Come on you bhoys in green?

It’s half-time in a (turgid) Andorra-Ireland match, and so I’ll be brief….

This morning’s MRBI poll in the Irish Times has made some headlines, with SF recording the second highest rating of all the parties.  The following are the party shares, and the IPR projections (again, ULA are within the OTH column, and so I’ve estimated their share on the vote as being pro-rata that amount)

FG 35% (-3) – 69 seats

SF 18% (+8) – 29 seats

LP 17% (-1) – 32 seats

FF 16% (-2)  – 16 seats

ULA 2% – 4 seats

GP 2% (NC) – 1 seat

OTH 10% – 15 seats

SF will be unsurprised to see LP still getting a better ‘bonus’ than they do, but may be encouraged by how little it puts them ahead in terms of seats.  In 3 cases (the 2 Donegals and Louth) a seat depends on them running a second candidate they didn’t last time, but still they will be very happy with this.  Largely, their gains hit the other parties more or less across the board.

I’ll not go into enormous depths about the poll, but I’ll just make the following observations;

1.  Contesting the Presidential election has been, obviously a good move for SF, but I suspect the main reason it has been as successful as it has is the onslaught from Gay Mitchell and others on SF.  By making SF the focus of FG/Govt scorn (in a way that FF used to be) they have apparently consolidated opposition to the Govt around a single party.

2. The gender gap, as has been commented by others, is startling with their support at 28% amongst men, but only 11% among women.  Some might assume that this would always have been the case, but no, not at all.  Last January, RedC ran a poll for Paddy Power which showed a very different story.  On that occasion, SF were 14% nationally, so they are up 4% in the intervening months.  And how much higher were they among men?  They weren’t.  In that poll, they rated 12% amongst men, and 15% amongst women.  In other words, since January, SF have risen 16% among men, but dropped 4% among women.  Really.

Now, that level of variation in January is m.o.e. stuff, but the current variation isn’t, so there clearly has been a very significant shift in SF support between the GE and now.

There’s not enough evidence to say for certain what has happened, but at the time in January I believed that SF’s rise was, in part, a surge among public sector workers, who are quite predominantly female.  Since then, it appears that they have lost some of this support, but gained more among men, apparently especially lower income and younger men.

It may be that this is a slight rouge element of the poll, as the variation between women and men out-strips anything I can recall in other polls, and I am reluctant to make any judgments based on this.  But it’s something no doubt we’ll see detailed in future polls in some detail, now it has become a matter of public comment.

anyways, back to Andorra-Ireland…..

D