It is just under a fortnight to the general election and Friday’s Irish Times/Ipsos poll showed a jump in support for Independents but Fine Gael sitting as the most popular party, six points ahead of its main rivals, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. It is still all to play for as the election campaign cranks up.
Parties are battling it out in 43 constituencies – four more than last time in 2020. There are four constituencies considered bellwethers where results should signal how the overall result plays out.
Dublin Bay North
Just off Vernon Avenue in Clontarf, Independent councillor Barry Heneghan and his team are moving door to door at great speed.
It’s a crisp, bright November afternoon and Heneghan is explaining what issues are coming up on the doorsteps of the five-seat Dublin Bay North constituency.
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“A lot of people, young families, are really struggling with childcare at the moment. A lot of people are very frustrated too with the housing crisis,” he says.
The 26-year-old had left home but recently moved back in with his parents and says he understands the frustration people feel about the housing crisis.
Heneghan has a master’s in engineering but has worked “multiple jobs” through his 20s, he says. “I was a bar man, I was a swim teacher, I was a delivery driver for Chinese food, I was a TV presenter.”
He was even a beekeeper for a time.
“I did move out, but even with all that work, there was a big squeeze financially,” he says.
He is not “designed to still be living at home at this age”, he says. “We are supposed to be more independent.”
His father, a retired garda, is a member of his campaign team and he has a “kitchen cabinet of 10 people”, including former Independent Alliance minister Finian McGrath, who has “first-hand knowledge of what I need to do, how I need to do it”.
Political pundits in Dublin Bay North are playing up Heneghan’s chances in the November 29th general election, but he is reluctant to imagine himself in the Dáil yet.
“Traditional political parties have been in power for the last 100 years. Independents represent the people, not a party’s agenda,” he says.
Heneghan is running a strong social media campaign and is boosted by his performance in this summer’s local elections when he won almost 2,500 votes.
There is an element of uncertainty, however, in how voting in Dublin Bay North, a constituency that stretches from Clontarf to Howth and Darndale to Clongriffin, might play out.
The constituency is considered a bellwether; trends that emerge here could be replicated nationwide as the 174 Dáil seats are filled.
An Independent wave nationally would put Heneghan in with a strong chance of taking a seat.
At least three candidates elected here will be new TDs. Three of the five TDs elected the last time in the 2020 general election are not standing: two are veteran deputies – Richard Bruton of Fine Gael and Seán Haughey of Fianna Fáil – and are retiring; the third, Labour’s Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, won a seat in the European Parliament in the June elections.
One side of the constituency remained loyal for years to Bruton, a TD since 1982, and, on that basis, a Fine Gael seat is considered all but guaranteed. The party is running councillors Naoise Ó Muiri and Aoibhinn Tormey. A second Fine Gael seat is also a possibility if a “Harris hop” from Fine Gael’s new leader materialises across the country.
The situation in Fianna Fáil is less certain. There are questions around whether Fianna Fáil has attracted younger voters beyond the traditional support base of Haughey, a TD for 27 of the last 32 years. Regardless, either of the Fianna Fáil councillors who are running, Deirdre Heney or Tom Brabazon, will be hoping for a seat.
Social Democrats deputy leader Cian O’Callaghan is viewed as having a strong chance of holding his seat. Sinn Féin TD Denise Mitchell won the highest first-preference vote of any candidate in the country in this constituency in 2020, but will the recent controversies surrounding Sinn Féin have an impact?
[ Will Sinn Féin’s many controversies cut through to their base?Opens in new window ]
Her running mate, Sinn Féin councillor Micheál Mac Donncha, has served on Dublin City Council since 2011 and could help her sweep up votes with transfers.
On current polling, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have a strong chance of winning seats. O’Callaghan’s national profile and on-the-ground work put him in a good position too. And so there could be a scrap for the last seat, with Heneghan (or another Independent, such as John Lyons) facing off against someone who has also experienced the pain of the housing crisis, Labour’s Shane Folan, who is attempting to hold Ó Ríordáin’s seat.
