Voters will go to the polls to elect almost 1,000 local councillors in Ireland, where Sinn Féin will look to make amends on 2019 when its support dropped by half.
Party leaders have said it has been a “pleasant” campaign but also that it has been difficult to read how people will vote.
There are 949 city and county council seats to be filled across 31 local authorities, which are divided into 166 electoral areas.
The local elections will be a test of strength for parties and independents, and possibly give an insight into who will become candidates in the general election that will be held in the next nine months.
Five years ago, Fianna Fáil retained its crown as the largest party in local government, with 279 of the party’s candidates elected after winning 27 per cent of first preference votes.
Fine Gael were just behind on 25 per cent, Labour won 5.7 per cent, the Green Party got 5.5 per cent, the Social Democrats won 2.3 per cent, and Solidarity-People Before Profit was on 1.9 per cent.
Independents won 19.6 per cent of the popular vote in the last local elections.
Sinn Féin lost half their councillors in the 2019 election, with their support falling to 9.5 per cent of first preference votes, giving them 81 councillors.
Its housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin said the result forced the party to regroup and reassess its strategy.
“Particularly in Dublin and Cork city, where our vote fell by half, we misread the strength of local independents, we misread the strength of our own local organisation,” he told the Inside Politics podcast.
“(We misread) a change that had happened in the party where previously people liked to vote for the Shinners in the local election because we worked damn hard on the ground, (but) they were never sure in a general election, that had changed quite a lot and we hadn’t fully appreciated that.”
The trend was bucked nine months later when Sinn Féin won a record 37 seats in the general election and 24.5 per cent of the public vote, shaking a long-established trend of electoral power in Ireland see-sawing between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
But Sinn Féin admitted it did not run enough candidates to capitalise on the surge in support it had attracted in that historic election, which its leader Mary Lou McDonald has pledged to correct in this vote.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Ms McDonald said a week before polling day on June 7th when a political editor asked about the party’s significant losses in 2019.
“We’re running 335 candidates, which is a huge slate of candidates. We’ve never done this before. We’re contesting every local electoral area,” she said.
“I want all of them to get elected … I want us to be the largest party full stop.”
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has said that the local election will be “challenging” for his party, but didn’t accept that it was inevitable the party would lose council seats.
He warned that it would be “very foolish” to use the results of local and European elections to project the outcome of a general election, warning that there are different influences to each vote.
“It’s going to be challenging for us because we got 27 per cent in the last occasion in the local elections. Local election polls and general election polls are different, there’s a personal dimension to it as well, in addition to a party poll.
“So I think we’re in a good position to retain the majority of seats that we have, it’s going to be challenging, and we’re going to do everything we can.”
Asked does he accept Fianna Fáil will lose council seats, Mr Martin said: “I’m not accepting anything. I’m going out there in a robust fashion. We’ll do the very best we can to retain the seats we have and gain extra seats.
“We had some big gains the last time, you know, winning four out of the seven, ‘heels against the head’ kind of wins, three out of six. So some of them will be difficult to retain. But if you looked at predictions before the last two local elections, Fianna Fáil defied those predictions.”
Fine Gael won 255 council seats, up 20 on 2014, and this election is the first test for new Fine Gael leader Simon Harris.
A week before polling day, Fine Gael councillor Barry Saul said that current and former Fine Gael voters were saying “we like Simon, wish him the best of luck”.
“The enthusiasm and general warmth for Simon is something that we’re picking up on the doors, in supermarkets, at shopping centres and at masses. He’s only been there for seven weeks.”
Off the back of a ‘Green wave’, the Green Party won 49 seats on councils in 2019, a substantial increase of 37 councillors on 2014, while Labour won 57 seats, up six.
Green Party leader Eamon Ryan admitted that the “short-term thinking tides” on climate issues come in and out, but said the overall level of consciousness around the risks to our environment was “as strong as ever”.
“I think we might surprise people, I think we might actually do well,” he said on Wednesday.
The Social Democrats, founded in 2015, won 19 seats in what was its first local election in 2019.
Its leader Holly Cairns has said her aim is to increase the number of party TDs and councillors “as much as possible”.
“Until we’ve offered more people the option of voting for the Social Democrats, I don’t think we really know what the appetite for that is there. To be realistic, it’s somewhat untested. So I’m kind of excited to see what happens and really hopeful,” she said in previous months.
The number of Solidarity-People Before Profit council seats fell from 28 to 11, Aontu and Independents4Change had three council seats apiece.
