Green party, which, with 12 seats,
had been the third partner in the outgoing coalition.
By Saturday
evening, they looked to have lost nearly all their seats, with leader Roderic
O’Gorman also in danger.
Migration,
an inflammatory issue in many recent elections in Europe, failed to fire up the
electorate, with an exit poll showing it was the top priority for just 6% of
voters, despite violent clashes over asylum seekers in the last year. Housing
and homelessness was the the top issue, followed by the cost of living, health
and the economy.
Counting of
votes in the 43 constituencies began at 9am on Saturday but with Ireland’s
proportional representation system final results may not be known until Sunday
night or Monday.
The Green
party’s former leader, Eamon Ryan, said he had been “sharing commiserations”
with colleagues but “holding heads high”.
He told RTÉ:
“Change is difficult. Sometimes, when you’re driving change, it upsets things.
… I think in a general election people were voting for government and maybe we
were caught in that squeeze. People who wanted to retain the current government
have voted Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and not us.”
The tallies
suggest potential trouble for Fianna Fáil in Wicklow, where the party’s only
candidate in the constituency – the health minister, Stephen Donnelly – is in
danger of losing his seat.
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Jack
Chambers, the departing Fianna Fáil finance minister, said the national result
was “too close to call” but said the exit poll showed the public did not want
the “volatility” that had spread in other countries on the back of the rise of
the far right.
Gary Murphy,
a professor of politics at Dublin City University, told RTÉ:“I think there is a
problem that Irish politics has faced since the fragmentation and the economic
crash in 2011 – that now we’re not sure who’s going to be in government.”
Fine Gael’s
director of elections, Olwyn Enright, said the exit poll had been a “positive”
prediction for the party, but that she had been “surprised” with survey results
that put Sinn Féin’s McDonald as the preferred taoiseach against the incumbent,
Simon Harris, who had a difficult final campaign week. In the poll, 34% said
they would like McDonald to be taoiseach against 27% for Harris.
People count
ballot papers in a town hall next to a sign that says General Election 2024
Ireland’s
voters unhappy with taoiseach Simon Harris, election exit poll shows
Read more
The
inconclusive results mean that all eyes will now turn to the search for
coalition partners. Government formation talks could take weeks – with,
possibly, no new government until January.
Elsewhere,
the election threw up surprises. In Dublin Central, Gerry Hutch, a gangland
figure released from bail recently in Spain to run for election, looked to be
in contention for the last of four seats.
Social
Democrat Gary Gannon, a certainty for the third seat behind Fine Gael’s Paschal
Donohoe and McDonald, said “austerity from the financial crash” had destroyed
some communities, which felt a “real sense of loss and pain over housing and
poverty” that the current government had failed to fix in the last five years.
As the
postmortem into the election began, Bríd Smith of the socialist party People
Before Profit–Solidarity blamed Sinn Féin for not setting out a narrative of
change stronger and earlier.
Another
small party, the conservative republican party Aontú, said the country needed
alternatives. Its leader, Peadar Tóibín, told RTÉ that Fianna Fáil and Fine
Gael, two parties that emerged from the ashes of the civil war in the 1920s,
were “becoming one party in many ways” and impossible to distinguish from each
other.
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