“Housing is the big issue unsurprisingly and people want to hear from me,” Folan says.
“I’m a renter and have only moved out of my parent’s house in the last few months, so my experience is the same as thousands of families across the northside. I’ve been getting support from people not just in my own situation, but their parents as well who are frustrated at what they’re seeing.”
– Jennifer Bray in Clontarf
Dún Laoghaire
Walking along Foxrock Avenue and Foxrock Park with Ossian Smyth, the Green Party TD for Dún Laoghaire, you count at least a dozen houses with solar panels.
“Definitely all Fine Gael voters!” remarked one of my colleagues later in the day.
She might be right. Dún Laoghaire is the kind of constituency that the Green Party should do well in.
Between the main N11 out of Dublin to the South East and the coast, it runs from UCD to the border of north Wicklow. There are pockets of huge wealth in this four-seat constituency and some poorer areas. But it is predominantly middle class, liberal and relatively well-to-do, with the highest proportion of graduates in the country.
Many people tend to think green but they don’t necessarily vote Green. Historically, it’s when climate change is high on the agenda and the party is coming from Opposition that it has done well. That worked in the 2020 general election when Smyth topped the poll with 15.9 per cent of first preferences. It is not expected this time, though.
Smyth is literally running for survival. While canvassing, he sprints as soon as he sees a door being opened. “Walk, walk,” the canvass director Clíona Dorman instructs unsuccessfully.
Dún Laoghaire had traditionally been a Fine Gael stronghold although Fianna Fáil has often shared the spoils. There has also been a left-wing seat, held since 2011 by Richard Boyd-Barrett of People Before Profit.
Fine Gael took two seats in 2011 and three in 2016. The party received 33 per cent of first preferences in 2020 but a three-candidate strategy backfired.
If recent opinion polls are accurate, it is now streaking ahead of Fianna Fáil in Dublin. Green support levels have halved since 2020. For Fine Gael to have a big day in Dublin, it will need to win a second seat in Dún Laoghaire.
Both Boyd-Barrett and the sitting Fine Gael TD, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, are considered safe. The last two seats will form the basis of a three-way battle between Smyth, the Fianna Fáil TD Cormac Devlin, and Fine Gael’s Senator Barry Ward, who picked up almost 6,000 first preferences in 2020.
This time around, for the Greens, it should not be like the annihilation of the 2011 election. There is no hostility on the doors. Conversations revolve around climate change, traffic, public transport (the end of the 46A bus route) and housing.
“Public transport is a huge issue here – 40 per cent of people here travel to work by bus or train,” Smyth says.
There are a few definite indications of support. “You have got my vote anyway,” shouts a man who stops his car. Most are non-committal, with many promising him a high-preference vote up the ballot but not their number one choice. This will be a struggle for Smyth.
He has a consistent message to those he meets out canvassing: “I got the first seat the last time, but I will be fighting for the last seat this time.”
“When you are a small party in Government, you become unpopular. I have been working very hard, doing the right thing, but if I had stayed in Opposition, then it would be easier to get re-elected.”
Carroll MacNeill is also running from house to house in Elton Park and Dundela Park in Bullock near Dalkey in the south Co Dublin constituency. Her campaign director Penny McRedmond has to issue the same advice as Dorman: “Walk, walk.”
This would, on first impressions, appear to be a strong Fine Gael area. But there is a wide variety of views. At two doorsteps, there are passionate denunciations of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Twice, people express concern about the impact of the proposed wind turbines for the Kish and Bray Banks on the marine environment.
A couple with young children disclose the eye-watering cost of childcare.
“We paid €4,000 a month until September and now we pay the bargain price of €2,600 a month,” one of the parents says..
Carroll MacNeill outlines the Fine Gael policy proposal – a maximum of €200 per month per child – but she accepts that it will take a few years to implement.
Childcare has been the most frequent issue mentioned around here. McRedmond says housing is not raised as much as in 2020.
Carroll MacNeill and Ward have free rein in the constituency. A careful division will be required for the party to win two seats. Fine Gael says a carve-up may occur in the last week if necessary.
