DUBLIN — Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald topped the poll and won easy reelection Saturday in her Dublin heartland — but Ireland’s most famous gangland kingpin is poised to win an opposition seat right beside her.
That eye-popping outcome from the Dublin Central constituency illustrates how badly fractured the political landscape here is becoming, how deeply alienated many voters are with established parties — and how difficult forming a stable new government will be.
Full results from Ireland’s parliamentary election won’t come until Sunday. But already it’s becoming clear that, despite McDonald’s personal triumph, her Irish republican party nationwide has fallen short once again in its efforts to overpower the center-ground parties that lead Ireland’s current government, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
It will almost certainly be those two parties, not Sinn Féin, that lead the next coalition government, too. But they will need help to command a majority in what will be a cacophonic parliament rife with feuding factions and loose-cannon independents.
A beaming McDonald faced a media crush at the Dublin Royal Society count center, where Sinn Féin activists cheered with gusto as she was declared the top vote-winner for one of the four parliamentary seats in Dublin Central, which she has represented since 2011.
It is the country’s most ethnically diverse constituency and one of its most impoverished. A year ago, it was wracked by racist rioting that helped to knock the immigrant-friendly Sinn Féin from atop the polls.
“The idea of five more years of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is not a good outcome for our society. I don’t think our society can endure another five years of that chaos and failure,” said McDonald, whose party nonetheless lacks any coalition partner that would make a Sinn Féin breakthrough into government a reality.
That’s partly because Sinn Féin’s potential allies in the wider left have been splintered as never before into several small parties. They refuse to cooperate with each other, never mind Sinn Féin or other big parties.
Jennifer Kavanagh, a political commentator and law lecturer at Waterford Institute of Technology, said Ireland’s left had become as absurdly split as the Judean factions in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
“None of them are uniting against the Romans. They’re all fighting against each other,” she said.
Non-party newcomers have sought to cut through that complexity with almost politics-free campaigns — none more bluntly expressed, or unsettling to the establishment, than Gerry “The Monk” Hutch.
Hutch is arguably Ireland’s most romanticized criminal with a reputation as a modern Robin Hood. He was a central figure — though acquitted last year of murder — in an international gangland feud that left 18 dead, including his brother and nephew. He’s currently on bail awaiting trial in Spain on money-laundering charges.
Now he’s on a clear-cut course to win a seat in Dublin Central after running a ramshackle campaign waged mostly from his popular TikTok account. He’s appealed for votes while sitting in the boxing club he funds and behind the wheel of his campaign van, with Thin Lizzy’s “Waiting for an Alibi” playing in the background.
While Hutch’s vote-winning prowess has come as a surprise to many, it didn’t to Gary Gannon, a Dublin Central lawmaker who successfully defended his own parliamentary seat as he competed against Hutch.
Gannon, whose Social Democratic Party is one of those small left-wing voices struggling for political relevance in opposition, said the out-of-nowhere votes for Hutch represent “a cry for help, an expression of genuine pain, towards a state that’s neglected them.”
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