Seanad General Election 2025 - University Panels

I’m the same with the NUI ballot

Never heard of any except the incumbents

It’s likely the incumbents will be re elected

Her expenses while she was a TD made it damn clear she was brazen about sucking the state dry.

Claimed to drive a specific, longer route to the Dáil to get pushed in to another expenses band. Difference was huge.

There was a much wider field in 2020 and ten of them got a respectable vote tally. Ruth Coppinger was the strongest challenger and survived to the 16th count when Alice was elected thanks to transfers from Labour's Laura Harmon.

Eva Dowling is running again for the Greens. She got 1,229 FP votes in 2020, in the middle of the field. The lack of serious contenders means she could be the only Green party candidate to increase her vote this time out 😅

The current list is astonishingly non-diverse despite a perfect gender equality. It is almost exclusively Dubliners and two-thirds reside in those blessed regions of Dublin's Southside which only the best and brightest of NUI graduates could afford 😛

STV gives us the satisfaction of voting against candidates - stop your preferences when you have exhausted all those you can stomach. But in this case, I have nothing for or against any candidates other than the sitting Senators.

Legitimate expenses would be a horribly parsimonious criterion for choosing between the candidates in a national election but, so far, no one here has come up with anything better😟

We spurned the opportunity to abolish all Seanad expenses in 2013. Whatever naive hopes there might have been for Seanad, surely no one imagined their expenses would be cut?

Which reminds me of a skeleton Philip Ryan didn't pull out of the Zapper's closet.

https://www.thejournal.ie/katherine-zappone-travel-expenses-2732813-Apr2016/

So, yeah, those Dublin Senators know how to max. out their expenses!

And you've done precisely nothing to try prevent the ones you dislike the most being elected

Conventional diplomas aren't issued anymore. Some old diplomas map to L7, and L7 Bachelors holders are able to register. Some defunct DIT diplomas map to L8!

Might be another court case in that one…

Polls have now closed for both NUI and TCD. Counting is underway in TCD and in the RDS for NUI.

The other panels have until tomorrow to vote for 43 seats. Their results expected on Monday or Tuesday. Counting a thousand votes can take a long time because there will be many counts before the final result.

https://www.thejournal.ie/counting-seanad-elections-6607488-Jan2025/

I've only voted once and that was around 15ish years ago and then only because I knew one of the candidates running and said I'd vote for them. Honestly, I just think the Seanad is a waste of a good room.

Based on a quarter tally from Trinity, Zappone is not getting in. 7th behind Ruane, Clonan, Aubrey McCarthy, Hugo McNeill, Ossian Smyth and Laura Harmon currently.

Far more votes than I thought she'd get but a fraction of the amount that some people on here (the site, not this thread solely) seemed to think she'd get.

Chu is also doing appallingly, this might be the last we hear of her for a seat other than a council seat.

NUI will be same 3.