FF could gain a dozen seats in the next general election

World of Politics with Harry McGee

Opinion polls tell you who is doing well around the country.  What they can’t tell you is the winner of the last seat in a five-seat constituency after 22 counts and transfers.

Local elections also give a fairly reliable indicator as to what parties are on the way up and which are on the way down.

But when you try to map those results onto a general election map, you start running into bother. People’s motives are always slightly different in local elections. And people often plump for people who they know rather than the party, or movement, they might represent.

That’s a long-winded warning about today’s exercise, an attempt to predict the outcome of the next general election.

Before we go any further, I need to warn you that the margin of error is massive. It’s beyond human capacity to predict where the last two seats go in Dublin Bay North or in Galway West and be prepared to bet the house on it.

If Fianna Fáil is doing well, that’s no guarantee it will hold onto the two seats it won in constituencies like Sligo-Leitrim, Cork North West and Kildare North, in 2016. It got a good bounce of the ball in that election. If it got the same percentage vote in both constituencies this time around, it might not hold onto what it had.

All that said, I have used the results from the local elections (mainly) and European elections (less so) plus the latest polling data to compile this guesstimate of where seats might fall. It will be interesting (for me anyway!) to come back after the election and see how far or near I was.

We know from the local elections that Fianna Fáil did well, Fine Gael did not do badly, and Sinn Féin did really poorly. My own view is that Sinn Féin will have too big a task to turn it around before the general election, as it will be held within months rather than years.

For now, anyway, the momentum seems to be with the two biggest parties, and with the Greens and (to a lesser extent) the Social Democrats and Labour. In some constituencies the last seat will be a toss of the ball between smaller parties and Independents.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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