GE2024 Out of the dog houseBY MOST METRICS, this has been an election the Labour Party will be very pleased with.
At the time of writing, the party has won eight seats and is guaranteed to win two more with an eleventh looking very possible.
The party will see six (or seven) new TDs enter Dáil Éireann this time around, almost doubling its six seats won in 2020.
So what does this say about the Labour Party’s brand – have they officially been detoxified?
This is a question that never fails to split an audience – Labour members and supporters hate it and will vehemently argue that the days of a radioactive Labour Party are long gone.
When asked by The Journal recently if her party has lost its traditional labour base, party leader Ivana Bacik was having none of it.
“I absolutely refute that.
“That line has been trotted out in every election… I remember that line being used against the party in the 1980s,” Bacik responded.
But for significant swaths of the public, the memory of austerity is still raw and the effects of it, and the crash that came before, are still very much felt. Rightly or wrongly, the Labour Party continues to be associated with this.
Baby steps
The results of this election show that the party is continuing to take small steps further out of the country’s bad books but they are still a long, long way from their previous highs.
A large part of why the party has had three decent elections this year (remember the locals and Europeans?) is probably down to two related things: the passage of time and the party’s crop of fresh faces.
The party ran 32 candidates in this election and received 4.7% of first preference votes, very similar to the Social Democrats’ 4.8% and significantly above that of the other smaller parties.
Although its percentage increase in first preference vote share compared to 2020 was just marginally up (with an increase of 0.3%), it still managed to add five (possibly six) TDs.
It’s significant however, that almost ten years on from Labour’s disastrous election of 2016, when the party received a battering from the electorate after its stint in government and returned only seven of its 37 TDs, the party has not managed to massively increase its vote share or number of TDs.
No poll toppers
It’s worth noting that not one Labour TD managed to top the polls in this election. Even in 2016 when the party was decimated, the party’s Brendan Howlin, who went on to become its leader, managed to top the poll in Wexford.
By comparison, other smaller parties did manage to have some poll toppers this time around.
Take the Social Democrats for example, Deputy leader Cian O’Callaghan topped the poll in Dublin Bay North. Or Independent Ireland, where both Michael Fitzmaurice in Roscommon-Galway and Michael Collins in Cork South-West had the highest number of first preference votes in their constituencies.
The most popular of all Labour’s candidates this time around was Rob O’Donoghue in Dublin Fingal West who secured 16.7% of first preference votes – above party leader Ivana Bacik who secured 14.3% in Dublin Bay South and former leader Alan Kelly who secured 15.5% in Tipperary North.
Across the board, O’Donoghue, Bacik and Kelly were the only three of Labour’s 32 candidates to receive the second-highest number of votes in their constituencies.
Others also placed high however, with Louth’s Ged Nash and Fingal East’s Duncan Smith both placing third.
Dublin South-West’s Ciarán Ahern, Kildare South’s Mark Wall and Wexford’s George Lawlor each received the fourth highest amount of first preference votes in their constituencies.
All of this indicates the party’s strong popularity in these areas and shows they were well in contention for the seats early on, without heavily having to rely on transfers.
That said, the party was still notably transfer-friendly this time, more than it was in 2020.
Take Limerick City’s Conor Sheehan who secured the constituency’s fourth seat despite placing 7th in first preference votes.
And the more obvious example is Marie Sherlock, who successfully won the fourth seat in the hotly contested battleground of Dublin Central despite receiving 633 fewer first preference votes than Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch.
With a new generation of Labour TDs entering the arena, the party looks poised to continue to build back its strength, but one thing remains indisputable: the electorate has been very slow to forgive.
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