Cast your vote in the 2016 General Election

[Bord na Mona man]

I've given everyone the option of 3 votes, given that it's a 3 seater.

[Bord na Mona man]

The 3rd and final seat is in the balance. Whoever loses will demand a recount!

[SearingDrive]

The 3rd and final seat is in the balance. Whoever loses will demand a recount!

Voting is on Friday. I'll wait until the real poll

[first_touch]

Is this a secret ballot

[Bord na Mona man]

Is this a secret ballot

Yeah, you can only see your own choice.

[sam88885a]

ivan yeates thinks it will be cowen {FF} fitz {ff} and between J leahy and m corcoran kennedy {fg]

[Bord na Mona man]

The people of uibhfhaili.com said Leahy, Cowen and Foley.
The people of Offaly and North Tipp said Cowen, Corcorcan-Kennedy and Nolan.

[Lone Shark]

The people of uibhfhaili.com said Leahy, Cowen and Foley.
The people of Offaly and North Tipp said Cowen, Corcorcan-Kennedy and Nolan.

Clearly those renegade votes from North Tipperary have distorted the democratic will of true Offaly people!!

[ah lethimoutwithit]

On a serious note on this what are the thoughts that no TD elected from North Offaly. Our brethren in the South have clearly said enough is enough over the whole electing to play hurling in OCP.
Negotiations went on long into the early hours to convince the North Tippers that they had indeed more in common with the Biffs in the South than those brigands in the North of the Faithful?
Thus we booked all sorts of trends and elected 2 fine filly's!! And MCK.....


Anyway..disappointed to see John Leahy lose out, reckon Nolan happened to be the right place at the right time, (Kileavy or Reilly from Daingean could have had a good chance had the gender quota shite not scuppered their chances).

[club125]

North Offaly needs to get its act together in order to achieve some balance in representation in the County. As the main centre of population Edenderry in particular needs to get clarity on what it wants to achieve as a major Town in the County. Until that happens and the local business community unite to help one another they will suffer from age old failings.

If consensus could achieved on a candidate in North Offaly, there is a seat there. In a very rudimentary exercise, if one combines the votes of Foley & Fitzpatrick and assumes the same transfer patterns as the election just gone. A North Offaly candidate in theory would have got the second seat. They would have had 9,114 votes by the end of the 3rd count. MCK would not have benefited from Foley surplus in this scenario.

I would suggest there is a seat for FF or SF in the North of the County. An Independent will not get the votes required from outside the Municipal District.

[Lone Shark]

On a serious note on this what are the thoughts that no TD elected from North Offaly. Our brethren in the South have clearly said enough is enough over the whole electing to play hurling in OCP.
Negotiations went on long into the early hours to convince the North Tippers that they had indeed more in common with the Biffs in the South than those brigands in the North of the Faithful?
Thus we booked all sorts of trends and elected 2 fine filly's!! And MCK.....


Anyway..disappointed to see John Leahy lose out, reckon Nolan happened to be the right place at the right time, (Kileavy or Reilly from Daingean could have had a good chance had the gender quota shite not scuppered their chances).

The North Offaly thing is interesting to me, since it is going on for some time now. What amazes me about it is that a pattern has developed that makes it impossible to conceive of TD being returned from that area as long as people continue to vote the way they do. At the risk of being seen to be contrary, the blame for this outcome lies squarely at the feet of the electorate in that area, for several reasons.

(1) Turnout in that area continues to be far below the rest of the county. For whatever reason, people don't bother voting in the same numbers down there. I'm trying to find the full details of the election (broken down by polling station) online, and I haven't managed yet - however I have seen some news outlets reporting turnout as low as 30% in some parts of Edenderry. That's obviously a huge factor.

(2) Some made the excuse of how John Foley's presence made life more difficult for Eddie Fitzpatrick and the post above from club125 ties in with that since it suggests that anyone who voted for either would automatically vote for the other if they only had one option - but I'm not buying that. Firstly, there was a real move towards independent candidates nationally and while Offaly has generally been hostile territory for independents (it has been for anyone bar the two civil war parties really) there was always likely to a vote there for independent candidates. With John Leahy aligning himself with Renua (a decision that he may be regretting now) then that left Hannigan and Foley as the obvious home for those votes.
Moreover, when Foley was eliminated, a very good share of his transfers went back to Fitzpatrick anyway - so I don't believe there was any net loss to the FF man. Anyway, the local scene was far more crowded in the south of the county, yet both MCK and Carol Nolan were returned. So I don't think it's all about achieving consensus, which is hardly likely anyway.

(3) Here's the real issue however - since Ger Connolly retired in advance of the 1997 election, the FF ticket in Offaly has been the same - B Cowen, + AN Other. Leaving aside the fact that there were some disastrous AN Others in that time, with one obvious example leaping off the page, North Offaly people have continually weighed in behind that candidate regardless. And since Offaly doesn't have two FF quotas in it, it means that B Cowen gets elected and the other misses out, every time. After all, if the same Killally couldn't get in behind Brian Cowen in 2007, there's just no hope for anyone.

Similarly now, there was no way that FF were going to win two seats with 36% of the vote, so for all Ivan Yates' prognosticating in favour of it on Newstalk, Fitzpatrick was never in with any real chance.

And when we have another election in five months, five years or whenever, Barry Cowen will again run and win, North Offaly will vote for "running mate" and that running mate will lose - again.

This is what I wrote on the 2011 election, on the equivalent thread at the time:

Liam Quinn on the other hand should get over the line. Dyed in the wool FG transfers from Flanagan will probably go to him, and if the people of North Offaly who have been hammered with increased fuel costs, negative equity and unemployment more than most, don't turn to an opposition candidate from their heartland, then you'd really have to wonder at the psychology of it all. Seriously, they've sided with FF for the last couple of elections and it has got them nowhere, now surely they will look at this election as a chance to get represented again.

