Hung Dail in prospect

An interesting exercise on RTE’s Saturday View, extended to 2 hours today. Using local and national media sources, supported in most cases by opinion poll findings, they did a constituency by constituency analysis of likely outcomes in all 43 to arrive at a projected national result for next Thursday’s election.

This was how the 166 seats panned out:

FF: 65 (-14)
FG: 47 (+15)
Lab: 21 (NC)
SF: 11 (+6)
Green: 9 (+3)
PD: 2 (-6)
Independent: 11 (-4)

If this is the actual outcome, the PDs are toast. However, a combination of FG/Lab/Green only totals 77 seats, which is still 6 short of the bare minimum required for an overall majority (allowing for non-voting Cathaoirleach).

Other than FF/Lab whose combined total is 86, it’s hard to see what sort of coalition Government could be put together, particularly as every other party has ruled out Sinn Fein in advance.

Needless to say, Mary Harney rejected the PD result, while Eamon Gilmore reckoned that Labour would be several seats better. Gilmore pointed out that, in the analysis, Labour were supposedly in the hunt for the last seat in 17 of the 43 constituencies but were never declared the likely winner. Phil Hogan predicted that FG would pick up several more seats than the 47 projected.