LAST UPDATE | 1 hr ago
ALL 174 OF Ireland’s Dáil seats are now filled after a mammoth three-day shift put in by count centre staff across the country.
Fianna Fáil, with 48 TDs, comes out of this election with the most seats in the 34th Dáil.
With a gain of 10 TDs, Micheál Martin and his party are unquestionably the overall winners of the 2024 general election after a three-week campaign that saw no real blunders for the outgoing Tánaiste or his team.
It is now more likely than not that Martin will become Taoiseach for a second time, with Fine Gael as a minority government partner alongside a small mix of Independents or a centre-left party like Labour or the Social Democrats.
Fine Gael’s representation in the Dáil will now rise to 38 TDs, only 3 more seats than the party won under Leo Varadkar’s leadership in 2020.
Where Fianna Fáil and Micheál Martin’s campaign was steady and understated, Simon Harris’s and Fine Gael’s was shaky and beset by self-inflicted blunders from the very first weekend when Ryanair’s Micheal O’Leary opened his mouth.
John McGahon’s selection as a candidate in Louth cast a shadow that just would not budge over Fine Gael’s entire campaign and ultimately led to the Taoiseach saying he was “not sure” if he would let the controversy-laden senator canvass with him.
By the end of week two, Harris had a mess of his own making on his hands when he was filmed walking away from a disability worker in a Kanturk supermarket.
The writing was on the wall for Fine Gael and its untested leader the very next morning when just one week out from election day, polling showed the party’s considerable lead had vanished.
Ultimately, whether this election was a success or not for Simon Harris is debatable. On one hand, to go from the high level of both personal and party support he had just weeks earlier to returning one TD fewer than Sinn Féin is far from great.
But on the other, we can’t forget that Fine Gael was in freefall for months in the last year – with the party haemorrhaging 18 TDs since the 2020 election. To come out of this election three seats up on 2020, doesn’t look so bad in that context.
Plus, Fine Gael is more than likely to be back in Government. Even though it looks like Simon Harris will have to forfeit being Taoiseach initially, the numbers suggest that a rotating Taoiseach deal is very much still on the cards.
So for that reason, we’re classing Harris and Fine Gael as winners - but just about.
For Sinn Féin, it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster but with no prospect of Mary Lou McDonald’s party finding a route to government it certainly isn’t a roaring victory, despite what her TDs might be saying.
Sinn Féin will enter this Dáil with 39 Dáil seats, only two more than it won in 2020.
Again, the scale of Sinn Féin’s defeat here is debatable. Considering the difficult year the party has had and the multiple crises it was rocked by in the weeks before the election was called, to come out one seats ahead of Fine Gael is decent.
It has also had notable success in a number of constituencies, getting two TDs across the line in six areas.
Comparing the two parties directly, Sinn Féin has had a better election than Fine Gael hands down.
If the lay of the political land was different in Ireland and Sinn Féin was seen as a viable coalition partner for Fianna Fáil, then McDonald’s party would be a winner here, but we have to deal in political realities.
And for that reason, Sinn Féin is a loser in this election.
Social Democrats, Labour, Aontú and Independent Ireland are all going home with winners’ badges for increasing their seats, as is Donegal’s Charles Ward for winning the sole seat for his party 100% Redress.
People Before Profit-Solidarity is getting the loser badge for dropping from five seats to three, with Gino Kenny and Mick Barry both losing their seats.
The biggest loser of all in this election is the Green Party, losing all but one (leader Roderic O’Gorman) of its 12 seats.
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