The Irish General Election

This coming Friday has the general election in Ireland - for those who are interested, here are the latest polls.

I've no particular insight to offer into polling methodology in Ireland - Millward Brown and Ipsos MRBI are traditional face-to-face polling using quota sampling, RedC is phone polling very much along ICM lines, with past vote weighting and suchlike (I have a recollection that it was set up by a former ICM employee). That said, there isn't a huge difference between the pollsters anyway (though RedC appear to be showing Labour slightly lower).

Across the board Fianna Fail have collapsed to well under half of their general election vote, Fine Gael are just below 40%, Labour have doubled their support since the election. I haven't included them in the table, but the Greens are in low single figures, but Independents/Others are up in the mid-teens (I haven't tracked down any recent polls on the company websites that have broken that "Independent/Other" down into it's component parts).

With STV I don't think there is a widely accepted equivalent of a swingometer to translate shares of the vote into seats. Certainly it will depend to some extent how votes transfer between the parties in individual constituencies.

There is a nice table and graphing of voting intention polls here, and some commentary from my Irish equivalent (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!) at IrishPollingReport.