Presidential Election 2025

Honestly, keep fighting with yourself. You're just ignoring everything being put to you and you're doing it deliberately and in bad faith.

The conservative element of FG had their own party not that long ago….Renua and they didn’t last long.

Analysing the breakdown will be impossible as there is probably multiple reasons and by the time someone could identify each reason by constituency it would be hard to create the basis of a quota in a GE.

This was a protest vote as voters know it doesn’t mean anything as the President is a figurehead with no power…….and it’s probably why Maria Steen was a more viable candidate in this election than in a GE.

There will be a lot of talking about spoiled votes for maybe a week and then all the parties will pretend it never happened. We are a great country at forgetting things, until it happens again.

Exactly, and I do not think this is any victory of the left she was just a way to express dissatisfaction with government. Actually, I am thinking that she may have it bit harder if McGregor stayed in the race - he was even better choice than her to stick it to the FFG and if he had stay in the race I would even go to give him a vote as electing him would be even better statement than electing her. I have to say that he is wholly inappropriate person to be elected president but that also make him prime example of protest vote statement.

Lads we can talk about social conservatism all we want but at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, the big issues of the day are housing, infrastructure and the cost of living, and that won't change.

President-elect Catherine Connolly vows ‘constructive questioning’ in order to create ‘a new republic’ (Indo)

With a record almost 215000 spoilt votes (plus Jim Gavins) she could start by questioning the transparency of the presidential election process

Renua was an FG splinter and it didn't have any real leadership. It was simply a bunch of people who left FG because they didn't get their own way. As a party, it fizzled and failed to gain critical mass. A prospective party needs leadship and having a set of backseat drivers won't work. I am not sure if Steen is a leader but she is a formidable debater. Such a party would also need clearly defined policies. That would be as difficult as finding a good leader. It also needs a set of issues on which supporters can agreem (much like the PDs and taxation, initially.)

He is going to be very disapointed then again .

The Spoil The Vote movement isn't quite a single party just as floating voters have multiple reasons for how they vote. There is a lot of discontentment with the interference by FFG in the nomination process. However, there are other issues. Think of it in terms of markets and demand. There is a demand for a Right of centre party that appeals to conservatives. The move by FF and FG to adopt "progressive" policies was a case of embrace, extent, extinguish. The larger parties do this to smaller parties with popular policies. By taking away their raison d'etre (like reforming the tax system and the PDs) reduces the electoral threat from these smaller parties.

FG has traditionally been Right of centre even under FitzGerald. FF in a bid to be more like FG and to take FG's seats and support moved to the Right and largely abandoned the centre and centre Left. That created an opportunity for SF. Labour had previously abandoned the Left and became little more than an Irish Times dinner party in terms of Dail representation. SF moved into the territory abandoned by Labour. SF has become more centrist in recent years. The move to back Connolly was a gamechanger and was missed by the media commentators. It was a strategic relaignment on the Left that resulted in President Catherine Connolly. There is the possibility for a similar realignment on the Right but it will take a lot of hard work.

Analysing the Spoiled Vote vote is what is known as a missing data problem. All the data necessary is not on the ballot papers. Any analysis of the vote is only going to give a partial view. It would require a lot of opinion polling to get a more reliable view.

I think that Steen mentioned in some coverage that the referenda issues were already resolved and as president, she would not try to revisit them (or words to that effect). The media has tried to frame her campaign in terms of those referenda. She has a potential set of voters (conservatives) and according to this election's opinion polls with her name on the ballot paper, considerable support. (22%) How much of that is a personal vote that would not translate into a party vote is unknown.

What wasn't transparent about this election?

I wonder where Jim Gavin's No. 2s went?

I had a look to see if this aligned in any way with my theory that the people who spoiled their votes were people who supported the Aontu/Independent/Other candidates in the last general election. It seems to support that - if you rank the support for these parties individually against these constituencies they all rank in the top 13. Dublin South Central is #1 for Independent (mainly Joan Collins who would be left wing), Meath West is #1 for Aontu, Laois is #4 for Independent, Dublin Central #4 for Other, Offaly #8 for Independent Ireland, Louth #8 for Other, Longford West Meath #10 for Independent Ireland, Dublin Mid West #13 for Independent Ireland (if you tot up all the independents you get a bigger figure that would push the constituency up the rankings)

I'm doing this in a noisy crowded space on a phone so can't guarantee the figures but I think it's interesting as a theory

The problem is that the people who spoiled their votes did so for a wide range of reasons. The common theme uniting them is dissatisfaction with the government but that's a very broad brush.

People may not even realise that Maria Steen wasn't a uniting force within that discontented group when she threw her hat in the ring. A lot of anti-migrant activists saw her as not being particularly forceful in that area and instead were pinning their hopes on Nick Delahanty.

It's really hard to distill all of the varied areas of interest into one political party.

To name just a few areas represented by the spoil the voters: You have:

• Pro-Life, anti-LGBT social conservatives
• Anti-Migration Irish Nationalists
• Vaccine skeptics
• Climate Change deniers
• Libertarians without a political home
• Out and out conspiracy theorists (Wi-Fi, Flouridation, Chemtrails etc)

There is overlap between a lot of those areas but it's extremely difficult to capture them all or in the right proportions.

Some are concerned about the levels of immigration but wouldnt necessarily be totally opposed to it (my position, though on balance I voted for HH despite these concerns as I thought the Left would be even more open borders). I think this is now increasingly the view of the CDU in Germany. A few days ago Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, said "ask your daughters" when responding to criticism of support for tighter immigration controls. This sparked criticism from a few members from the Merkel wing and the left.

I am liberal on bodily autonomy. But I am maybe a bit more libertarian on free speech than the Left, or Helen McEntee. I vote Independents because people who speak out of turn in political parties lose the whip. Some of this is a legacy of Haugheys way of doing things, like when Dessie O'Malley was expelled in 1985.