The Politics Of Choice

Patrick Ryan takes a look at how Ireland’s current voting system emerged from Britain’s attempts to control calls for independence from the crown.

On Friday November, 29th voters in Ireland go to the polls in a general election to elect 174 Teachtaí Dála to form the 34th Dáil Éireann in the largest election the state has ever seen. Whoever emerges as a TD from the ranks of SF, FF, FG, SD or any other party one winner is guaranteed: PR – STV.

Yes, it might sound like an ointment to treat unfortunate social diseases but PR-STV has ensured that our election process has remained healthy and clean for over 100 years.

“Proportional Representation – Single Transferable Vote”, to give it its full title is used in only one other country – Malta – to elect the national parliament, but the enthusiastic support it enjoys here is all the more unusual since the system was introduced under British rule to quell independence and prevent a landslide victory by various nationalists and republicans campaigning initially under the Sinn Féin banner.

In 1917 a bye-election was held in east Clare to fill the seat vacated by the death of Captain Willie Redmond, MP, who was said to have hated British rule in Ireland with a passion, mortally wounded by a barrage of enemy fire in No-Man’s Land while revolver in hand he led an attack from the trenches at Messines Ridge.

The news caused reverberations around the world, a shock unmatched by the death of any other soldier bar Lord Kitchener. Those German bullets would also help change the history of modern Ireland.

Redmond, and his brother John, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, or IPP had worked tirelessly with other “Home Rulers” towards eventually uniting Unionists and Nationalists in a common cause, with a parliament in Dublin while still remaining part of the UK, similar to Scotland today.

The campaign for the bye-election which followed Redmond’s funeral was a bitter, occasionally violent affair. The result caused consternation in Westminister when one of the military leaders in the 1916 Easter Rising, Eamonn de Valera (campaigning in his Irish Volunteers uniform) took the seat for Sinn Féin by a more than two-to-one majority over the IPP candidate. Redmond had held the seat unopposed for the Home Rule since 1900.

De Valera’s posters promoted “a vote for Ireland a Nation, a vote against Conscription, a vote against partition, a vote for Ireland’s language, and for Ireland’s ideals and civilisation” and the message proved equally persuasive in the general election 18 months later when Irish voters had their first opportunity in almost a decade to elect their preferred candidates to parliament.

The result wasn’t just a total collapse for moderates and their quest for Home Rule, which had dominated Irish politics for generations under Parnell, and the Redmonds. It also proved the launchpad for our current electoral system.

“The East Clare by-election was a milestone for Sinn Féin because it secured a striking popular mandate which helped the organisation to continue its rapid growth ahead of the 1918 general election,” says Dr Daithí Ó Corráin, Associate Professor in History at DCU.

Under First Past the Post (FPTP), a far simpler system which remains the method to decide elections in much of the UK to this day, SF candidates took 73 out of 105 seats in December 1918, this time just under 70% on less than 50% of the vote, 25 candidates were elected unopposed. The party promptly made good on their manifesto and strong mandate, refusing to take their seats in the House of Commons and announcing An Chéad Dáil.

Despite a police raid to seize papers two weeks earlier Dáil Éireann convened on January 21st, 1919 at the Mansion House and ratified the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that had been read at the start of Easter Rising.
In a vain attempt to stem the tide Westminister passed the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1919 ensuring that elections here would be conducted under a system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote, used for the first time in Ireland at the Dublin University (TCD) ballot box in 1918, and later in voting for Sligo Corporation candidates the following year.

The theory was that instead of the winner representing everyone in a ward these larger wards would elect a small team of representatives, more accurately reflecting the voice of the electorate and stalling the SF juggernaut.
In reality Irish republicans enthusiastically cheered the abandonment of FPTP.

A decade earlier, on April 20th, 1911 SF founder Arthur Griffith welcomed the establishment of the Proportional Representation Society of Ireland following a visit to Dublin by the political radical and system advocate Leonard Courtney, 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith, and Griffith used his influence to ensure that it was widely embraced by likeminded men and women. Even the Irish Times, certainly no supporter of republicanism at that time, welcomed what it called “a thoroughly workable system” as the “Magna Carta of political and municipal minorities”.