Fine Gael needs a swing of only 2 percentage points. Fianna Fáil’s Devlin needs to drive his personal vote up to 14 per cent. Smyth needs to remain in double figures.
Any of these scenarios could materialise. Whichever outcome emerges will tell us a lot about the fate of the three Government parties overall in Election 2024.
– Harry McGee in Dún Laoghaire
Kildare North
Bill Clear has a mountain to climb. He has just left his party, the Social Democrats, he has been campaigning as an Independent with a small team and he is up against his former party leader’s handpicked successor.
But, on a cold Wednesday morning in November in Sallins, it is clear he has hope. Part of that stems from Kildare North, Clear’s constituency, undergoing many changes in the last four years.
Not only has it gone up one seat from four to five, but the constituency’s highest-profile politician, Catherine Murphy – Clear’s former leader in the Soc Dems – has retired. Most significantly, the population here has soared by almost 20,000, throwing into the mix thousands of new voters whose preferences cannot be predicted.
All this makes Kildare North a kind of bellwether for the state of the parties across the country; if there are shifts in national trends, they will be clearly visible in this constituency on Dublin’s commuter belt.
The predominance of national issues was evident during the week on Clear’s canvass. For every strongly voiced local concern – a disliked property development, or a gripe about a local greenway, or a concern about a tree’s roots growing under a boundary wall – there were plenty of major national policies issues on the minds of the people of Sallins.
Housing was on the mind of one voter: Lizzie Minihan, a fitness industry professional who has been living in Kildare for years and renting for all of that time.
While plenty of houses have been built in north Kildare in recent years, Minihan has found that getting a mortgage from a bank has been a significant challenge.
“They want you to hop on one leg, then hop on the other leg, and then they will say: ‘Oh no, sorry, you hopped the wrong way there’,” she said, exaggerating onerous requirements of the bank for effect.
Transport is also a major issue, according to Sallins resident Karen McDonnell. She has two children of college age who have been battling with timetable changes and privatised bus services as they attempt to travel to Dublin City University. Affording accommodation in Dublin, of course, is out of the question.
Meanwhile, energy costs are a major concern for Pat Russell, a pensioner in the town, who has seen the cost of living rise but not yet fall back to normal.
There was clear frustration on the canvass with the ability of past governments to tackle these issues. As Russell put it: “It needs a change, doesn’t it?”
In such context, predicting the election outcome in Kildare North is difficult.
The broad consensus is that Fianna Fáil will win the first seat, likely through sitting TD James Lawless, and that Fine Gael will secure the second, though it’s not clear whether the strongest candidate will be party stalwart Bernard Durkan, who is seeking to retain his seat, or Leixlip county councillor – and a local election poll topper – Joe Neville.
Sinn Féin is expected to hold a seat through its sitting deputy Réada Cronin, while Murphy, who is retiring at the election, will have enough clout to bring her successor, local councillor Aidan Farrelly, over the line.
The final seat is likely to be,fought out between the remaining Fine Gael candidates and Naoise Ó Cearúil, Lawless’s Fianna Fáil running mate.
There is, however, an alternative and very plausible analysis that says that a number of significant national trends could send the constituency in a different direction.
The first is if there is a slump in the strength of Sinn Féin, which has tumbled in the polls over the last year. It’s not a view held by Sinn Féin’s Cronin, who told The Irish Times that she expects the party to tap into the national frustrations about housing, health, education and cost of living.
“What I’m hearing on the doors is that people are ready to give Sinn Féin a chance and we are doing much better on the doors than we had expected after local elections.”
If support for Sinn Féin slumps nationally, it could put her in a fight for the fifth seat and throw the race wide open.
A further factor in determining how the seats will fall is the strength of the so-called Independent wave, with Independents polling around 20 per cent nationally.
The primary beneficiary could well be Clear, who topped the poll in Naas in the locals and could still ride a strong Social Democrat vote in the constituency, the party having returned five councillors in the five major towns of north Kildare.
But the biggest wind at his back will be his Independent status, Clear believes, telling The Irish Times: “Maybe this is the time for me to get in and be the Independent progressive voice of North Kildare.”
