At this early stage of the European Election count in midlands north west, a few things can be said.
First, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail will take a seat, with very strong votes for both parties. Fine Gael are in poll position to take two seats, with an enormous vote divided almost perfectly between Nina Carberry and Maria Walsh. For Fianna Fáil, Barry Cowen is guaranteed election.
For Fine Gael, Carberry is apparently very transfer friendly, and Maria Walsh can expect votes to come her way from Fianna Fáil’s Lisa Chambers. Both should be very confident of election.
Another seat will go to Luke Ming Flanagan, who topped the poll though not by the crushing margin some pre-election polls suggested. He is well positioned to pick up left-wing transfers as candidates from smaller left-wing parties are excluded.
The final seat is essentially a two-way battle between a disastrously performing Sinn Fein, and Independent Ireland’s Ciaran Mullooly. Mullooly seems intuitively much stronger: Sinn Fein have been struggling for transfers all weekend, while Mullooly as a right-leaning independent can expect to pick up a substantial vote – a la Niall Boylan in Dublin – as other candidates on the right of the political spectrum are eliminated. There are nearly 100,000 such votes.
40,000 of those votes belong to Aontu’s Peadar Toibin, who will not be elected. His best hope might be that voters for candidates like John Waters and Hermann Kelly, for example, favour him by huge margins over Mullooly, but that seems unlikely. The gap between the two candidates is 17,000 votes on the first count, which is just too much to make up.
For the remaining right wing candidates, the story of the count is the split vote.
Between John Waters, Gerry Waters, Hermann Kelly, Margaret Maguire, the twin leaders of the National Party, Michelle Smith, Anthony Cahill, and Peter Casey, 68,830 votes were cast.
Had any one of those candidates secured that vote by themselves, they would have been in fifth place on the first count and well positioned to take a seat. As it is, none of them will feature in the later counts.