Are we talking Australia or Russia here?
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Italia
Considine’s transfers next to be distributed. You’d imagine the two Boylans will do quite well off them. One of Cuffe or O’Riordain will surely elect the other.
Will smyth and Daly elect Lynn boylan? Leaving cuffe/O’Riordan to pass the headbanger boylan…
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fingers crossed
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The kalergi plan the headbangers call it.
I can see more of daly and smith going to Headbanger Boylan. I think he has a decent chance of overtaking Sf boylan
Daly did well off Considine’s transfers. I think there’s a very good chance she gets ahead of one of Cuffe and O’Riordain off the back of Brid Smith’s transfers, eliminating them.
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Doolan started with 10,766 and added only 1,000 in transfers. But managed to transfer out 10,600 - mostly to Lynn Boylan but also a spread across others (particularly Brid).
Very different to Steenson before who started with 7,128 and added 4,300 in transfers but left most of that behind in transferring onwards. So 3,600 right votes left behind there.
Considine started with 10,693 and has added 3,500 but I think again she will leave most of that 3,500 there.
I think Lynn Boylan is safe there. Concerns for Cuffe in particular that he’s not picking up very many transfers at alll. O Riordain doing a little better in gneral but if votes go heavily to Lynn Boylan then I think that puts N Boylan over the line because the other two won’t get enough from Smith and Daly.
Wow. Not great for O’Riordain now. He will need to comprehensively outgun Cuffe with transfers now from Gibney. Very possible of course.
Daly still in with a shout but Gibney’s transfers won’t be good for her.
Very interesting. That was spread more than I expected. Andrews got a fair few there. Cuffe did surprisingly well. Not so many for Niall Boylan and that’s the end of the right transfers.
Niall Boylan could do OK off Smith and Daly’s transfers.
One of Cuffe and O’Riodain is banking on the transfers of Gibney and whichever of the two is eliminated.
I think O’Riodain might get ahead of Cuffe off the Gibney and Smith transfers.
I don’t think Niall Boylan will do well off Smith. Daly is a bit more of a lottery but I think he’d have expected to do better in the first two counts this morning. He did very poorly from Doolan and I think that will be similar from Smith.
Yeah I think very close between the others and O Riordain might do better from both Gibney and Smith. But I would have expected him to get more from Aontu also.
Can anyone do the needful?
Smith and Daly are committed hard left. Scummer Boylan is hard right. I can’t see him getting many transfers off either. Aodhan, lynn and Cuffe will all do significantly better from their transfers i think.
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Daly’s support is angry headbanger. I think they go boylan if she goes out first.
Smith is proper left but harder left than Aodhan or greens or SF and feel let down by them. Maybe a fair few just dont transfer.
We’ll see i suppose. I’ll admit to being wrong on the internet if either transfer in significant numbers to the nest headed cunt.
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We have to start with what might seem an odd proposition: the shock absorber was Sinn Féin. Ever since the party became a serious electoral force in the Republic, it has acted as a buffer between the democratic political system and reactionary radicalism. The election results tell us that it can’t do that any more.
What does a shock absorber do? It takes a disruptive kinetic energy and converts into another kind of energy, which it then dissipates. When the vehicle is driving over a bumpy road, the absorber keeps its wheels in contact with the ground.
This is not the job Sinn Féin ever imagined for itself. It is rooted in anti-democratic militarism and sees itself as a revolutionary party. It is only the peculiarities of Irish history that made it possible for such a movement to be, in effect, a stabiliser.
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Those peculiarities created the doubleness of the modern Sinn Féin. On the one hand, it drew on the same kind of ethnonationalist identity politics that now fuel the far right across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Yet on the other, it thought of itself as a progressive socialist party, committed to equality and inclusion.
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As it happened, this doubleness created a kind of ambivalence that was very useful in a society experiencing a very rapid transition from monoculture to multiculture. If you were an ethnonationalist, you could identify with Sinn Féin while wrapping yourself in the tricolour and chanting Ireland for the Irish.
Yet to Sinn Féin’s great credit, it absorbed this energy while directing it away from the immigrant population. It could have tried to exploit resentment of incomers, but it chose not to do so.
And for about a quarter of a century, this accidental mechanism was extremely effective. The main reason Ireland did not have a significant far-right party was not because we are a peculiarly lovely people. It was (mostly) because Sinn Féin was occupying the space where a far-right party would be.
The effectiveness of this political device made the ride feel so smooth that it was easy not to notice how bumpy the ground really was. A combination of genuinely large inward migration, very rapid population growth, a two-tier economy and terrible planning for housing and other infrastructure was always going to generate political shock waves.
But it was too easy to forget that the State has a long history of far-right movements, that prejudice and bigotry have deep roots in sectarian fanaticism and violent tribalism, and that about a third of the electorate is deeply unhappy about the sudden implosion of Catholic Ireland. It was too easy to ignore the fact that Peter Casey got a quarter of the vote in the 2018 presidential election essentially by making himself the anti-Traveller candidate.
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Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS count centre on Sunday. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times
That vote has always been there – there’s as much of a market for the zero-sum politics of scapegoating and tribal resentment in Ireland as there is in Britain, the US or continental Europe. The purveyors of that product just had to find a way to get it on to the shelves that Sinn Féin was filling. And they’re now managing to do that.
It’s been pretty clear since the pandemic that a kind of parting was taking place: much of ethnonationalist vote was uncoupling itself from Sinn Féin.
It is still a fragmented and fractious movement. But even if it does not yet quite know what it is, it knows what it is not. It’s not Sinn Féin. It sensed what much of the political mainstream had not: that Sinn Féin was absorbing and redirecting the rough energies of ethnic resentment.
What we’ve now seen in the election numbers are the first effects of this uncoupling: a shrinking of Sinn Féin’s vote and the emergence of the far right as a potentially viable political force. What makes this latter phenomenon so significant is precisely that the movement is so fragmented and fractious. It is not a coherent or well-led organisation – and yet it is beginning to make a mark.
In the European elections in Dublin, anti-immigrant candidates took about 15 per cent of the vote between them. Dublin City Council will have three councillors elected on anti-immigrant platforms. The full picture across the rest of the country is unclear at the time of writing, but there are similar signs that this kind of politics is gaining footholds in at least the lower slopes of power.
This is a real breakthrough. It’s nothing like a massive shift, and it is counterbalanced by a consolidation of the centre ground. But the far right has opened up a space for itself in electoral politics, and it would be foolish to think that it cannot use this opportunity to normalise its rhetoric and widen that space.
It still lacks one of the essentials of reactionary radicalism – the single charismatic leader. Yet it has given itself the elbow room in which one might emerge.
That possibility still lies in the future. The immediate significance of the elections is the loss of the buffer zone that Sinn Féin had created. Can that zone be reoccupied? Probably not.
If Sinn Féin tried to snatch the ethnonationalist vote back from the usurpers, it would lose many of its progressive voters. And a turn away from the rhetoric of pluralism and inclusivity would take it further from its primary goal of a United Ireland.
So don’t be fooled by the success of the existing political establishment, impressive though it is. The ground is rough – Ireland has to get through a terrain made jagged by the mismatch between the expansion of the population and the sclerosis of the State. It is going to be a bumpy ride and from here on in all the shocks will be felt.
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I think Daly has a large base from years of campaigning on the left. It’s not all headbangers.
She and Smith have picked up more transfers from the right than others but not a huge amount.
Niall Boylan has a lead of about 11k over Cuffe and O Riordain at the moment. I think he needs to keep that sort of lead to stay in it before one of those is eliminated.
Thanks kind sir