Kildare North

Profile

Province: Rest of Leinster

Seats: 5 (+1 from redraw)

Current TDs: 1 FG, 1 SF, 1 FF, 1 SD

Projection: 1 FG, 1 SF, 2 FF, 1 SD

Analysis

August 2023 (redraw)

Kildare North gains a handful of EDs around Naas from Kildare South, with a relatively small population. The constituency also gains a seat, which I expect will be fiercely contested based on current polling numbers.

If you saw my preliminary projections, I had the Social Democratss in a second seat here. After revisiting the numbers I found the error that led to this – but I don’t think it’s implausible; Catherine Murphy will cruise past a quota, they have several councillors and are transfer friendly. Of course there are arguments against as well – how much of this is down to Murphy’s personal support, and how a party with almost zero experience of managing a vote split ^{(as far as I’m aware their only experience of this was the North Inner City LEA debacle in 2019)} pulls it off, especially where the margins will be very fine.

However, the fact is Fianna Fáil should be favoured to take this seat, but there are some things to consider. Firstly, there’s no guarantee Frank O’Rourke – who came fifth in 2020 – runs again; a less established candidate may prove weaker. Both the Soc Dems (as above) and Sinn Féin (perhaps more realistically) could contend with a second candidate – and the balance would ultimately come down to transfers, which as I have said many times, are very hard to project.

January 2021

Not a whole lot to note here – the SDs, SF and FG are currently locks to keep their seats. The one potentially interesting piece is if FF’s polling continues to decline and they run two candidates again; at that point a second FG candidate would enter into play. However if FF keep their heads and only run one, it would take a major polling shift to indicate any change in this constituency.