The new Irish Free State held elections in 1922 using PR-STV and it was entrenched in the Irish Constitution following a plebiscite on July 1st, 1937 with 685,105 voting in favour and 526,945 against.

Our system was not without its critics however and another referendum to return back to FPTP voting was very narrowly defeated by 52% to 48% in 1959. A second plebiscite on the same issue was decisively defeated by 61% to 39% a decade later, ending the debate.

In Northern Ireland it was rather different. They switched to FTPT for the 1929 election but reverted to our system in 1973, the staus quo unchanged since.

“The experience in the Republic of Ireland is one familiar the world over – once people become used to a proportional electoral system there is little appetite to switch back to First Past the Post,” writes Peter Smart of Britain’s Electoral Reform Society (ERS) which is campaigning for a change to PR-STV in the UK.

Under our system votes are cast in secret at the polling station by writing “1” opposite your first choice candidate, “2” opposite your second choice, “3” opposite your third choice and so on in the officially stamped ballot card next to the names (in alphabetical order) and photos, as well as party emblems, of your preferred candidate.

As citizensinformation.ie explains:
“When you vote with more than one preference, you are instructing the returning officer (the person responsible for the counting of votes) that if your preferred candidate is eliminated, or elected with a surplus of votes, you want your vote to be transferred to your second choice candidate.”

The candidate is elected based on the quota, which varies in each of the 43 constituencies, a number calculated by dividing the total valid poll by 1 more than the number of available seats, and then adding 1.

Again citizensinformation.ie provides a good example.
“In a 4-seat constituency with a total valid poll of 25,000, the quota is 25,000 (the total valid poll) divided by 5 (1 more than the number of seats), which is 5,000. Then add 1. The quota is 5,001.”

Although this precise system is used in only two countries many others use similar arrangements with “open lists”. There the electorate chooses which one of any party’s candidates to vote for and there are few calls for reform, according to Michael Gallagher, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political Science at TCD.

“‘Multi-seat PR with competition among candidates of the same party’, the bugbear of critics of PR-STV in Ireland, is in fact the norm for smaller European democracies, not an example of Irish exceptionalism,” he says.
Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland all use open lists.

“This suggests, at the very least, that allowing voters a choice among candidates of the same party is not inherently an eccentric idea. The provision of intra-party electoral competition should be seen as an enhancement of participatory democracy; inherently a ‘good thing’ rather than a ‘bad thing’,” says Professor Gallagher

According to Britain’s ERS over 100 countries use a form of PR, while less than 50 use the FPTP system enshrined in British law.

“Those who do tend to have it as a result of being former British colonies,” the ERS states.
Their website notes that the 2022 Human Freedom Index, which measured 83 indicators of personal and economic freedom, includes Ireland – along with Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Netherlands and Luxembourg – all of which use a form of PR, in the Top 10,

Interestingly the ERS also highlight that Ireland is also ranked in the first 8 of the Top 10 countries classed as “full democracies” on the Democracy Index 2020. The other nations in there with Ireland at the very top – Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands – also use proportional representation.
So it seems that our PR system finds favour with many political thinkers, but more importantly, it’s the option chosen by the people, for the people.

Politics here is at its most competitive within parties with candidates fighting to get on the ticket and fighting off running mates for the seat. Few TDs risk missing a funeral in the constituency for fear of lost votes from mourners noting their absence, coming back like Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas Past to haunt them at the polling booth, a criticism often laid at the door of PR-STV and Irish politics in general.

“Research shows that the most important criterion for Irish voters when deciding whom to vote for is the ability of candidates to look after the needs of the local constituency,” points out Professor Gallagher on TCD’s website.

“The lesson to be drawn from this is that the electoral system should attempt to accommodate voters’ preferences, not to thwart these. TDs are there to do what the people want them to do.”

Tipp O’Neill, former speaker of the US House of Representatives, born in an area of North Cambridge, Massachusetts so full of Irish immigrants it was known as “Old Dublin” summed it up even more succinctly, his four words a good reminder to everyone eyeing this election. Ignore him at your peril.

“All politics,” declared O’Neill “is local.”