Expanding Dublin

Meejit surveys the by-election coverage in which some constituencies were suddenly  became part of Dublin.

It was a commonplace of the by-election media coverage that the two constituencies are increasingly part of greater Dublin, and that Kildare North is further along the path of what Meejit might pretentiously call "metropolitanisation" than Meath.

What was largely missing in the post-election analysis – dominated by excitement about the Blueshirt revival and prospects therefore of a blue-dominated Rainbow – was any significant recognition that the colour of greater Dublin is now red. In Kildare North this fact wasn't even obscured, as it can be in Dublin proper, by many left-wing voters giving Greens and Shinners their number-ones, or even buying into Bertie's Fianna Fáil left-populism.

Just imagine if the PDs, ex-PDs and other candidates to their right were to gain half the vote in a by-election, virtually doubling the right-of-FF/FG vote in less than three years. Don't you think it would be a story? A trend, even? That's exactly what the left did in Kildare North, yet bored-sounding pundits are happy to keep talking about Tiger Ireland's cosy conservatism without mentioning the leftward turn in the Pale's electoral politics.

Indeed, the post by-election editorial in the Irish Times even hinted that the Government's own left turn ("a more caring, social approach") had put off voters – without clearly acknowledging to whom the voters, in Kildare at any rate, had actually turned.

Protest vote

In as much as analysts noted the direction of the vote, it was with a warning that this was a by-election, subject to protest votes and low-turnout skewing. Fair enough, but it seems striking nonetheless that Kildare North in 2005 now resembles most Dublin constituencies in 2002 (the main difference being a redistribution of some of the centrist vote from Fianna Fáil to Fine Gael).

The resemblance can be summarised easily, though you wouldn't know it from the media: half the vote went to the left, and most of that went to candidates arguably to the left of the Labour party. (For Meejit's purposes these include Sinn Féin and Greens.) This is roughly the same scenario as in the Dublin constituencies outside the middle-class ghettos.

In Kildare North this was a particularly dramatic result, with the combined left vote nearly doubling. (The left-independent victor, Catherine Murphy, knocked only a few points off Labour's 2002 vote.) The Government must be glad this wasn't already a left-leaning constituency.

Fine Gael's fabulous fightback, by contrast, involved an increase in Kildare North from 17.5 to 18.3 per cent, compared to 26.2 per cent in 1997. In Meath, where the up-for-grabs seat was deemed a Fine Gael one by many voters, Fine Gael sags below its 1997 levels. Where does that leave the "jubilant Enda" stories?

Meath, we heard, is not properly Dublinised yet, with by-election turnout confined to more traditional, long-time, local voters. Its poll was billed as a two-horse race.

However, the combined left first-preference vote in Meath was actually well over 25 per cent, amounting to a pretty healthy horse in its own right. (The count, sadly, didn't let us see if Labour voters would transfer to Sinn Féin in any great numbers, though historically and in the circumstances it seems unlikely.)

The media are right to neglect the chimera of "left unity" under the leadership of Labour, which (1) commands only a minority section of the broad left vote and (2) has clearly sold its soul to Fine Gael already. The media falls short, however, in its mission to explain and analyse. One can only speculate as to the reason why.