Commentary

‘The end of the Haughey dynasty as Fianna Fail draw another blank in a Dublin constituency’

The Constituency Commission made a boundary revision here since 2007 with a population of 2,758 in the Edenmore electoral division transferring in from Dublin North East. However, the constituency did retain its three seats.

The Fine Gael vote was up 12 points since 2007 and with 1.5 quotas they were in contention for two seats. Richard Bruton topped the poll and was just 9 votes short of the quota on the first count. His running mate Naoise Ó Muirí was just outside the frame in fourth place with half a quota and failed to make up his first count deficit of over 1,000 votes on outgoing independent TD Finian McGrath.

Labour had won a seat here in 1992 and 1997 but lost it in 2002 and failed again in 2007. The party made no mistake in this election with Aodháin O Riordáin taking second place with 0.9 of a quota on the first count as he increased the Labour vote by 15 points for an impressive performance.

This was another disastrous performance by Fianna Fáil with their vote down 31 points, their seventh largest loss of support in this election. Sean Haughey did poorly and with just 0.5 quotas was in fourth place on the first count, just ahead of O Muiri. He failed to make any headway during the count and was overtaken by the Fine Gael man and was finally eliminated on the sixth count with his transfers ensuring McGrath’s election. So this election marked the end of an era in Irish politics with the Haughey name missing from Dáil Eireann for the first time since 1957.

Outgoing Independent deputy Finian McGrath was in third place on the first count and went on to hold off Ó Muírí for the final seat by the very comfortable margin of 4,626 votes.

The turnout was up five points in this constituency and at 73.17% was five points above the Dublin turnout of 68.20%.