In the biggest backlash against an unpopular government of all time, huge numbers of Offaly voters in the greater Portarlington and Edenderry areas voted for John Moloney (FF), Eddie Fitzpatrick and John Foley (Both Ind, FF gene pool) when giving Quinn just 1,500 more votes would have seen him get ahead of Marcella Corcoran Kennedy on the first count - and thus more than likely into the Dáil. I'm not making any statement here on whether or not Quinn would have been a better or worse TD than MCK, but this was very definitely a case where North Offaly people had the choice of retain their traditional allegiance to the green side of the civil war, or to side with a young candidate who was going to be in the government party, and they chose the former.

This won't be forgotten either. FG will never bother to run a candidate from the far side of Spollanstown ever again after receiving such a clear message at a time when their vote was higher than ever, so this cycle is doomed to repeat itself for a long time.

The best the area could have hoped for was a run by Brendan Killeavy, who undoubtedly would have won the seat now occupied by Carol Nolan. Gender quota or not, Killeavy would have had first shout at it and he chose not to go - so I wouldn't blame quotas for that one. I don't know much about Martin O'Reilly and if he was a likely option, so I'll defer from comment on that. Either way, the end result justifies the means from a SF perspective.

I would suggest there is a seat for FF or SF in the North of the County. An Independent will not get the votes required from outside the Municipal District.

This is exactly the attitude that means that North Offaly will not win a seat for a long time in my mind. I certainly don't blame voters for following party lines rather than geographical ones, but we've had a quarter of a century of proof that voting for FF running mates won't do the job - and yet every election, we get a "I'll do the same thing, but this time the outcome will be different!" attitude from the electorate up there.

[club125]

(1) Turnout in that area continues to be far below the rest of the county. For whatever reason, people don't bother voting in the same numbers down there. I'm trying to find the full details of the election (broken down by polling station) online, and I haven't managed yet - however I have seen some news outlets reporting turnout as low as 30% in some parts of Edenderry. That's obviously a huge factor.

From casual observation it seems the new members of the community (e.g. migrants from Dublin etc.) have not fully integrated in large numbers and it seems are not participating in the electoral process.

(3) Here's the real issue however - since Ger Connolly lost out in the race for the 1992 election, the FF ticket in Offaly has been the same - B Cowen, + AN Other. Leaving aside the fact that there were some disastrous AN Others in that time, with one obvious example leaping off the page, North Offaly people have continually weighed in behind that candidate regardless. And since Offaly doesn't have two FF quotas in it, it means that B Cowen gets elected and the other misses out, every time. After all, if the same Killally couldn't get in behind Brian Cowen in 2007, there's just no hope for anyone.

Correct, very discernible voters up here. The lack of a successful candidate is directly proportional to the quality of the candidates put forward.

[Plain of the Herbs]

On 36%, logically two FF seats shouldn't have been on at all, but the actuality is that Fitzpatrick came within 170 votes of a seat, and any kind of FF vote management would have carried the day. Granted Fitzpatrick was just 42 votes ahead of John Foley at the time of the latter's elimination. The swings and arrows of the single transferable vote.

And quite a broad similarity between Offaly's Local election results and GE16's results.

Similarly now, there was no way that FF were going to win two seats with 36% of the vote, so for all Ivan Yates' prognosticating in favour of it on Newstalk, Fitzpatrick was never in with any real chance.

[Lone Shark]

On 36%, logically two FF seats shouldn't have been on at all, but the actuality is that Fitzpatrick came within 170 votes of a seat, and any kind of FF vote management would have carried the day. Granted Fitzpatrick was just 42 votes ahead of John Foley at the time of the latter's elimination. The swings and arrows of the single transferable vote.

And quite a broad similarity between Offaly's Local election results and GE16's results.

Similarly now, there was no way that FF were going to win two seats with 36% of the vote, so for all Ivan Yates' prognosticating in favour of it on Newstalk, Fitzpatrick was never in with any real chance.

Theoretically yes, however I don't think you could plan for the future based on this. First of all, Barry Cowen went 1300 votes over quota, and 900 of his surplus went to Eddie Fitzpatrick - a remarkable transfer rate. So there weren't a lot of votes "wasted" on Cowen, if any at all, from a FF perspective. You still have to get your first man over the line as well, and I've no doubt that a lot of Foley's transfers that eventually went to Fitzpatrick, only did so because Cowen was listed number 2 and thus number 3 was counted. If more FF first preferences around Tullamore went Fitzpatrick's way, Cowen would have needed those transfers down the line.

Secondly, due to the open field and the number of viable candidates, Carol Nolan got elected with less than 9,000 votes AFTER transfers. If I'm not mistaken (and I haven't gone through them all methodically), she's the only current TD who achieved that in a rural constituency. It happened a lot in Dublin where turnout was low, but down the country, if you ended up with between 9,000 and 10,000 votes, it was 50/50 whether or not you got in and I'm pretty sure if you got less than 9,000, either your name was Carol Nolan or you missed out. A handful missed out with over 10,000, and I don't know of another who got in with a number that small. Of course Fitzpatrick could have done the same, but I don't think you could work off the basis that 9,000 would be enough on an ongoing basis. Hence you'd need to look at getting 10,000 votes to get in, and I genuinely don't believe a "running mate" based in that area is going to be good enough to do that - at least until they hit upon someone who genuinely has a big personal following - and I don't know if Eddie Fitzpatrick was that person.