ELECTION ANALYSIS:NOW THAT the dust is settling on the presidential election, it is appropriate to examine the potential impact of the result on the political parties.
Without question, the dramatic intervention by Sinn Féin candidate Martin McGuinness on the
Frontline
debate prevented Seán Gallagher from becoming president.
The media has been consumed in the past week by discussion of the accuracy and impact of the allegations made against Gallagher. The key question though is, why did Sinn Féin take a strategic decision to target Gallagher?
When the polls on the last weekend of the campaign were published, Gallagher was the biggest obstacle to Sinn Féin’s plan to subsume the bulk of the Fianna Fáil vote. He had attracted and galvanised the majority of that vote, while also garnering significant numbers who had deserted Fianna Fáil in February to vote for other parties.
While the attack on Gallagher certainly cost him the presidency, a detailed analysis of the results, show that it was a pyrrhic victory for Sinn Féin.
The attack on Gallagher was predicated on the belief that it would cause his vote to collapse and further weaken Fianna Fáil to the benefit of Sinn Féin. This did not happen as Fianna Fáil supporters, offended by the attack on a candidate who had only one degree of separation from their party, flocked to Gallagher in their hundreds of thousands.
As political commentator Johnny Fallon astutely observed when he was in the Newstalk studio with me on Friday, those supporters will not forgive Sinn Féin.
Their anger had the impact of stopping the Sinn Féin advance dead in its tracks.
As the accompanying table demonstrates, Sinn Féin – despite claims to the contrary – made no headway last weekend even with the highest-profile candidate they could muster.
Sinn Féin contested 38 of the 43 Dáil constituencies last February. Comparing that performance to the same 38 constituencies last Thursday, the party only managed a net increase of 1,390 votes, or an average of a mere 37 votes a constituency. Gallagher, on the other hand, achieved a 31 per cent increase on the Fianna Fáil vote in those same 38 constituencies.
Furthermore, when the performance in the 14 constituencies where Sinn Féin had TDs elected in February is analysed, it shows that it lost more than 26,000 votes, a drop in its share of the vote of 20.6 per cent, or one-fifth.
Of the 14 constituencies, only Cork North Central improved on February, while half of them had Sinn Féin support fall by more than 2,000 votes. This compares unfavourably with Gallagher’s performance, which had him improve on the Fianna Fáil February vote by 37.2 per cent in the same group of constituencies.
This trend was confirmed by the result of the Dublin West byelection.
Fianna Fáil byelection candidate David McGuinness increased the party support by more than 700 votes despite a drop in turnout of almost 7,000. While Paul Donnelly added 600 to the Sinn Féin vote, he intriguingly polled 1,000 fewer votes than Martin McGuinness in the presidential contest in the constituency.
This raises the question whether, in the one direct comparison between the Dáil and presidential election, Martin McGuinness is running ahead of his party and that Sinn Féin support is declining as a result of the ambush on Gallagher.
While Labour can justifiably celebrate victories for Michael D Higgins and Patrick Nulty, its coalition partner Fine Gael had a disastrous weekend. While it would be fatuous to suggest that this would be repeated in a general election were there one imminent, there are signs that there is a small but potentially significant shift in the public mood.
In what I would call the cause and effect syndrome, the further removed we are from last February, the more that the cause of our difficulties shifts away from the last government and on to the effect of the performance of the current Government.
Clearly, the speed of this shift depends on how the economy and the associated evils of unemployment, emigration, mortgages and the increased poverty trap are dealt with by the Government.
This shift in mood is apparent in the results last weekend. The turnout for the presidential election was down some 450,000 votes on February, despite an almost identical electorate. The combined vote of Michael D Higgins and Gay Mitchell was 420,000 fewer than their respective party support last February.
Similarly, in the Dublin West byelection, the turnout was down by 6,770 votes while the combined vote of the Labour and Fine Gael candidates fell by 6,400 votes. All this while what was effectively a Fianna Fáil presidential candidate and a bona fide Fianna Fáil byelection candidate were performing very well.
The presidential opinion polls and the actual polls suggest that Fianna Fáil may not be anything like as toxic as many commentators have suggested. If it can find a raft of young energetic candidates and articulate coherent alternative policies, it is well placed not only to see off the threat of Sinn Féin but to play a more influential role much sooner than anyone would have thought possible a few weeks ago.
Odran Flynn is an electoral analyst