HOUSING MINISTER EOGHAN Murphy has said he expects to be re-elected as a TD over the next number of counts as he again defended his ministerial record.

Murphy polled in third place in Dublin Bay South with his Fine Gael colleague Kate O’Connell in fifth.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan was elected on the first count with what Murphy described as a “phenomenal first preference vote”.

“It looks like myself and Chris Andrews of Sinn Féin will take the second and third seats and Kate O’Connell and Jim O’Callaghan are battling it out for the final seat,” Murphy said in an interview on RTÉ..

He added that it’s “difficult to tell at this point in time” who will win the seat between O’Connell and Fianna Fáil’s O’Callaghan. 

Only a handful of seats have so far been filled but Fine Gael look likely to lose seats..

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Murphy was also asked whether his own performance as Housing Minister was part of the reason for Fine Gael’s vote decline, Murphy says “of course housing and homelessness were major issue in the campaign because everyone cares about it”.

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“We have to do more when it comes to getting people off the streets and into homes, but also to do more to help people out of the rent trap to buy their own home,” he said.

And the campaign actually gave us space to talk about what we’ve done so far and what we want to do in the future and when you look at other parties, none of them were offering that radical alternative, they were talking about building on the progress that our the Fine Gael government has just made, there was a chance in the election that we got to put that message as and as a result, say, in my own constituency Fine Gael got the largest codeshare by quite some distance.

We didn’t come forward with populist proposals that could actually damage supply. We came forward with the record that we have in terms of doubling supply, but what we’re going to do next to increase that if we get back into government and if we get the most seats will be trying to form a  government, because that would be our responsibility and trying to, you know, meet the people’s needs when it comes to housing in particular.