Anatomy & Post-Mortem of a Landslide Election 

What a difference a year makes.  In December 2024, Pat Leahy of the Irish Times proclaimed Micheal Martin as a Resurrection Man (at the time, I begged to differ describing him as not the Messiah but a very lucky boy).  

Leahy described him as “starting another chapter in a long political odyssey that has seen triumph, disaster, renewal—and now triumph again”.  In classical mythology the Odyssey started after the fall of the Troy, courtesy of the Trojan Horse.  Official Ireland has not yet been able to build its own Trojan horse inside which it can secret NATO membership!

And Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory is a triumph for neutral Ireland over official Ireland.  The push against neutrality has become a form of perpetual political football which neutral Ireland has to win every time—lose once and it’s game over.  Until there is wider change globally, be prepared for the possibility of another rematch soon!

Moving from the prose to the percentages of the 2025 Presidential Election held on 24th October:  whilst the turnout was below average, it should not obscure the fact that Catherine Connolly’s 63.4 per cent share of the vote surpasses the previous record of 56.3 per cent for Eamon de Valera in 1959.  Her total vote of 914,000 surpasses the 822,000 which Michael D. Higgins received in 2018.  Across Ireland’s 44 constituencies, she won all of them bar Cavan/Monaghan (the home constituency of her Fine Gael rival, Heather Humphries).  Even in the most affluent constituencies of Dublin & Dun Laoghaire, she received more than 50 per cent of the valid vote.

There is not much of note about the 7.2 per cent vote for Jim Gavin, the Fianna Fail (FF) candidate whose campaign imploded and then officially ended in mid-campaign with him withdrawing from the race but remaining on the ballot paper.  At the end, it was a combination of a Fianna Fail diehard constituency augmented by a Dublin GAA vote of thanks for services rendered.  For FF, it was a precipitous decline from 481,000 votes in November 2024 to 103,000.  It would have fallen below 100,000 without the Dublin GAA connection.  In Dublin, 27,000 voted for Jim Gavin, compared to 87,000 for FF in 2024, a drop of 69 per cent.  In the rest of the country, it was a drop of 81 per cent (from 394,000 to 76,000).  At the time of writing a Cork man is believed to be helping the Soldiers of Destiny with their inquiries!

For Fine Gael (FG), Presidential elections have not been happy experiences and, whilst 2025 was not the most chastening, a percentage tally of 29.5 per cent compared to 27.0 per cent in the General Election is a very mediocre return in the context of a decommissioned FF campaign. 

Heather Humphries, as the FG candidate, received 424,000 votes compared to 458,000 in the November 2024 General Election.  But within that total is considerable variation.  In her own constituency of Cavan Monaghan, she doubled FG’s vote from 15,000 to 31,000.  In other Border constituencies (Donegal, Sligo/Leitrim, Louth) there were also improvements.  She cultivated some Independents, such as the Healy-Raes in Kerry, and won 5,000 more votes there.  She also received 5,000 extra votes in Tipperary North (Michael Lowry’s home patch).  

But in other places such as Dublin and Cork there was basically either no material increase or a significant slippage—as in Cork North West where she lost 5,000 votes compared to 2024.  Most strikingly, the massive Fine Gael 2024 votes in places such as Mayo (24,000) and Wicklow (19,000) this time brought in a mere 22,500 votes between them, a loss of almost 50 per cent!

And lastly there were the people who, in the spirit of the late Frank Maguire—the onetime Westminster MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone—turned up to abstain in person, all 213,738 of them!  The spoilers represented almost 13 per cent of those who turned up!  

The previous three Presidential contests—in 1997, 2011 & 2018—had 5, 7 and 6 candidates on the ballot paper respectively.  This contest was limited to just 3 candidates, none of them Independents in any meaningful sense of the word.  And, in a country where 30 per cent of the electorate voted for Independents in 2024, the efforts of FF & FG to block Independents from being nominated to run were ill-judged!  

Every constituency had a sizeable number of voters who spoiled their votes.  In Dublin Mid-West and Dublin North-West, spoiled votes accounted for 20 per cent of ballots issued.  Even in Galway West, Catherine Connolly’s home constituency, there were 4,420 spoiled votes out of 50,544 ballots issued—over 8 per cent of the total.

The level of spoiled votes represents a challenge to the governance of the state.  On the Monday after the vote, there was quite a contrast in the tone and reactions of two main papers.  The Irish Times ran two articles, one of which concluded with a quotation from leader of the Labour Party Ivana Bacik, in which she stated that an orchestrated campaign to spoil votes was an undermining of democracy.  But that observation was mild compared to that of Una Mullally who in an opinion piece described some of the spoiled votes as a form of “unhinged rage”.

The main editorial on the Presidential election devoted the final paragraph to the spoiled votes, proposing no solution.  The Letters to the Editor was silent on the issue of spoiled votes, whilst being able to find space on Knock Airport, the Busby Babes, and car registration plates.

By contrast, the Irish Independent devoted a lengthy editorial to spoiled votes. This discussed the background and the reasons behind the grievance and did propose changes that would relax the requirements for contesting the Presidency. 

This was supplemented by 4 of the 8 letters to the Editor, of which only one was critical of the campaign to spoil votes.  The Irish Times is correct in stating that spoiled votes represent a challenge to democracy—the challenge is to make a wise choice.   

David Jackson  

Another thought that came to mind is that it was a strategic blunder on Martin’s part to push on the neutrality issue. It mobilized the supporters of Ireland’s traditional policy. And having been rebuffed, they continued to talk about it, raise it. Why keep pushing something that is not popular in the opinion polls?

They should have played the long game, kept quiet and a more malleable successor to MIchael D would probably have been elected President.