The accelerating fall in Sinn Féin support

I agree about their old status as that, however much of their recent gains were anti-establishment/anti-government votes, and many of those will still at the end of the day transfer better to SF than FF/FG/GP/LAB

Five years of acting as if they were somehow robbed of Government and are the Government-in-waiting are not going to help with getting anti-everything votes. There's also the people who've gone SF to far right and are calling them traitors - they're not going to transfer to them.

Horseshoe theory has a little bit of validity

If you were anti-government Nationalist, a different type of anti-government Nationalist seems quite similar sometimes.

SF are absolutely losing votes to the far right; its not the case that they're shedding votes to the centre (-left/-right) and those are shedding to the far right while holding steady or even growing as is the case currently.

SF are in freefall at the moment,

Id say they will be happy to go to march for th GE and try and regroup

SF were still according to exit poll the party people did not want in power the most.

Do they ever provide a detailed breakdown of these opinion polls?

I’ve not seen it for this one anyway, you mean around demographics? All I could see was that 1,770 people were polled. There is a margin or error of around 2%.

That's a tiny number polled. Works out at about 68 people per county.

Anyway, SF are not an effective opposition. Their stance on immigration in line with the current government and their stance on the recent referendum also in line with the state doesn't set them apart, which is exactly what people are crying out for, something different.

Incredible stuff. Sinn Fein’s collapse was inconceivable to me six months ago. Four years ago I was predicting that as the only major party in opposition they would storm to 40%+, leaving FG or FF on the verge of extinction after the next election. (And in mid-2022, when they reached 36%, I thought with horror that I was being proved right.) But how things have changed. I hope I will always remember this as an example that anything is possible in politics.

Ivan Yates on the Anton Savage programme today predicted a November election. He thinks four TDs will be elected to Europe, requiring by-elections within six months. He was sort of rambling, so his reasoning isn’t entirely clear, but presumably he thinks the government will just decide to call a general election instead, maybe fearing the phenomenon of anti-government by elections. With SF where they are in the polls, it makes sense for the coalition parties to try to capitalise on it. Embarrassing, though, if it blows up in their faces.

We all know the story - SF is being stretched between its young, progressive facade and its nativist, working class base. It would be natural to expect that eventually the base lost patience with the party’s rebrand. But I don’t really see evidence of that happening. SF was always very careful to appease both sides. Although it sometimes gave off the image of supporting an open-arms immigration policy, I don’t know of any major policy difference from the coalition (and you can imagine what the party was continuing to tell working class communities on the ground). And, of course, they were never in government, so they can hardly be blamed for the current mess. Instead I feel that we’re seeing a cultural wave that has swamped SF. It’s not so much that they’ve done anything wrong as that right wing independents are offering something different instead. Like when Old Sinn Fein usurped the Irish Parliamentary Party after the Rising, the paradigm has shifted and ready-for-government SF is left flat-footed

Fascinating to see what happens next. Will Mary Lou survive? Will SF chase their right wing and lose their progressive voters? Can the country survive another five years of ‘centre-right’ government without imploding?

Polls are about trends over time, one poll means little. The trend is the thing that's hard to stop. Yes, it's those parties/independents springing up on the right that are eating into their support.

This isn't one set of polls; this is three or four polls each across multiple polling agencies.

My take on SF’s poll woes. They got too popular, too fast and are now suffering from the Irish attitude of ‘You think you’re great, do you?’
We’ll see if it’s all spin out a few days with the election results anyway.

..

True . Stating that the value of houses can be determined by diktat ,ignoring the multiplicity of factors and variables that apply -shows not just pure economic illiteracy but the most nauseous type of populism. McDonald also declared that the looming pensions issue could be ignored because 'the demographics would take care of it' !

How can anyone in their sane senses consider voting for such a clueless bunch of chancers ?

The fact that SF is on the same poll numbers as FG is fascinating.

What are they going to do in trying to reverse these numbers? Turn nativist and right-wing? That is going to please their new progressive youth vote.