Jennifer Carroll MacNeill comfortably topped the poll in Dún Laoghaire, becoming the first TD to be elected to the new Dáil along the way, on a day when the main questions in this constituency had been whether Fine Gael could nail down the second seat they expected to win last time and who would prevail in a dogfight for the last seat.
The answer to the first question was yes, with effective vote management helping to ensure Barry Ward’s election was never in too much doubt from the time the initial tallies were completed.
With Ossian’s Smyth suffering amid the wider Green party malaise, however, the anticipated scrap never quite materialised.
Fianna Fáil’s Cormac Devlin polled significantly better than some had expected and looked a safe bet for seat from early on too, while People Before Profit’s Richard Boyd Barrett did a little less well than many had thought without ever having to sweat too much.
There was a good showing from Hugo Mills of the Social Democrats, who was running for the first time, but the scale of Mr Smyth’s slump aside, there were no other real surprises and the constituency wrapped up by well before midnight on count seven when Mr Boyd Barrett, Mr Devlin and Mr Ward were all deemed to be elected.
