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OVER A QUARTER of voters intend to give a Sinn Féin candidate their first preference in the upcoming European election in June, according to a new The Journal/Ireland Thinks poll published today.
In the first poll of a series ahead of the European Parliament election, 26% said they intend to vote Sinn Féin, while 19% said they will vote for Fianna Fáil and another 19% opted for Fine Gael.
The state of the other parties, when undecided voters and those unlikely to vote are excluded, is as follows:
The poll of 1,255 people was carried out between the 2 and 7 February and has a margin of error of 2.8%.
This is the first poll specifically about the European election voting preferences and kicks off a six-month series of The Journal/Ireland Thinks surveys.
The results follow a pattern of Sinn Féin out in front. Although there have been signs in recent surveys that support is waning for the party overall, the poll reveals that the largest cohort young voters are still putting their support behind the party.
A large swathe, 30% of those aged 18-34, said they plan to vote Sinn Féin, followed by 28% of those aged between 35-44.
However, its support trends older too with 32% of those aged 45-54 saying they would vote Sinn Féin in the European elections.
Of those aged 55-64, 27% said they would vote Sinn Féin, while 19% of over 65s say the party is their first preference.
While Sinn Féin has scooped much of the support of younger voters, Fianna Fáil is attracting the backing of the over 65s.
Of those aged 65 and over, 32% said they would vote for Fianna Fáil.
Just 9% of those aged between 18-34 said they would vote for Micheál Martin’s party. Meanwhile, 14% of those aged between 35-44 said they would vote Fianna Fáil and 9% of 45-54-year-olds said the party would get their number one vote come June.
Of the 55-64 age group, 22% said they would opt to send a Fianna Fáil candidate to Strasbourg.
Fine Gael fares similarly with younger voters.
Just 10% of 18-34-year-olds said they would give their vote to Fine Gael in the European elections.
Support for Leo Varadkar’s party increases in the older age groups, with 14% support among 35-44-year-olds; 17% of those aged between 45-54; and 17% of 55-64-year-olds.
The sex breakdown of voters shows there is a disparity within Fine Gael voters – just 16% of female voters would give them a first preference, compared with 21% of men.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil voters are on an equal footing with 19% male and female voters stating they would opt for the party candidate.
In terms of Sinn Féin, 24% of male voters said they will vote for the party and 28% female.
Looking to the other government coalition partner, just 10% of those aged between 18-34 said they would give their votes to the Greens.
The poll shows that support falls dramatically to 5% within the 35-44-year-old category, and popularity wanes even further in the older generations with 3% of voters aged between 45-54; 2% aged between 55 and 64; and 2% aged over 65 stating they would vote for Eamon Ryan’s party.
When surveyed on how they would rate the EU’s performance on climate change on a scale of 1 to 5, where one is very bad and five is very good, the poll showed that 41% answered 3 and 20% answered 2.
Looking to the regions, the poll shows that 30% of voters in Dublin will vote for a Sinn Féin candidate in the European elections.
Just 13% of voters said they would vote for a Fianna Fáil candidate in the capital while 18% of voters would choose Fine Gael.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s strongest support comes from the Munster region, with 24% and 19% of those living there stating they would vote for the two parties, respectively.
A number of candidates have already thrown their hat in the ring, making it known they wish to be selected.
Carlow-Kilkenny TD Kathleen Funchion announced just last week that she is seeking to be nominated as Sinn Féin’s Ireland South candidate.
Sinn Féin Senator Paul Gavan has already been selected to contest the Ireland South constituency in the European elections. The party has nominated Senator Lynn Boylan and Councillor Daithí Doolan to contest for a seat in the Dublin constituency.
Sinn Féin last week also nominated Northern Irish MP Michelle Gildernew and current MEP Chris MacManus to contest in the Ireland North-West constituency.
Three Fine Gael MEPs – Seán Kelly, Colm Markey and Maria Walsh – have all indicated they plan to run again, though Frances Fitzgerald announced she will stand down.
Junior Minister Josepha Madigan has announced her intention to put her name forward for a Fine Gael selection convention, as has Senator Regina Doherty.
Two Fianna Fáil MEPs – Barry Andrews and Billy Kelleher – both plan to contest the next election. Offaly TD Barry Cowen has been chosen as the Fianna Fáil candidate for the Midlands North West constituency.
Housing is obviously one of the top issues on the agenda in domestic polls but the European Parliament has little power over policy in the area. The housing crisis is attracting support to Sinn Féin for this campaign nonetheless.
The poll shows there is strong support for the party from those who live in rented accommodation from the council, private rented accommodation and from those that live at home with their parents.
