| The election took place on Friday; results take a while in Ireland because its uses the single transferable vote system (a form of proportional representation), which provides several winners in each of 43 constituencies, and requires multiple rounds of counting. By the time it all finished last night, though, not a lot had changed: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the two leading parties of the last government, both had almost the same vote share as they did in 2020, with Fianna Fáil winning 48 seats and Fine Gael 38 of the 174 available in the Dáil. (In an expanded parliament with 14 extra seats, that is very slightly more as a proportion than they won in 2020.) Sinn Féin lost a big chunk of vote share, falling from 25% to 19%, and won 39 seats. The biggest losers were the Greens, who were punished by progressive voters for their role in the right-leaning coalition and dropped from 12 seats to one. Even if the result looks like a maintenance of the status quo, it raises up some big questions: how the coalition will be formed, where Sinn Féin goes from here, and whether any anti-incumbent sentiment can be found at the fringes. Coalition talks: what price could smaller parties exact? While Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has said that her party has “made contact” with the Social Democrats (SD) and Labour, she has also acknowledged that “the numbers are there” for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. “You need 88 seats for a simple majority, and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have 86,” Lisa O’Carroll said. “They probably need to be in the mid-90s to feel confident in the stability of the government, allowing for resignations and deaths and so on. So the question is whether they try to bring independents on board or enter talks with one of the smaller centre-left parties.” Turning to some of the 16 independents who won seats would probably mean not having to give up ministries as the price of power, but could mean a less stable coalition because they would be more likely to revolt on specific issues, Lisa said. The alternative is bringing in the Social Democrats or Labour, who finished fourth and fifth respectively. The SD deputy leader, Cian O’Callaghan – his boss, Holly Cairns, had a baby on polling day – has said that the party is open to talks, and Labour hasn’t ruled them out either. But the bitter experience of the “coalition tax” suffered by Labour in the past and the Greens this time around means that both will be wary. In this piece, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy says that decision-makers in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would prefer Labour as a political “mudguard” and are sceptical that the Social Democrats are truly interested. Either would want real say on a specific policy area that they can campaign on at the next election – but are aware that with the two biggest parties only two seats away from an outright majority, they have limited leverage. With all outcomes possible, the talks are likely to run for weeks or months – but probably not as long as the four-and-a-half months needed in 2020, since much of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s programme is already aligned this time. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael: ‘Identical twins’ It has been a decent few days for the two giants of the Irish political system. Founded out of a split in nationalist opinion over the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty that ended the war of independence, they have long been bitter rivals; Fine Gael is the more socially progressive of the two, and tends to do better in Dublin, while Fianna Fáil dominates in much of the rest of the country. But after four and a half years in their first ever coalition, where they rotated the role of taoiseach, or prime minister, they are sometimes derided by critics as so close together that they may as well merge: in this piece, Fintan O’Toole calls them “the identical twins of Irish politics”. Opposition parties even accuse them of drumming up “phoney war” arguments to differentiate themselves. (In this interview with the Journal in October, the Fine Gael taoiseach, Simon Harris, refused to “compare and contrast” the two – a curious stance during an election campaign.) “It was a solid result for them both,” Lisa said. “What you’ve seen happening is voters switching between the two parties with their second and third preferences more than they go to the others.” (RTÉ has more on that here.) “The numbers would suggest that Fianna Fáil are likely to choose the first taoiseach, if they do agree to continue to rotate it.” That would mean Harris is likely to give up his job, at least for now. Sinn Féin: from the brink of power to another term in opposition Sinn Féin won the most first preference votes in 2020 and, earlier this year, appeared to be on the brink of power, sitting as high as 35% in the polls. But its support has collapsed in 2024, with the nadir being June’s local elections, where it won just over half of the 200 council seats it had targeted and got 12% of the vote. Against that yardstick, it has recovered somewhat recently – but it is nonetheless staring at another term in opposition. Part of the problem for Sinn Féin is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rule out working with it; even as the party has moved away from its past as the political wing of the IRA, both say that the policy differences are too significant to be bridged. But the party has many problems of its own – like the fact that few voters prioritise Irish unity as an issue, and the fact that many of its working-class supporters reject its relatively liberal attitude to immigration. In this piece, Gail McElroy, a professor of political science at Trinity College Dublin, tells Lisa that Sinn Féin has a different challenge to most nationalist parties in Europe: | 