It’s almost four weeks since polling day and there’s still no sign of a government being formed any time soon. The current belief is that when the Dáil next votes on the matter (at its next meeting on April 6 – two weeks from now) we still won’t have a new government. We’re in uncharted…
By Michael Gallagher In 2011, all the economic indicators had plummeted since the previous election in 2007, and it was no surprise that the government parties lost support heavily: their vote share declined by 29.7 percentage points and their seat total fell by 66 in a 166-member parliament. In 2016, by contrast, all the economic…
Guest Post by Dr. Stephen Quinlan, GESIS Leibniz Institute With the focus now firmly on government formation, academics and political number crunchers are also trying to discover why Irish people voted the way they did on 26 February 2016. The election resulted in one of the most diverse Dáils in the history of the State being…
Guest Post by Anthony O’Halloran On Thursday, March 10th an important opportunity will arise to change the gender landscape of Irish politics for the better. The first important constitutional obligation of the 32nd Dáil will be to elect the Ceann Comhairle. Most of the public commentary to date has focused on how the next Ceann Comhairle…
When the new Dáil meets on March 10th its first job is to elect a Ceann Comhairle. Up to now this has been pre-ordained by the Executive and so took a little time. But now there will be an election by secret ballot. It hasn’t been done before, so this could take some time. Each…
By Rory Costello, University of Limerick Government formation is not just a numbers game. Political parties campaign to a large part on policy, and we must assume that people who vote for a party do so as an endorsement of those policies. If we view the new Dáil as representative of the spread of views…
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