In Ireland they call it STV, but for electing their President, they use AV – rejected by the British in last May’s referendum.

This election campaign was more interesting and contested by more candidates than ever before. The presidency is symbolic and usually the candidatures are carefully controlled by the political parties. To get a nomination, a candidate must be supported by at least 20 parliamentarians or four county councils. Some of the political parties allowed their supporters on county councils to nominate popular independents, thus opening up the election. The other important difference compared to previous elections was the collapse in support for the candidates associated with some of the main parties, notably Gay Mitchell, whose party had just won the parliamentary elections earlier this year with 27 percent of the vote. He emerged from the contest with only 6 percent of the vote. The winner was Michael D. Higgins, a popular figure in the less popular Irish Labour Party. While Labour scored a comparatively high 19 percent in the parliamentary elections, Higgins doubled that to 40 percent in the presidential election. It seems that personality is everything.

Under the AV system, the votes were counted as follows.

Michael  D. Higgins was ahead from the start and as lower-placed candidates were eliminated this did not change. Indeed, he picked up more transfers than Sean Gallagher at both of the successive relevant counts. At the second count, the transfers from Dana Scallon and Mary Davis for Gay Mitchell were higher than they were for Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein. The elimination of McGuiness and Mitchell in the final count led to an avalanche of transfers to Higgins in an anti-Fianna Fail surge. Although the scores of McGuiness and Gallagher were respectable, they were very few people’s second preference.

Nothing is surprising about Ireland, but a final curiosity is that McGuiness, the third placed candidate for the Presidency of Ireland, had no vote in the election because he is a UK resident. He is also a member of the British Parliament. If he had been elected, we would have seen the strange event of the head of state of a Republic requesting a manorial stewardship from the Crown in order to be able to resign from Westminster.