EDITORIAL: Transfers will be vital in Mayo election race

WE now have a general-election date to focus on, with Taoiseach Simon Harris dissolving the Dáil last Friday and calling the election for Friday, November 29.
Sixteen candidates are now in the running here in Mayo, with two more Independents, Gerry Loftus and Sean Forkin, entering the race last week. Both of those candidates also ran in the 2020 election, meaning eight of those who ran last time are now running again in the upcoming election.
There is of course an extra seat on offer in Mayo this time around, meaning the quota should be considerably less than it was in 2020.
Three candidates, Michael Ring, Rose Conway-Walsh and Dara Calleary, all passed the quota of 12,871 on the first count last time out, with Alan Dillon being elected on the seventh and final count without reaching the quota.
While many constituencies around the country look fairly predictable, that certainly cannot be said here in Mayo, where perhaps ten of the 16 candidates have real aspirations of taking a seat.

Hard to predict
With no Michael Ring in the race, it also is very hard to predict who will top the poll when the boxes are opened in the TF Royal Theatre on Saturday, November 30.
High-profile junior ministers Dara Calleary and Alan Dillon will be expected to poll strongly and will probably be favourites to top the poll. However, Rose Conway-Walsh polled an incredible 14,633 votes in 2020, and if she polled even three quarters of that this time around, she too may not be far from from the top in Mayo.
If Calleary, Dillon and Conway-Walsh all take seats, as expected, there will still be a battle royale for the final two seats. There is no doubt that transfers will ultimately decide who makes it over the line.
At the moment, it is very hard to decipher which of the three other Fine Gael candidates is in the strongest position to take one of those two seats.
Keira Keogh, Martina Jennings and Cllr Mark Duffy have all been given clearly defined areas of the county to canvass, and the party will be hoping that whichever of them is eliminated first will transfer strongly to their running mates.
Michael Ring has made it clear that he wants all Fine Gael voters to keep their transfers within the party, but as we have seen in the past, many voters keep their votes local and often decide their transfers on geography rather than party.

Risky strategy
With Fianna Fáil only running two candidates, they don’t have the luxury of having any obvious transfers to come to them, so their candidates, Dara Calleary and Lisa Chambers, know full well that they have to poll very strongly with their first preferences.
Chambers received 1,175 votes more than Alan Dillon back in 2020, but Dillon proved much more transfer friendly and eventually ended up 2,066 votes ahead of Chambers in the race for the final seat after all transfers had been distributed.
From the large number of Independents in the field, Patsy O’Brien and Chris Maxwell will probably be expected to poll strongest. However, another Independent, Stephen Kerr, and Aontú’s Paul Lawless are likely to get fairly substantial votes, and it could be the case that their transfers could go a long way toward deciding who takes the last two seats in Mayo.
In 2020, 651 of Lawless’s 3,375 votes went to the Green Party’s Saoirse McHugh, but with the Green Party’s Michael Boxty O’Conaill likely to be eliminated before Lawless this time around, it is difficult to guess who would benefit most from transfers from Lawless.
It is really very difficult to make a confident prediction of who will take the five seats in Mayo when all the votes are counted at the end of this month. It would be a big shock if Calleary, Dillon and Conway Walsh were not able to retain their seats, but who will take Michael Ring’s seat and the extra seat now on offer is anyone’s guess in an election that will take place in just 18 days’ time.