Now that Catherine Connolly has ascended to the heights of President Elect, voters in Galway West will be asked, within six months, to choose her replacement in the Oireachtas. That by-election, on paper, promises to be a three-way fight between three camps with hopes of claiming her seat.
If we look at the result of last year’s general election in the constituency, the votes can be broken down into three not-quite but not-far-off equal camps.
First, there are the two Government parties. While Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will compete with each other for the seat as much as with everyone else, recent history suggests their votes will transfer well between each other and broadly stick together. At the last election, the combined FF/FG vote in the constituency was 35.6%.
Second, there is the left, fresh off their crushing election win as an alliance, and eager to flex their muscles once more by retaining the President-Elect’s seat. Sinn Fein in particular will have their eyes on whether left-wing transfers can push their candidate into the winner’s enclosure. At the last election, candidates of the left (Connolly, SF, Greens, Labour, and the Soc Dems combined) achieved a collective 36.1% of the vote.
Finally, there is the diverse collection of voters and candidates who voted for mostly centre-right to right-wing independents and smaller parties. I include here votes cast for Noel Grealish, the sitting TD, alongside votes cast for Independent Ireland, Aontu, and the raft of smaller right-wing parties who contested the last election without much success. Collectively, these candidates achieved 28.3% of the vote. Can these parties hope to claim victory?
The short answer is that yes, they can, but doing so will require some heretofore absent political maturity. A by-election count, just like a Presidential Election count, is a race to 50% of the vote or as close to it as can be achieved. The key to victory is to be in a place where you can stay in the race long enough to benefit from the maximum number of transfers.
We know that the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael votes will be split between the two parties – if they were split equally that would mean something like 17% of the vote each.
We know too that the left-wing vote will be split between multiple parties: If that was to play out according to today’s polls, it would equate to something like 20% on the first count for Sinn Fein, with a raft of other left candidates picking up 3-6% between them.
And then there is the independent vote. We do not know how many candidates there might be, but the more that there are, the worse the chances of victory for an independent candidate becomes. If there was only one candidate – Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas being the obvious choice to be that runner – and most of the Independent vote was retained, that candidate might expect to emerge with 25-30% of votes on the first count, and be well positioned to fight for the seat should FF and FG or the left fail to transfer well between them.
However, if that vote is split six different ways between The Irish People, The Irish Freedom Party, The National Party, and six other independents, then the chances of victory drop precipitously.
We might expect Aontú to run a candidate here, naturally enough, but Galway West has not yet been a happy hunting ground for Peadar Tóibín’s party, which secured just 2.1% of the vote here in 2024 as opposed to almost 10% for Independent Ireland.
If there was any political unity amongst centre-right to right-leaning political groups, the obvious political strategy here would be to clear the field for Noel Thomas in so far as is possible, and attempt to unify behind him as much as possible of the 28.3% of the vote achieved by independents and smaller parties last time out. The path to victory would be to get Thomas as close as possible to a third of the vote on the first count, and then hope that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would not be able to overtake him, and would transfer many more votes to him than they would to Sinn Fein.
This, I fear, is very unlikely to occur. By-elections tend to turn into circuses where every Tom, Dick, and Harry decides to fly the flag and seek to claim their 5% of the vote. Indeed, even the left-wing unity strategy that was so successful in electing Catherine Connolly is very unlikely to be replicated here, which could open the door for either an Independent or a Government candidate.
So in a way, this by-election will prove a political maturity test both for those committed to building a left-wing Government in alternative to the present coalition, and for those committed to shifting politics in Ireland rightwards.
Put simply, the side that is less factional and more united around a leading candidate of their side has the better chance to win. We will watch, as ever, with great interest