As I’m writing this, seven parties with Dáil representation have either nominated or publicly declared their intention to nominate a candidate. They are as follows:

• Fine Gael are nominating Heather Humphreys.

• Fianna Fáil will nominate either Billy Kelleher or Jim Gavin.

• The Social Democrats, Labour, 100% Redress, People Before Profit, and Solidarity are nominating or backing Catherine Connolly. (For the purposes of this analysis, I’m treating People Before Profit and Solidarity as one group.)

• Aontú are backing Maria Steen

For the analysis below, I assume that councillors from any of the above parties will vote against the nomination of any of the above-listed candidates if it comes before their local authority. This assumes the party whip will be followed, though in practice, local-level whips are often harder to enforce and sometimes carry little or no consequences. That’s worth bearing in mind when interpreting the results.

The embedded spreadsheet shows, in its first section, the breakdown of each of the 31 local authorities by party. It details the number of councillors each party holds, alongside their proportion of overall seats on that authority.

Side note: Parties can hold either an Outright Majority (more seats than any other party on that council) or a Shared Majority (the same number of seats as another party but ranked first by tie-break rules). Adding these together gives a party’s Collective Majority — i.e. all local authorities where they have either type of majority.

• Fianna Fáil hold a collective majority on 12 local authorities, eight of them outright.

• Fine Gael hold a collective majority on 13, with seven outright.

• Sinn Féin hold an outright majority on just one council (Monaghan) but share a majority on two more.

• Labour hold a shared majority on one authority.

• Independents collectively hold a majority on 11 authorities, with an outright majority on seven.

The second section of the spreadsheet models three scenarios:

1. Baseline scenario: Remove councillors from parties already nominating or backing a candidate (Fine Gael, Social Democrats, Labour, People Before Profit, and Sinn Féin), or those intending to nominate but who haven’t yet named their candidate (Fianna Fáil).

   • In this scenario, two councils (highlighted in green) show a majority of councillors not tied to one of the six parties above.

2. Including Sinn Féin’s 99 councillors: When Sinn Féin are factored in, the number of “open” councils drops from two to zero.

3. Including Aontú’s 8 councillors: This has only a marginal effect, lowering percentages slightly in some councils.

As things stand, only 2 councils have a majority of councillors not already committed to a candidate, and therefore not bound by a whip in upcoming nomination votes. A candidate seeking four council nominations without relying on whip-breaking has only two realistic options:

• Donegal County Council

• Louth County Council

Sinn Féin still face three choices: back another candidate, run their own, or sit the election out. They are due to decide by 20 September. Should they choose either of the first two, the number of councils with a “free” majority would fall from two to zero.

In terms of imposing whips on their councillors, Fine Gael has instructed  their Councillors not to vote in favour of any nominations. Fianna Fáil is expected to do the same, and Sinn Féin have announced that their councillors will not be placed under a whip until their internal process on candidate selection has finished on September 20th. 

I found only one clear instance of councillors from a party that had already endorsed a candidate voting to nominate someone else at council level. In 2018, Waterford City & County Council nominated independent Gavin Duffy by 18 votes to 2. According to The Irish Times, Duffy’s nomination was supported by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Labour councillors. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had opted not to nominate anyone nationally, but Labour had already publicly endorsed Michael D. Higgins for a second term two months earlier. Despite this, Labour’s Waterford councillor John Pratt voted to nominate Duffy. I found no record of any sanction being imposed on him, although that does not guarantee the same outcome if such a situation arose this year.

Bearing this in mind, councillors from a party who have imposed a whip may chose to abstain rather than vote against a candidate. Abstentions automatically lower the threshold of councillors required for a vote to pass, so while there may be no routes to a nomination from the councils if councillors vote only yes or no, they may very well be a path if whip-restriced councillors vote to abstain. 

For example, if Fianna Fáil had 6, Fine Gael had 7, Sinn Féin had 8 and Labour had 4 councillors on a local authority, the total would be 25, with 13 being required for a majority. If Fianna Fáil councillors abstain rather than vote no, the threshold effectively falls from 50%+1 of all councillors to 50%+1 of all 'yes' or 'no' councillors, so in this example, a candidate would only need 10.