Of those that live in council rented houses, 46% said they would vote Sinn Féin, while 34% of those living in private rental accommodation said they would give the party their vote.
Of those living at home with their parents, 34% said they would vote for Mary Lou McDonald’s party in the upcoming European elections.
In comparison, 16% of those living in council rented accommodation said they would vote for Fianna Fáil and 8% of those living in the private rental market would back the party.
Just 17% of those that live at home with their parents would vote Fianna Fáil.
In terms of those polled who pledged to vote for Fine Gael, just 13% are in council housing, 15% are in the private rental market while 13% live at home with their parents.
Interestingly, support is strong for Fianna Fáil for those that own their own home outright, with 27% of voters who own their own property stating they would vote for the party.
A total of 15% of mortgage-holders said they would give their vote to Fianna Fáil.
Meanwhile, just 17% of those that own their own home outright said they would vote for Sinn Féin, while 29% of mortgage-holders said they would.
Over Christmas, McDonald stirred up some controversy by telling The Irish Times that the average house prices in Dublin should fall to the €300,000 mark.
Fine Gael will get the vote of 23% of voters that own their own home outright, while 17% of mortgage-holders will also vote for the party.
The Journal/Ireland Thinks series of polls will run each month ahead of the European parliament elections in June. It will continue to explore voter intentions, measure Irish public sentiment towards the EU on a number of issues and highlight any potential opinion gaps between different demographics of Irish society on matters important to them.
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This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work are the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
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Like slurry pits and breweries I suppose?
http://www.bim.ie/training/safetytraining/. Would this not be a matter for the Irish Sea Fisheries Board training courses. If it was a construction site issue, it would be addressed in a Safe Pass day course. Surely it’s mandatory to do it before going onto a ship.
Although I suppose it could be an oderless hidden killer, training might not fix it.
There should be *free* mandatory day courses for farmers as well every two years say.
Thats like the mandatory one day course that all bus and lorry drivers must do every year. At a cost to themselves of course.
You have to do if for the ‘cert’. But as a mate said: “Loada lads, half of them without a word of english, sitting in a class for a day, getting a safety cert for something they are not even tested in afterwards. What could go wrong?”
We like our ‘courses’ in Ireland so we do. These certs keep trainers in jobs and officialdom get to pretend they are doing something proactive. Imagine a safety course with no theory or practice test at the end??? Just pay the money and get the cert and sure now its all cushdy
I would have thought that all boats/ ships would have some form of gas detection or portable detectors aboard? Considering the amount of confined spaces on them. You can buy a single gas detector calibrated for Hydrogen Cyanide which is cross sensitive to Hydrogen sulphide which are two of the three gases that the two crewmen were overcome by. A single gas instrument would cost a few hundred euro, which is a lot cheaper than a funeral. RIP to the Crewmen.
For the first responders out there especially those championing the useless Eircode. None of our harbours or quays have an Eircode and never will. Pat Rabbittes billing & taxing code will mean delsys for these types of accidents because better GPS based location codes are available. Welcome to Ireland where merit plays second fiddle to Labour political strokes.
Most quays and harbours are marked on maps and are usually located by the sea. Pretty sure 999 know where they are.
Don’t mind him Kev, any excuse for a rant about Eircodes. It’s a wonder the fool isn’t on about a missing Eircode on the Apple money too………damn sure if anyone dials 999 and says Killybegs quay or Kilmore Quay, or cliffs of Moher then they will have the intelligence to know.
Plenty of minor quays & harbours around the country & weren’t National Ambulance Service unable to find Wexford Quay six months ago. But hey lets settle for mediocrity… It’s what we do.
Let me guess loc8 codes would solve the problem.
Good guess…
So what your saying Get Lost, is that since the foundation of the state that emergency services have been unable to find beaches, quays, cliffs, harbours. People must be dying in their droves at these locations for the want of guided assistance. Your stubborn, outdated, ignorant rant is a pathetic insult to the work of the Coastguard, Lifeboat volunteers (God bless their bravery and commitment) and all the state emergency services who do so much. After months of you shoehorning your agenda into everything here on the Journal I really wish you would do exactly as your name implies and, GET LOST.
Anthony this is not about the emergency services finding places. This is about the public being able to accurately able to report the position of a casualty to the emergency services. We had, and still have the opportunity too introduce a code that can help with that.
Small story for you. October last year while out on a family cycle wife had an accident on a main road and ended up unresponsive. I asked a passerby to call 999 but the passerby didn’t know where we were to tell the operator. Now ECAS can take a Loc8code but NAS do not.
