A Mayo View: Bye-elections a referendum of Mary Lou's SF leadership
by Dr. Richard Martin
TWO bye-elections are looming. Dublin North Central and Galway West. Both will be held this month on May 22.
The government civil war parties know they don’t have a snowball's chance in hell of winning them.
Government parties have won just three of the last 30 bye-elections. All Micheál Martin and Simon Harris require is a respectable showing from their candidates.
As long as they are not humiliated and poll relatively well, the show will go on.
The real pressure in on Mary Lou. These bye-elections are a referendum on the leadership of Mary Lou McDonald.
If she can’t deliver a victory in her own constituency it’s a calamitous day for SF. She is the leader of the major opposition party and if SF candidate Janice Boylan fails to make it over the line, it makes her leadership untenable.
A day of reckoning comes in the career of every major political figure. Right now Mary Lou McDonald's back is to the wall.
For starters, she didn’t want Janice Boylan as a candidate. She wanted the scoliosis campaigner Gillian Sherratt as the candidate. Boylan contested the selection convention and won. The local North Central SF members weren’t going to allow another ‘outsider’ come in.
Mary Lou, as we all know, isn’t from the inner city. She hails from the leafy suburbs of Rathgar.
In SF there is no dissent and it is a party ruled with iron discipline from the top down. In the civil war parties we frequently see elected councillors and TDs going on solo runs - not so in SF.
The party's activists rejected their party leader's preferred candidate in her own backyard. That’s unprecedented.
Dublin North Central was and is the home of Bertie Ahern. As leader of FF he always brought a running mate home. Always.
In the general election of 2007, Ahern received 12,734 first preference votes. Cyprian Brady received only 939 first preference votes (2.7% of the vote).
Nine other candidates polled ahead of Brady on the first count, but through careful strategic vote management, all of Ahern’s transfers went to Brady and he was elected on the fourth count.
In the 2024 general election, Mary Lou topped the poll in the constituency but failed to bring her running mate, Janice Boylan.
Mary Lou received 6,389 first preference votes and 19.5% of the first preference vote. Janice Boylan received 1,257 first preference votes and 3.8% of the FPV and was eliminated on the second count.
Based on the evidence, it’s fair to say Mary Lou is no Bertie. A leader of a major party has to deliver a running mate.
SF face several challenges in this bye-election. A major one is the presence of Gerard Hutch in the field. He trounced Janice Boylan in the 2024 general election. He received 3,098 first preference votes and 9.5% of the FPV.
The motivation behind his desire to enter the Dáil isn’t quite clear. I suspect that part of it is to thwart SF in his own area.
Hutch was acquitted after a 52-day trial, when the Special Criminal Court ruled that the state had failed to prove that Gerard Hutch was one of the gunmen at the Regency Hotel.
Jonathan Dowdall was the chief prosecution witness in the trial. He was a SF councillor and Hutch associate.
He won’t be elected in the upcoming bye-election. The winner needs over 50% of the vote. He will poll strongly in the traditional working class area, which is normally fertile ground for SF. It will be enough to seriously hinder Mary Lou and SF.
Who were the real winners in the recent fuel protests? The recent Ireland Votes opinion poll confirms my own intuitive feeling - SF at 22%, FF at 17%, FG at 17%, Independent Ireland at 9% (increase of 3%) and Aontú at 7%.
The water protests of 2014 was protest dominated by the left. The 2026 fuel protest was dominated by right wing elements. The real winners were and are Independent Ireland and Aontú.
The polls are telling us that the recent protests have made no impression on the popularity of SF. That’s ominous.
Despite their craven attempts to piggyback the protests, blockades of our ports and only oil refinery, it hasn’t worked.
They have reached a political purgatory where they have little credibility with the thinking electorate.
By not supporting the state in a time of a crisis, it has damaged their credibility with middle Ireland.
By trying to mingle and claim solidarity with far right activists and march with them around Castlebar and other towns and share platforms with them they have damaged their credibility even further.
The question always remains. Do the electorate trust SF? The current opinion polls suggests the negative. Personally? I don’t. They just can’t be let into government on their own and be let meddle with our economic model which is so reliant on FDI and corporation tax.
Recently, the Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘Stormont was wooing a top Wall Street bank for over a year before 300 jobs were lost after an abrupt meeting with Sinn Féin minister Archibald’.
The talks had been going on for 18 months. When the representative from Cantor Fitzgerald met with Caoimhe Archibald recently, the project collapsed instantaneously. Three-hundred jobs in the financial services sector were lost. Is this what we want in the south?
In Stormont they refuse to show leadership and govern for the greater good. It’s constant handbags politics arguing about flags, statues, kerbstones, the Irish language, and oneupmanship.
If they actually reached out to the unionist community with positive progressive policy they would actually persuade the other ‘side’ that they are honest brokers and want to make the island a better place.
They are a party struggling with their own contradictions. They want to enter Leinster House. In doing so, they sign the roll of the house. But, they fail to accept that when you sign the roll of the house you recognise the state and the institutions of the state. It’s not an à la carte menu.
They want to be in government and govern the state. But when push comes to shove they refuse to support the organs of the state in a time of crisis. Middle Ireland isn’t stupid. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be responsible and irresponsible at the same time.
Rose Conway-Walsh released a video on Facebook after a tumultuous Dáil debate, decrying ‘the arrogance of the current government’ and the usual platitudes of ‘not listening to the people’.
That same week she was on RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime and was asked to condemn the blockade at Whitegate. Over five times. She was asked five times and every time she refused on all occasions.
All of the SF TDs were on the same page. The blockade was right and justified. Was this a diktat from the top? Watching and listening I said to myself they might want to look at their own arrogance.
SF can say bye bye to both bye-elections.