General Irish politics discussion thread

I really don't know where to start with this. It shows such a lack of understanding of Irish politics and democracy.

Let's just take the first point. You state clearly that

"the electorate have the say otherwise there is no constitution, the electorate vote based on the leader of the party bringing them into an election, if someone becomes Taoiseach outside of this juncture then they have no mandate from the people,"

This is just complete gobbledy-gook. Firstly, there is no such provision in the Constitution. Secondly, the Constitution is upheld by the Courts, so where is the court challenge to Varadkar being Taoiseach. Thirdly, there are precedents. I would just point you first to the 1948 general election:

Richard Mulcahy was leader of Fine Gael, yet John A. Costello became Taoiseach. Now how do you square that happening with your constitutional nonsense?

No, I don't think I have a problem at all.

As I requested, explain to me where in the Constitution does it say that the leader of the biggest party becomes Taoiseach or that it is unconstitutional to change Taoisigh between elections? As you don't like going back to 1948, how about John Bruton becoming Taoiseach a couple of decades ago? Was that also unconstitutional and challenged in the Courts?

Those who parrot the SF line about getting elected on lower counts are going to have to do a lot of deleting of old posts after the next election, as SF candidates will be getting in on much lower counts than in 2020 - as they'll run an appropriate number of them.

Romping home with vastly over a quota on count one shows poor candidate selection and vote management; not that you're actually more popular. Order of election is completely irrelevant and was only ever used to decide the Alderman title on councils anyway (first elected in each ward).

Trying to make it become a thing just to attack politicians who did proper vote and transfer management will backfire, and it'll be hilarious when it does. Some of the parroters are not SF supporters, but whatever Independent or minor candidate they support is also likely to end up coming in on a late count, so its an odd position to take.

Are you old enough to vote?

Of the 12 Green TDs elected, only Eamon Ryan secured in excess of a quota on the first count. The other eleven were all elected with the help of transfers from other parties. Even Catherine Martin, who topped the poll in Dublin Rathdown, did not get a quota on the first count. But a couple of points about this:

1. They weren't necessarily elected on the back of transfers from other parties - there were transfers from independents too. I haven't tried to break those out.
2. We'd expect this. In a three-seat constituency, the quota will be more than 25% of the vote; in a four-seater, more than 20%; in a five-seater, more than 16.67%. Parties other than the majors will nearly always have nearly all their candidates elected on the back of transfers. Even for the majors, the large majority of candidates will normally be elected on the back of transfers (but some of these will of course be transfers from within the party).
3. It cuts both ways; in constituencies where the Greens were not successful, other candidates were elected on the back of transfers from the Greens.
4. It tends all to come out in the wash; nationally, the Greens secured 7.1% of the vote and won 7.5% of the seats.

We had up to 9 seaters in the past. This is very representative and lead to results like Labour having a TD in Donegal (and the poll topper there is an Independent Unionist!)

NI had six seaters for Stormont until recently, which gave them some minor party representation - PUP, two PBP rather than one - over 5 seaters.

They'll need to be consider their moves carefully. Some portions of the internet will have an aneurysm at the thought of a TD getting elected to the 6th seat in a constituency.

The larger the constituency, the more you enable truly proportional representation for minor parties.

At the moment, with our pattern of 3, 4 and 5 seat constituencies, the major parties get a share of seats which pretty closely mirrors their share of the national vote, but with minor parties and independents there is greater variance. The larger the constituencies become, the more proportional the representation of the minor parties will be. The ultimate case, in theory, is that you turn the entire country into a single 166-seat constituency.

The reason you don't do that is not that it wouldn't be democratic; it's that (a) it would largely break the notion of local representation, which for all its faults we generally like, and (b) it would create an unfeasibly large slate of candidates — it would be impossible for voters to have a sufficient awareness of most or all of the candidates to express a meaningful preference between them.

So, there's a sweet spot, where constituencies are large enough to provide a reasonable proportionality in representation, but small enough that voters can make reasonably informed judgements about the candidates offered to them.

Globally, in places that use the single transferable vote, having constituencies that elect more than six members is unusual, which seems to imply a view that that's about the upper limit of what works well.

In the past, though, we have had constituencies as large as 9 seats (Galway — from 1923 to 1948 the entire City and County was a single constituency returning 9 TDs). By the 1950s, however, the trend was towards smaller constituencies - by around 1960 we had 22 3-seaters, 9 4-seaters, 9 5-seaters and nothing larger than that; the average was 3.7 TDs per constituency. Today we still max out at 5-seat constituencies but there are 13 of those, plus 17-four seaters and just 9 3-seaters, giving an average of 4.1 TDs per constituency.

It would be a fairly weird thing to think.

Plus, if we wanted larger constituencies in order to improve the proportionality of the system them, rationally, we'd want fewer or no small constituencies, so there might not be any 3-seaters. Currently all 3-seaters with the exception of Roscommon-Galway are subdivisions of counties, so they could be merged into larger constituencies without losing a distinct county-based identity.

People are weird. The fact people still think along county lines is weird in itself. Shure Leitrim people often have "no" representation apparently.

Ya people were against losing the Seanad because they didn't want to lose elected officials

Oh wait 🤣

Many of the few who did vote were swung by the likes of Norris flapping on about reform. Whatever happened to that.

You'rfe suggesting two different measures here. One is to set a fix limit to the number of TDs. The other is to allow unequal representation, with people in some areas electing more TDs per head of the population than people in other areas.

I think the fixed limit might be popular, but the unequal representation one, not so much. The only benefit you suggest would be to TDs, not voters, which is hardly going to generate mass appeal. (Plus it's very open to abuse — back in the 1960s, FF argued for better representation for rural voters on the grounds that constituencies were larger and more diverse, distances greater, etc. Not coincidentally, FF had stronger support in rural areas.)

If we have larger constituencies then we have fewer constituencies and, therefore, fewer boundaries, so the boundary-changing problem that you point to tends to diminish anyway. But, honestly, I don't see that it's a problem. Whatever the considerations that go into drawing constituency boundaries, keeping the current TDs in office should not be among them.

From memory, after it. When they failed to secure the adoption of FPTP, they tried instead to secure greater representation for rural voters than for urban voters. The Supreme Court squashed it on the grounds that it was repugnant to the constitutional requirement of equality before the law.

Your last statement does not reflect the historical reality.

Yes, in the mid-1970s, large-sized constituencies fell out of favour with a preference for three- and four- seat constituencies, most famously, with what became known as the Tullymander, which backfired on Tully, with FF gaining their biggest majority ever in 1977. Since then, there has been a trend upwards in five-seater constituencies, which favour smaller parties over larger parties.

What exactly is wrong with moving boundaries ?