– Barry J Whyte in Sallins
Clare
As a thick mist settles around The Market in the centre of Ennis, a solitary cherry picker works its way from one lamp post to the next, quietly announcing the coming festive season with each new spool of lights.
This once bustling thoroughfare is quiet, even by recent standards, as a combination of inflation, antisocial behaviour and a controversial public regeneration project has dampened moods and tightened purse strings.
Like everywhere in the midwest, the state of local healthcare is a top election issue here in the four-seat constituency of Clare.
But in a small shop on Upper Market Street, Bernadette Clune insists she is not just going to talk about “health and the hospital”, even though she says that University Hospital Limerick, the region’s main hospital, is a “total disgrace”.
Instead, her focus is on policing and antisocial behaviour, and her feeling that the two main political parties are allowing Ennis to be turned into a “ghetto”.
“It’s like they think that some areas aren’t worth looking after. Not one politician has come to my door to ask me what I think, how I feel, or the issues that I have,” she says.
“Ennis is much less safe than it used to be. There is an awful lot of antisocial behaviour and when I complain, they tell me that this is happening in every town in Ireland. They were dealing drugs on my road, so I continuously complained about it, but our voices are not being listened to.
“This is down to the big parties, the old guard, but politics down here doesn’t seem to have changed. There seems to be no appetite for change here; it’s the same old, same old.”
One member of an old guard party, who is taking his first stab at a national election, is Fine Gael’s Joe Cooney. Cooney, probably one of the most popular politician that you have never heard of, was cajoled into running, days after saying he was 15 years too old for the Dáil, following an hour-long conversation with Taoiseach Simon Harris.
The east Clare man is easily Clare’s best-loved county councillor. A long time servant of Clare GAA and well liked across the political divide, he is expected to take a seat in the election.
But the logic of Fine Gael pressing Cooney into reluctant service is unclear. Should he win a seat, it will almost certainly come at the expense of his party colleague Leonora Carey, the sister of former TD Joe Carey who retired from politics due to ill health earlier this year.
Fine Gael may hope that the “new energy” of Harris may lift them in parts of the country, but in Clare it is expected to be one seat – and one seat only.
Cooney’s inclusion will also be a headache for several high-profile candidates from east Clare, with Fianna Fáil TD Cathal Crowe (FF), Fianna Fáil Senator Timmy Dooley and Independent Ireland’s Eddie Punch all facing stiff competition from the Fine Gael candidate.
Punch, the former secretary general of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association, was seen as Independent Ireland’s best chance of winning a seat in this election after secured 20,000 votes in Ireland South in the recent European elections.
But Cooney’s appearance on his doorstep has brought in a strong opponent.
The drone of the Ennis Public Realm Regeneration works on nearby O’Connell Street is heavy in the air as customers mill around the Ennis Pet Centre.
Inside, shop owner Valerie Morris is hoping that the next government can help solve the town’s transportation problems and may look to Green Party Senator Róisín Garvey, the party’s general election candidate, for that reason.
“As a business owner, transport in Ennis town is a massive thing. It is impossible to park a car here. It’s affecting all the business. If people can’t park, they are going outside the town to shop,” she says.
“I am looking for a party who can tackle this. Better public transport would be a big help. Years ago we had a decent bus service, bringing people into the town every 15 minutes. If that was brought in again, I’d be all for it. For the sake of better access, but for the environment as well. If the Green Party can sort that out, that would be brilliant.”
While the Green Party is likely to face headwinds across rural Ireland in this election, Clare could be the exception.
Garvey is a rare thing: a rural Green politician. Her profile has been enhanced by the Greens’ spell in government. Unfortunately for her, the much anticipated Ennis Town Bus Service will not come online until 2025.
With Clare likely to elect two from Fianna Fáil and one from Fine Gael, and with Sinn Féin’s Donna McGettigan likely to split the republican vote with deputy Violet-Anne Wynne (the former Sinn Féin TD turned Independent in 2022), the way could be clear for a Green breakthrough.
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