Greens: ZERO seats in the 31st Dail

[locke]

The thing about the Liz O'Donnell votes will go to Eamon Ryan theory is that Liz was eliminated early enough that we can see exactly where her votes went.

FF +1,923
FG +1,329
Green +802
Lab +223
Non-tran +243

That has to be slightly tempered by the fact that Seamus Brennan and Tom Kitt were already elected when she was eliminated. But if anything, that's worse news for the Greens.

Rather than the disappearance of the PDs, what might save Ryan is that transfer analysis would suggest that about 500 of Seamus Brennan's votes were personal votes that would go to Eamon Ryan instead; that's probably twice as many as for the Labour or third FG candidate. Add to that that some of Brennan's votes may have been votes for the most likely minister from the constituency - votes that may now go to Ryan - and there may be more of a boost for him.

If Ryan can retain his vote and pull in the votes from the absence of Brennan and O'Donnell from the field, he should be close enough that transfers will bring him in.


On another point, to echo someone else's comments about Dan Boyle's chances, what changes to Cork South Central?

The one thing I'd say is that a change of Green strategy is needed. There seems to be a targetting of the Labour seat. Firstly, I believe Ciaran Lynch has made enough of a good impression on the ground to get re-elected. Secondly, Lynch took John Dennehy's working class FF seat. In terms of where the votes were lost, Boyle lost middle-class voters to Deirdre Clune.

If he's to get his seat back, either the 2nd FF or 2nd FG seat will have to be targetted.

[John_C]

FF +1,923
FG +1,329
Green +802
Lab +223
Non-tran +243

If you look at the candidates rather than the parties, those votes break down as;
Young woman +1,923
Older woman +1,329
Young handsome man +802
Older man +223

[stringjack]

Probably, but it is hard to get a clear example of patterns in Dublin because both Labour and FG both tend to have candidates there that survive until the final count.

Yeah; one might be able to generate some traction by going back a couple of elections, but that obviously comes with baggage of its own.

However, the core Labour voters in the Dublin region were some of the ones most likely to give the Greens a second preference ahead of FG (IMHO) so their loss will be felt all the more keenly (also IMHO).

I think it's certainly likely that Labour voters in the Dublin region were some of the ones most likely to give the Greens a second preference ahead of FG; I think it's somewhat less clear that it was core Labour voters who were doing that.

What might hit the Greens hardest in south county Dublin may be the defection of the "People Before Profit" and SF vote (for example, Gormley got 37% of the SF transfers in Dublin South East in 2007, and 49% of the very "leftie" dominated independent transfers).

I suppose the alternative is that those votes go to Labour - Lisbon II might be an interesting factor here. If they don't go to Labour, then all the Green candidate has to do is stay ahead of the leftie pack - the votes will come home eventually. If they do go to Labour, they won't make it as far as Fine Gael.

stringjack said:

"The Fine Gael votes went exactly where you'd expect them to go."


This seems a bit at odds with your previous scepticism, stringjack, over "the assumption that Fine Gael and Labour voters are going to fall over themselves to transfer to one another's parties."

So just how likely do you think it is that they will be falling over themselves to transfer to one another next time out?

The two are consistent with one another - present a Fine Gael voter in Dublin at the last election with the option of transferring to Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, or Joseph Stalin and they'd have gone for Stalin. (If you'll forgive the hyperbole. And, again, that's just an impression - I haven't looked at the numbers.)

[scrawledincrayon]

He ran as a 'Baths' candidate.

If he's such a nice bloke, how come he only got 876 votes in 2002, at a time when FG were giving away votes for free?

You are missing the point entirely.

The SWP used to run under their own name in Dun Laoghaire, with leaflets carrying their policies - workers councils and all. With that approach, Boyd Barrett got 876 votes on his first time out in the GE and then got 1,400 votes, as an SWP candidate in the 2004 locals.

By the time the last GE came around, his approach (and that of the SWP in general) had changed dramatically. He was no longer carrying the SWP tag, but instead the much less threatening People Before Profit moniker. The politics in the leaflets was a great deal softer too. Out went all the stuff about socialism and the working class, and instead they were full of local issues, most notably the Baths but also a range of other community stuff, and the kind of big issues that interest a certain subsection of the bien pensants of Kingstown, like the Iraq war.

Since then, he's been probably the most active politician on the ground in the whole constituency. It's rare that you can walk around Dun Laoghaire without seeing posters up about some local issue or other with Boyd Barrett's name on them. With endless rounds of cuts to services likely to go on until the next election at least, he will have no shortage of issues like that to take up. The Baths was an important breakthrough issue him, amongst a few others (Iraq, the bin tax), but if you look at that alone you are missing the big picture.

If he was still standing as a revolutionary socialist, I've no doubt that he'd be doing well to get much over the 1,400 he got in the last locals. DL is one of the two or three richest constituencies in the state and the demographics have changed in a way that's unfavourable for the hard left since the days when the Workers Party were players. But Boyd Barrett isn't standing as a hard left candidate!

He will be standing as that nice, well spoken young man, who comes across as extremely sincere, doesn't like the Americans bombing places, and is working away on a host of local issues. There is very definitely a market for that in DL. He will romp home in the locals, in my view, and that will give him yet another platform for the GE.

Now I'm not making any rash predictions about him taking the seat in the GE. A lot will depend on whether he gets a council seat and then uses it effectively and a lot will depend on the wider political and economic situation. The reduction to a four seater makes things very tough. But he will get a big vote.