Gavan Reilly: Election 2024’s big question: where will SF get transfers from?

The calm before the storm. The Dáil schedule is packed for Tuesday and Wednesday; the Taoiseach is expected in Budapest for an EU summit on Friday, and so Thursday is the obvious time for the plug to be pulled. (To be honest, waiting until after he’s home on Friday will only antagonise the media, which isn’t a great note to start an election campaign on!)

The outcome on election day is never quite what the polls had suggested on Day One, so there’s little point in setting out making presumptions about how a government might be shaped - or who might end up in it. Any of the ‘big three’ parties could end up the largest, and any of them could be in the driver’s seat when it comes to claiming office at the end. Best to let the campaign be fought on issues and not, as the last ones have, on coalitionology.

But, from the purely analytical question of how the vote might break down, there remains an old electoral cliche which I don’t think has yet been fully squared. Are Sinn Féin still ‘transfer toxic’?

It’s certainly the case that when the election comes, Sinn Féin aren’t going to get much support from the ‘new right’ nationalist parties that have popped up in the last few years on foot of migration becoming a political flashpoint. Sinn Féin, in my view, opportunistically thought there were some right-wing votes to be won in the last year, sought to sweep them up, failed because it was seen as insincere, but vacated moderate left votes in doing so.

Nor, naturally, are Sinn Féin likely to get many transfers from the big two parties in government right now. If neither Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael are minded to embrace them in coalition, their voters won’t do so either.

That leaves us with the other centre-left and left-wing groups. The likes of People Before Profit continually express dismay at Sinn Féin for refusing to rule out coalition with the ‘big two’. Will their voters be similarly bothered? And will supporters of the Greens, Labour and the Social Democrats – all of whom ultimately see each other as like-minded progressives – lend their votes onwards?

Much was made of a ‘vote left, transfer left’ idea in 2020 but in truth the most votes that were available to transfer were from Sinn Féin onwards, because of the extraordinary surpluses its candidates unexpectedly built up. This time around there will be two Sinn Féin candidates in the biggest constituencies – the likes of Mary Lou McDonald and David Cullinane will have running mates – but, if the Sinn Féin share goes down overall, then many of those candidates may not have quotas of their own.

So what then? In situations where there are two competitive candidates who ought to collectively get two seats, where will the help come from?

In 2020 there was little or no evaluation about Sinn Féin transfer attractiveness because its candidates so often topped the poll. Sinn Féin candidates simply didn’t need any help from others; next time, they might. A real acid test of their standing is whether they get it.

Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist with the Meath Chronicle. Column appears first in Tuesday's paper!