In this post I’m going to have a quick look at some of the statistics arising from the 2019 election.

Firstly, I’m going to look at how parties performed in different LEA types. The types are :

• City – all the four Dublin Councils, plus Galway City Council, and the three city council LEAs in both Waterford and Limerick.
• Large Town. The Largest town in the Area has over 20,000 inhabitants.
• Medium Town. The Largest town in the Area has between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants.
• Small Town. The Largest town in the Area has between 10,000 and 5,000 inhabitants.
• Rural. The Largest town in the Area has less than 5,000 inhabitants.

For the purposes of brevity, I’ve grouped the Centre-Left parties (Greens, Social Democrats and Labour) under a common heading, and the Far-Left parties (Solidarity, People Before Profit, Workers Party, Independent Left and Independents For Change) the same.

Note how Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael between them took less than 40% of the vote in cities, but over 60% of the small-town and rural areas. By contrast, the centre-left parties took nearly 30% in cities, but less than 5% in small-town and rural areas.

Next up is a table on the performance of parties in City Areas (as defined above) segmented by the percentage of Professional and Managerial households per area.

The Definitions are as follows :

• Very High – Over 35% of households have a Professional or Managerial Bread-Winner.
• High – Between 25% and 35% of households have a Professional or Managerial Bread-Winner.
• Average – Between 20% and 25% of households have a Professional or Managerial Bread-Winner.
• Low – Between 15% and 20% of households have a Professional or Managerial Bread-Winner.
• Very Low – Under 15% of households have a Professional or Managerial Bread-Winner.

There is a very stark distinction here between the perfomances of Sinn Féin and Fine Gael – in fact they are nearly mirror-images of each other. Fine Gael outpolled Sinn Féin by more than 10 to 1 in the areas with the highest concentration of Professional and Managerial Households while Sinn Féin outpolled them by 3 to 1 in the areas with the lowest concentration.

Centre-Left parties also did better in areas with more Professional and Managerial households – mind you this was largely due to the performance of the Greens in middle-class Dublin.

Just for interest’s sake – the LEA with the highest proportion of Professional and Managerial Households (according to the 2022 census) was Blackrock at 43%. Ballymun-Finglas was the lowest at 10%.

I hope to have a few more reports later.