Independents aren’t top dogs in Connacht / Ulster

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

There was what you’d call a turn-up for the books in last week’s Irish Times IPSOSO MRBI opinion poll. For the first time ever in Irish polling history, the dominant group attracting support from voters wasn’t a political party but the crowd collectively known as ‘none of the above’.

Nearly one third of voters said that if an election were held tomorrow they would vote for a non-party candidate or one that belonged to a smaller party. There was a gap of a full ten percentage points between the independents and the nearest political party.

In a week during which a famous independent TD, Jackie Healy-Rae, was buried, it seemed his tradition will live on. In many ways Healy-Rae provided a template for aspiring non-party candidates. Rejected by Fianna Fáil in 1997, he ran as a candidate and won a seat in South Kerry that he probably would not have won as a party candidate. Holding the balance of power, he and three other independents were able to set out a shopping list of demands for constituency goodies.

I was down for Healy-Rae’s funeral in Kilgarvan on Sunday and could see evidence of his success everywhere – wide smooth roads, pristine bridges, shining new facilities. Other aspirants could point to Healy-Rae’s success and say ‘vote for me as an independent and I could have huge influence’. It worked at the next election five years later but then Fianna Fáil was so strong after 2002 that independents fell right back.

But now their stock has risen completely since the recession has hit, with a sense of deep disillusionment taking hold when it comes to all the traditional political parties (and it seems Sinn Féin is also beginning to be dragged into that group).

So does that mean that any aspiring independent in the West can hop on the bandwagon sure of getting elected?

Well, not so fast there buster! There are a couple of things I need to point out first.

If you start looking at the detail of the ipsos poll, the findings are interesting especially for Connacht /Ulster. The picture for independents here is still good but not quite as good as the national figures.

Indeed, they are not the biggest grouping along the western seaboard. The regional figures show that Fianna Fáil is attracting most support at 28 per cent with Fine Gael at 24 per cent. Sinn Féin at 18 per cent is four points down on its national total – a bit of a worry for the likes of Trevor Ó Clochartaigh given that the party is very very strong in Donegal and Sligo/Leitrim and will hoover up a lot of support there.

Another straw in the wind that might affect the Sinn Féin vote is that more in the west, 40 per cent, say they are less likely to vote for the party after the Maíria Cahill affair. That compares to a national figure of 32 per cent.

Independents are still taking a respectable 26 per cent of the vote in the West. In the normal course of events, that might translate into them taking between one in three, or one in four seats. But that supposes that their support levels will remain high.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.