I am shocked about the lack of democracy in Ireland. I never thought that the level of democracy is not much higher than one of these dodgy countries where international observers need to supervise the elections. This statement might seem a little harsh to you, but read this:
1) The Constituency Dublin North has 5 seats. 3 candidates of Fine Gael were elected in Dublin North (Peter Mathews, Alan Shatter and Olivia Mitchell). 3 out of 5 candidates means that FG got 60% of the mandates, but in fact they only got 36.3% of the first preference votes. How is a system that allows situations like this a democratic system?
2) A total number of 2,220,359 valid votes were counted and there are 166 TDs, that means that each TD represents 13,375 people. But the tiny amount of 6,206 voted, for example for Richard Boyd Barrett from the ultra-left People Before Profit. He got elected and now represents more than double the voters than the amount that wanted him to get elected! Overall he got a mandate from the tiny amount of 0.28% of the voters. Should he be in the Dail? I don’t think so! I know he was not the one with the smallest number of votes, that dubious honour seems to be reserved for Kevin Humphries from Labour who just got 3,450 votes.
But the reason why I picked Richard Boyd Barrett is because his party got overall only 21,551 votes, which is 0.97%. His party won 2 seats with 0.97%, while the Greens with 1.8% and 41,039 votes didn’t get any seats.
3) Further up it is not better: Labour got 19.4% of the votes and won 37 seats. Fianna Fail got just 2% less of the votes at 17.4, but won just 20 seats.
The final result is
FG 76, LAB 37, FF 20, IND 15, SF 14, GP 0, SP 2, PBP 2
but it should be
FG 60, LAB 32, FF 29, IND 21, SF 16, GP 3, SP 2, PBP 1
In the elections this time, that result wouldn’t have changed much in the majority situation in the Dail, but the difference to the undemocratic actual vote is significant.
I can’t see how the Irish voting system can be called democratic!
