For the Electoral Commission, which has the unenviable job of redrawing Dáil constituencies, it will boil down to a wrestling match between geography and maths.
Sometimes there is no escaping the maths. Only so many seats will fit within a county boundary no matter how many permutations you try. And when it does not work out, it can get ugly.
Article 16 of the Constitution specifies there must be one TD for between 20,000 and 30,000 people. But here’s the catch. That’s everybody, not just those over 18 who are eligible to vote. It covers every resident of the country recorded in the latest census, including children and people of other nationalities.
It was fine for most of the history of the State when the population was low and the number of people per TD hovered around the 20,000 mark. But in recent decades the population of the State has risen sharply and when boundaries are redrawn, it is always close to the 30,000 limit.
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That gives rise to two problems. The first is there is no wriggle room. A cardinal rule for the Electoral Commission is to respect the county boundaries as much as possible. But if a county has a population of 100,000, there is no getting around it. It means it will be allotted three seats but the extra 10,000 votes will go to another county.
The second is that the 30,000 upper limit is baked into the Constitution. With a growing population, it is estimated the Dáil will need an extra 15 TDs at least by the time of the next election in 2029. That would mean the Dáil will have increased by almost 30 TDs in the space of a decade from 160 to 189.
Based on population projections, the Dáil could have 250 TDs by the middle of the century if the limit remains the same. Clearly that would be unmanageable. Indeed, the current Dáil chamber could not accommodate 200 TDs, even with Ryanair-size seats installed. Earlier this year, the Independent Senator Michael McDowell tabled a Private Members’ Bill calling for a referendum to change that limit. “If every 30,000 people in the United Kingdom required an MP, there would be roughly 2,300 members of the House of Commons,” he told the Upper House during the debate.
If you are comparing like with like, Westminster has currently one MP for every 92,000 people.
Increasing the limit would allow a bit more leeway in respecting county boundaries, but as governments have learned to their costs, referendums are never shoo-ins.
Down the years, there have been some difficult nuts to crack, none more resistant than Roscommon. The county’s population would merit two TDs. In the past it was paired with Leitrim and then, during the 1980s, with a non-Connacht county, Longford, on the other side of the river Shannon. Lately, a fair portion of northeast Galway has been sheared off to create the three-seat Roscommon-Galway constituency.
Pairing it with Longford was particularly unnatural. Albert Reynolds’s right-hand man, Mickey Doherty, was asked whether the Longford poll-topper would transfer surplus votes to his Roscommon colleagues. His acid reply was: “Votes don’t swim.”
When maths wins out it makes for clumsy constituencies. The Electoral Commission did a reasonable job last time and managed to eliminate cross-border overlaps in most instances. But not all. Almost 10,000 voters from Ballyshannon and Bundoran remain in Sligo-Leitrim, which is not a natural fit. A new constituency had to be created in between Wexford and Wicklow. And 13 electoral divisions from East Kilkenny including Freshford and Urlingford were lumped into Tipperary North in 2023.
That was not an ideal marriage. One person who spoiled their vote in Urlingford wrote on the ballot paper: “I would rather vote for Hitler than vote for a Tipperary man.”
None of the solutions are simple. The drafters of the 1937 Constitution did not envisage a population heading towards six million. The cube-root rule devised by Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera holds that as population rises the size of a parliament should increase at a relatively slower rate. The only way that can be achieved is by referendum.
The other solution to enable smoother boundary changes would be to allow six-seat constituencies for the first time. Such a radical departure would not go down well with all parties. Back in the 1970s, during a Fine Gael-Labour coalition, minister for local government Jim Tully reduced many constituencies in size to three-seaters. The rationale behind it was nakedly electoral. Many were in Dublin, where Fine Gael and Labour were strong, and they also selected other constituencies where both parties dominated. The idea was to keep Fianna Fáil out of government. It was an old-school stroke, a classic gerrymander. It became known as a Tullymander, after its architect-in-chief. It backfired and Fianna Fáil won by a landslide in 1977.
Any move the other way to create six-seaters will be resisted. Larger constituencies tend to favour the smaller, more marginal parties and candidates, so the big parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and even Sinn Féin) might be less than enthusiastic.
There are 15 five-seat constituencies at the moment. If all the candidates who finished sixth were totted up, it would show nine were Independents or from smaller parties, with six from the big three. The 15 consisted of four Independents, three from Fianna Fáil, two from Fine Gael and Aontú, and one each from Independent Ireland, the Social Democrats, Solidarity and Sinn Féin. It’s not directly comparable but it does indicate direction of travel. Agreeing to go down that route might be a bigger ask of the three bigger parties than agreeing to a referendum.
