Blog Posts

During the ongoing election campaign, Stefan Müller will write weekly articles for RTÉ News, focusing on insights and trends from the opinion polls, exit polls, election results, and the Irish Polling Indicator.

Recent polls reveal significant shifts in party support as Ireland approaches its next General Election. Fine Gael has seen an increase in popularity following a change in leadership. At the same time, Sinn Féin has experienced a notable decline across all age groups.

The 2024 Local and European Parliament Elections are approaching fast. The obvious question is whether current polls about support for General Elections can predict the outcomes of these two “second-order” elections in less than a month.

The past six months have changed the political discourse in Ireland. We have observed several crucial developments since the last blog post published in July 2023. But let’s go through this step by step.

It looks like 2023 might break the record for the most polls published in a single year. By mid-July, newspapers have released 22 polls. But what do these regularly released polls tell us about the political landscape in Ireland?

The RedC poll published on Sunday marks the 30th opinion poll on party support released in 2022. Despite mentions of “bounces”, “rebounds”, and “recoveries”, we observe very little change in aggregated party support this year.

Recent Irish opinion polls made headlines. The latest Behaviour and Attitudes poll put Sinn Féin at 37 per cent. For the first time in Irish polling history, the most recent Red C survey placed Sinn Fein above Fine Gael and Fianna Fail combined.

The Irish Polling Indicator website comes in a new look, and we have released new publicly available datasets of all polls and estimates since the 1980s. This blog post describes the new features and data before we summarise recent developments in terms of support for Irish parties.

We have updated the main graph showing the current standing of Irish political parties and independent candidates. In particular, the new graph now focuses even more on the range of our estimates.

In this blog post, we outline recent updates in relation to our polling aggregation and visualisation of results. Afterwards, we summarise the current standings of Irish political parties. Changes to the polling indicator, graphs, and website The Polling Indicator and the graphs come in a new layout.