Dublin South-Central By-Election Results

The Labour Party has held onto its seat in the Dublin South-Central by-election, but the result was not exactly a ringing endorsement of its candidate. Activists from all parties had feared that turnout for the by-election, necessitated by the death of TD Pat Upton, might only be around 35%. In the actual event it turned out to be even worse, with only 28.1% of eligible voters casting a ballot, the lowest voter turnout in the history of the state. Various explanations were put forward by analysts: people are disgusted with politics in general because of recent well-publicized probes of high-level political corruption, there is often a lack of interest in by-elections to begin with, and there were two European-level soccer matches being televised on voting night that would have kept people at home.

Whatever the reasons, Labour's Mary Upton managed to win the depressed vote to take her late brother's seat. A political unknown in the area prior to her brother's death, it is likely that a sympathy vote propelled her to victory. As one Labour Party activist was quoted as saying in a Sunday Business Post article, "when we explain that the election is being held to fill the vacancy left by Pat's death, [people] sort of perk up and say, okay, he was a decent man, I'll give you a vote. We got quite a lot of that..."

Even so, Upton actually only got the second-highest number of first-preference votes, trailing Michael Mulcahy of Fianna Fail after the first count. Mulcahy received 30% of first-preference votes, Upton about 28%. For those of you unfamiliar with Ireland's transferable-vote voting system, voters rank the candidates in order of their preference on their ballot. On the first count, everyone's first-preference votes are tallied and the candidate with the lowest number is eliminated. That candidate's votes are then transferred to the remaining candidates based on the next-preference indications on his/her ballots. A second count is then made, and the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and his/her votes are distributed in a likewise manner. And so it goes until the number of candidates left is equal to the number of seats being contested in the multi-seat district (or in the case of a by-election, until only one candidate is left).

There were nine candidates in the race, including candidates from Labour, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Sinn Fein, the Green Party and the Workers Party. Fianna Fail's Michael Mulcahy did well, leading the voting up until the sixth count when Upton finally passed him with the help of transfers from Fine Gael. His chances of winning a seat in the area in the next general election, when there will be five seats up for grabs here, would appear to be very good.

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