The Cedar Lounge Revolution

That Irish Times poll… October 9, 2014

As noted earlier, there’s only two shifts in the poll outside the margin of error, a slide for FF and a rise for SF. The Labour Party is 2% up but that’s again well within the MOE and small recompense for changing their leader. IEL asked, tongue in cheek, yesterday whether it might be time for a leadership change in the LP. But he could be right! And M. Martin will be having a most uncomfortable day or two, in advance of the byelections, while SF is probably delighted. And so should Ind/Others be.

IEL has noted that the projections from Adrian Kavanagh posit the following outcome on the poll.

Adrian Kavanaghs take…..
Fianna Fail 34, Fine Gael 45, Sinn Fein 41, Labour Party 6, Independents and Others 32.

Ironically an FG/FF combination would have 79 TDs straight off – or precisely half the number of TDs in the ‘reformed’ Dáil. Not difficult to envisage them being able to find a fair few Ind/Others who would work with them. Though an SF/FF/Other government would be quite feasible on those figures. So, perhaps what faces us is genuinely a centre/left or centre/right option. Not very centre/left, but most definitely centre/right. Not difficult to see what is most likely.

But here’s Stephen Collin’s take:

… The increase in support for Sinn Féin, which puts the party at level pegging with Fine Gael, is the most striking feature of the latest Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll.
While the finding is undoubtedly good news for the party some caveats are required before extrapolating from the poll result to the next general election.

And he continues – perhaps attempting to calm the horses:

… The last Irish Times poll in May had Sinn Féin on 20 per cent of the vote, yet in the local elections a few days later it won 15 per cent. By contrast Fine Gael at 24 per cent and Fianna Fáil at 25 per cent won exactly the same share of the vote in the election as they got in the poll.

Something similar happened in the presidential election of 2011 when the party got 13.5 per cent of the vote having polled 18 per cent during the campaign.

Those of us watching the process of SF’s remarkable, albeit not entirely inexorable rise over the past decade and more might throw in a counter-caveat, as it were. He’s right, at the locals SF did indeed gain 15%, which was lower than the polling projections. However, let’s also note that at the European Elections held on precisely the same day as the locals that party gained – yes, that’s right, 19.5% – an increase of 8.3% on their previous number and just 3% or so short of FG on 22.3%.

Intriguingly Harry McGee also reiterates the comparison with the local elections.

… That is good news for the party. However, there is always a significant gap between its opinion poll performances and its actual vote. For example, in the May local elections, the last opinion poll put support for Sinn Féin at 20 per cent, where the actual out-turn was just over 15 per cent (which was still a substantial gain for the party).

An explanation for the discrepancy between local and European votes? Well it’s not difficult to see that in a local election SF might potentially suffer, particularly in Dublin, from challenges to its left.

Do I think SF will get 20% at the next election? I’d tend to caution. But it’s surprising not to get a little bit deeper of an analysis of this poll and its ramifications, is it not?

And what are those ramifications? Three parties now contesting much the same ground in terms of their share of the vote, that being FG/FF and SF. One considerably smaller party. And one large bloc of non-party and small party support. That Ind/Others remains remarkably cohesive, doesn’t it? It will be quite something if upwards of 25 Ind/Other TDs are returned to a smaller Dáil.