Sunday Independent/Millward Brown Lansdowne poll, 30th January 2011: Plus ça change…

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Adrian Kavanagh, 29th January 2011

A Sunday Independent/MBL poll, to be published in tomorrow’s Sunday Independent, estimates party support as follows: Fianna Fail 16%, Fine Gael 34%, Labour 24%, Sinn Fein 10%, Green Party 1%, Others 15%. Based on these figures, my constituency level analysis would estimate the number of seats that parties would win based on these levels of national support to be as follows: Fianna Fail 22, Fine Gael 67, Labour 45, Sinn Fein 12, Green Party 0, Others 20 Continue reading →

Fianna Fáil’s candidate strategy will punish the party further

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Eoin O’Malley (25 January 2011)

Last night Fianna Fáil selected two candidates to run in the four seat Dublin Central constituency. Given that the party polled less than 13 percent of the vote in the 2009 by election, and there are no reasons to believe its vote will have increased since then, this is a dangerous strategy. This is far less than the quota for the constituency (20 percent of the vote + 1) and assuming a reasonable equal distribution of votes between the two candidates, means that neither will have a chance of winning a seat. In fact only if one FF candidate got the whole of the 13 percent would s/he candidate have a good chance of getting elected. Continue reading →

Will Fianna Fáil change leader?

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Eoin O’Malley (UPDATED 17 January, 2011)

The fact that Cowen has pushed for a vote of confidence in his leadership would seem to indicate that he is secure that he has the numbers to win it. He has the advantage of having spent the previous three days canvassing support openly, whereas Micheál Martin was unable or unwilling to show his hand and campaign openly. Cowen also set the timing for any challenge, limiting the time Martin will be able to campaign. Continue reading →

Will opinion polls really sink Cowen?

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Some of the political correspondents writing over the last week are reading a great deal into every government minister’s' utterance. Micheál Martin made an extremely banal comment when asked on Newstalk about the Cowen incident;

“I think we all have to reflect in terms of how the conference was organised, in terms of communications issues and so on like that. Clearly we have lessons to learn and we will work on that particular agenda in terms of future events and future communications strategies.” Continue reading →