Seanad vocational panels – some calculations

[Note: Updated 28 Feb to correct an error in the Sinn Féin figures. Thanks to Roscommon21 on Twitter for spotting it.]

Nominations for the vocational panels in the Seanad general election close on Monday. The voters are the combined sets of: members of the city and county councils, members of the outgoing Seanad, and members of the Dáil.

My calculation is that the electorate will be 1,161 voters. It could possibly a few under that, but I expect that all council seats that became vacant with the Dáil election will be filled and that there will be no other vacant seats in any of the councils. There are eight vacancies in the Seanad following the Dáil election.

The 1,161 voters consist of the following:

• 949 councillors
• 160 TDs
• 52 senators.

I don’t know how many councillors have resigned from their party or joined a party since the election last year, so I assume the numbers are as they were then. (I’m using this wikipedia page as the source for the party numbers.) I will list ten ‘parties’, reflecting the nine Dáil parties plus ‘Independents and others’ (and counting as part of the ‘Independents and others’ members of parties that had one councillor elected).

	Cllr	TD	Sen	Total
FF	279	38	12	329
FG	255	35	17	307
SF	81	37	4	122
Lab	57	6	2	65
GP	49	12	1	62
SD	19	6	0	25
S/PBP	11	5	0	16
Aon	4	0	0	4
I4C	3	0	0	3
Ind+Ors	185	7	7	192

There are five panels, and each voter gets a vote in each panel — essentially five elections in parallel. The number of seats on the panels varies, so the quota will vary. The number of seats on each panel is set out in the following table. Also shown is the number votes that a ‘quota’ on each panel will be, assuming all 1,161 voters cast a valid vote. (That is unlikely to be achieved. In 2016, 17 of the voters managed to make a mistake in returning their papers in accordance with the rules, and further 3 managed to spoil their papers — 4 spoilt in the case of the Cultural and Educational Panel.)  I’ve put the word quota in inverted commas here because the way in which the quota on a Seanad panel is calculated is different from the way it is done in a Dáil election, and fractions matter in transfers — but the details of that are for another day.)

Panel	Seats	“Quota”
Agriculture	11	96.8
Labour	11	96.8
Industry	9	116.1
Administrative	7	145.1
Cultural	5	193.5

Combining the number of votes each party has with the quotas for each panel gives the following

	Votes party has	Quotas party has
		Agr	Lab	Ind	Adm	Cul
FF	329	3.40	3.40	2.83	2.27	1.70
FG	307	3.17	3.17	2.64	2.12	1.59
SF	122	1.26	1.26	1.05	0.84	0.63
Lab	65	0.67	0.67	0.56	0.45	0.34
GP	62	0.64	0.64	0.53	0.43	0.32
SD	25	0.26	0.26	0.22	0.17	0.13
S/PBP	16	0.17	0.17	0.14	0.11	0.08
Aon	4	0.04	0.04	0.03	0.03	0.02
I4C	3	0.03	0.03	0.03	0.02	0.02
Ind+Ors	192	1.98	1.98	1.65	1.32	0.99

The first point we can see from this is that:

• Fianna Fáil is guaranteed 11 seats.
• Fine Gael is guaranteed 11 seats.
• Sinn Féin is guaranteed 3 seats . [Sinn Féin is guaranteed 4 seats and so close to a fifth that it is almost guaranteed to get it.]
• The Social Democrats, Solidarity/People Before Profit, Aontú and Independents 4 Change do not have enough to make a seat. Even if they were to all back an agreed candidate on any panel, that candidate would still need to get most of their votes from others in order to get elected.

That leaves 18 [16] seats on the panels where the destination is not assured, where the votes of the smaller parties and independents will decide the matter.

What could happen with those seats?

First, Labour and the Green Party have more than half a quota each on three panels and almost half a quota each on a fourth panel, so they could do a deal and vote for a Labour candidate on each of two panels and for a Green Party candidate on each of the other two panels and be sure of three of those being elected, with the fourth almost certain to make it. That would leave 14 [12] seats to be decided.

Second, the ‘independents and others’ would in theory be guaranteed four seats and would almost be certain to get three others if they were to act in concert. They would probably secure a further seat on the Industrial panel if the Social Democrats and Solidarity-People Before Profit voters were to add their combined one-third of a quota to the 1.65 of a quota that I’ve classified as ‘independents and others’.

In the 2016 Seanad elections, four independents were elected: one each on the Agricultural (Victor Boyhan), Labour (Gerard Craughwell), Industrial (Frances Black) and Administrative (John Dolan) panels. Two of these had had notable roles outside of politics before their election: Frances Black in traditional music, and John Dolan in disability activism. One had been a politician since the 1990s: Boyhan. And the fourth was, well, somewhere between the two: Craughwell. Repetition of that allocation of four seats to independents would leave 10 [8] seats up for grabs. I have no idea how they will fall.