Europe- It’s the Final Countdown

By Dónal Hassett

Swedish 80’s pop band ‘Europe’ provide us with a fitting title for our final look at the Dublin constituency in the upcoming Euro-elections. As we enter the week of “The Final Countdown” the time has come to ask to whom the voters of our fair city will by saying “farewell”.

Few if any punters would dispute that Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell and Labour’s Proinsias de Rossa are home and dry in these elections. The real contest is to be seen in the three way battle for the final seat between sitting MEPs, Fianna Fáil’s Eoin Ryan and Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, and Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins. While this seat is looking increasingly hard to call, there is no doubt but that transfers will dictate the outcome.

Eoin Ryan is sure to attract transfers from his running mate, Dublin Lord Mayor, Eibhlin Byrne but these alone will not be enough to save his seat. Fianna Fail's coalition partners, the Green Party, have refused to call for a voting pact but Deirdre de Burca’s transfers are Eoin Ryan’s last hope. The other pro-Lisbon candidates, Gay Mitchell and Prionsias De Rossa, will not have large surpluses to transfer on to Eoin Ryan so Ryan is reliant on a high middle-class vote running scared of Sinn Fein and the Socialists and transfers from the Green candidate. While Eoin Ryan has quite the reputation as the comeback kid, it’s hard to see how Fianna Fail can salvage this seat with the tide so against them.

This leaves a two-horse race between Joe Higgins, the old socialist stalwart, and Sinn Fein's Vice-President Mary Lou Mc Donald for what some have called the ‘anti-Lisbon’ seat. While Sinn Fein are known to find it hard to attract transfers the Socialists are not immune to this phenomenon either. Polls indicate that Mary Lou is set to gain around 13% of the first preference vote putting her 4% ahead of Joe Higgins. It’s hard to see how Higgins will be able to narrow this gap as preferences from anti-Lisbon campaigner Patricia Mc Kenna are likely to be split between the two candidates.

So as the Day of Reckoning approaches, it seems that Eoin Ryan will be staying at home in Dublin come June 7th while the rest of Dublin’s Euro-team will be returning to Brussels and Strasbourg. However, as we all know, the only poll that can be trusted is the one on election day.