The woman passed here phone to me and i had by that time already used the Point8 app got generate a Loc8code with 6m accuracy buy by the time the phone had been passed to me the call had switched from ECAS to NAS.
Thinking i was still on to ECAS i called out the Loc8 code using the phonetic alphabet giving a quick and precise location. NAS operator said to me “Where did you get that? Google???” i responded that it was a Loc8 code and he said “we don’t use them”
So i responded that we were approximately 2km north of lucan on the Clonee road. NAS operator said sorry I don’t know where that is, WHAT COUNTY ARE YOU IN.
Eircode cannot help in this scenario repeated many times a day all over the country. If you cannot see the value of Loc8 code in this scenario you are a moron.
Ultimately we have a situation where the Department of Communication is hindering rapid access to causalities with their protectionist agenda towards the UNTESTED and half baked Eircode political postcode.
Also Vodafone had a serious outage yesterday so their data network was down. This means for anybody on the Vodafone network EIRCODE was totally unusable….enjoy.
First, and most importantly, I sincerely hope that your wife has made a full recovery from her injury. It obviously has had a deep and frightening effect upon you as it would with anyone.
I certainly see and understand your point.
Speaking as a former member of the rural emergency services, we trained and studied our butts off learning our area and in rural Ireland we have so many Gurteens and Newtowns and small unheard of towns lands. The 999 controllers are so expert at gathering information from panicked and frightened callers. They relay the often scant info to the crews and the crews know from our training and dedication, who, where and most importantly how quickly to get to the incident. Oversight from Government and EU showed that our response times and incident locating ability before Loc8 or Eircode were to be commended. We did often take GPS coordinates too. No system is perfect even the UKs postcode is flawed some 30 or more years into it.
However, in this tragic story Eircode or any other locating media is not mentioned, nor was there a difficulty locating the casualties location I believe.
Thanks Anthony. Suspected broken ribs and a bit dazed. She was unresponsive because she was badly winded. I managed to get her back on her bike and through a park to a retained fireman buddy who looked after her as she went into shock and i went to get the car to collect the kids 3 & 5 who were with us. 5 year old was distraught as his mammy crashed trying to avoid him and at one point he thought she was dead. Now my fireman buddy is actually the person who came up with the name GetLostEircodes and he also designed the logo. He also told me of 2 incidents last year in the park we had just traversed. One where a man jad just had a heart attack and emergency services couldn’t find him…he died. The other some teenagers had broken into a skateboard park after hours and had fallen badly breaking his collar bone in such a way as to nearly bleed to death.. again emergency services had great difficulty finding him. Gary Delaneys Loc8codes can be put on existing signs in parks or on posts on waymarked trails such as wicklow way, mayo greenway or even canals. More tech savvy can use their smartphone. Loc8 is tried tested and proven and is used by disaster planners for that reason. It was for example used to close off roads during the Manx Air crash. Don’t for one minute think that Rabbitte, White, Naughten or the department have any interest in assisting emergency services who were never consulted at all on Eircode. DCENR have been actively trying to scupper Gary since 2010 and we are all the poorer as a result. My point in this story is there are hundreds of minor harbours, quays and jettys on both our coastal & inland waterways and they will never get an Eircode. A simple Loc8code on a Quay wall or fence post will identify the location accurately saving valuable time. DCENR are now promoting app with non hierarchical random What3Words from UK…anybody but Loc8.
Yes, Glad it was not a very serious injury. Scary one especially as you had young children to manage too, as I said I fully understand where your coming from.
And agree!
Loc8 is superior as long as one has a device that’s working etc. It’s a good system and I suspect that the Eircode was well in play and probably deals done with vested interests before Loc8. They had been rattling on about Eircode in the late 80′s. Using inferior or not using alternative information sources or being open to using better information in emergency situations is criminal.
This article is misleading the crewmen Rip died because of refrigeration gas, there was a fault in the refrigeration system, gas had leaked & do to the boat being moored for a period of time it had settled into the confined space, at the bottom of the fish hold tank. as the crew men climbed down he entered an area with poisonous gas & NO OXYGEN. The second crewman tried to safe him but was also overcome, A regrettable accident & very rare due to the high standard of maintenance & training . Crews are trained about fumes in confined space from engines etc but they are detectable by alarms & also smell, this was in a tank that is usually filled with sea water so normal alarms/ detector would not work as they would need to be salt waterproof they could not detect gases.. Also it if very very rare that refrigeration gases leaks & even rarer that it would find it’s way to a tank.RIP
Confined space entry training for all spaces not considered a normal place of work should be provided to workers, this type of accident happens quite a bit unfortunately
How very sad is that!!
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