Storm Catherine about to hit the Irish political landscape

Storm Benjamin is hitting the UK this weekend with heavy downpours and winds of more than 100km/h, but it looks like it will miss Ireland. We will have our own version to contend with, nonetheless: Storm Catherine, with an epicentre in Dublin Castle, will blitz the country by mid afternoon on Saturday.

The final poll of the campaign by Red C, and published online by the Business Post last night, confirms a trend that has been evident since late September. There is a storm-force wind behind Independent candidate Catherine Connolly. In the last 24 hours of the campaign her election looks almost inevitable.

Our lead story says the polls suggest Connolly is on course to win the presidential election. The poll figures put Connolly on 44 per cent, 19 points in advance of Heather Humphreys on 25 per cent.

The gap evident in The Irish Times Ipsos B&A poll published last Thursday has been maintained, notwithstanding a more coherent and concerted Fine Gael effort to shore up support for Humphreys in the last week.

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If these figures are replicated when people vote tomorrow it will mean Connolly will win in the first count by a substantial margin.

There are 21 per cent who are still undecided but it’s likely the vast majority of those won’t vote, so it won’t impact on the result.

The 10 per cent figure for Jim Gavin is interesting. It’s likely that a majority of Fianna Fáil voters who feel compelled to exercise their electoral franchise will vote for the zombie candidate. It won’t be enough to generate a second count but it may be enough for Fianna Fáil to recover €250,000 in expenses, if Gavin reaches 12.5 per cent.

For me, it’s a little like the Fianna Fáil equivalent in this election of how Éamon de Valera approached the oath of allegiance to the crown when first entering the Dáil in 1927. This time around it’s a means of allowing diehard Fianna Fáil supporters to vote for a Fine Gael, or even a left-wing, candidate, while nominally staying loyal to the party.

In a way, the Gavin vote could be seen as a protest vote by angry Fianna Fáil supporters, who were left with a horse in the race whose rider was unseated.

Turnout in 2018 was low, 43.9 per cent. That election was a foregone conclusion and we expect turnout to be around the same this time around. As a rule of thumb, older voters are more likely to vote than younger voters – which should theoretically favour Humphreys.

But the Connolly campaign was based on the Repeal and Together for Yes referendums in 2018 and 2015, which mobilised mostly younger voters by creating a movement. More than 15,000 joined and the movement had a huge impact with a younger cohort, especially through social media. So there is a strong motive for many more young people to vote this time.

Look out too for the percentage of spoiled votes. In 2018, it was 1.2 per cent, and in 2011 it was 1 per cent. There’s been a specific protest campaign, Spoil the Vote, which has encouraged people to do exactly that. Many of its most prominent players are those who were involved in the effort to get Maria Steen on to the ticket.

The reality is that Steen was not felled by a lack of democracy or a flaw in the democratic institutions. She simply arrived too late. If she had launched her campaign in spring it is likely she would have been on the slate.

Another interesting phenomenon is that the presidential election, since 1990, has not been a party political election. A strong candidate will out-trump a strong party in this election every single time.

Final day of campaigning

Catherine Connolly will be in Roscommon today before travelling to her home city of Galway where she will attend the final rally of her campaign.

She is expected to attend a school and business in Castlerea in Roscommon in the morning before travelling to Roscommon town to meet community groups and people in the afternoon.

The final campaign rally will be held in the Galway Bay Hotel in Salthill this evening. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik, Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns, People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy and Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman will be in attendance, along with MEP Luke Ming Flanagan.

Meanwhile, Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys begins her last day of campaigning in Sligo before travelling to Donegal in the early afternoon for a flurry of visits and rallies.

On the eve of the poll, there are no sittings in the Oireachtas today.

Election Daily

What does a two-horse race look like in our PR-STV electoral system? What happens when you throw a zombie candidate and a spoil-your-vote campaign into the mix? And what about turnout?

Pat Leahy and Hugh Linehan take a look at how the count could play out this weekend on the latest episode of Election Daily.