Irish General Election To Take Place On 26 February

The Irish general election will take place on 26 February, the country’s prime minister, Enda Kenny, has said, as he dissolved the Dáil and kicked off one of the shortest election battles in Irish political history.

Political scientists, election number crunchers and bookmakers are predicting that Kenny will make history by being returned as Taoiseach.

If the experts and recent opinion polls are correct, Kenny will become the first ever Fine Gael Taoiseach to be elected for a second term since Ireland became independent from Britain in 1922.

While the odds are in favour of Kenny becoming Taoiseach again and thus taking the salute at the military parade on Easter Sunday to mark the 100^th anniversary of the Rising in Dublin against British rule, opinion polls indicate his party will fall short of an overall majority. 

All the recent polls and the predictions from academics and experts point to a Fine Gael-Labour coalition propped up with support of at least six Independent TDs (MPs).

Prof Michael Gallagher and Mike Marsh, Irish political scientists at Trinity College Dublin and the authors of a book on how Ireland voted in the last 2011 general election, said it was almost certain that Fine Gael would be the largest party.

Gallagher said: “The only pre-declared willing coalition is Fine Gael and Labour, which on current polls is likely to be some way short of a majority, so for them to remain in office they would need to bring in another party or come to an arrangement with quite a number of Independents, unless their support grows between now and the election, which is possible. In short, there is a lot of uncertainty.”

The key issue of the campaign will be the management of an economy that took a severe battering after the 2008 financial crash and forced the previous government prior to the 2011 election, led by the rival Fianna Fáil party, to hand over the nation’s finances to the International Monetary Fund and the EU.