The Irish Party System Sistemul Partidelor Politice în Irlanda

Assistant Lecturer Javier Ruiz MARTÍNEZ

Fco. Javier Ruiz Martínez: Assistant Lecturer of Polics and Public Administration. Department of

Politics and Sociology, University Carlos III Madrid (Spain). Since September 2001. Lecturer of “European

Union” and “Spanish Politics”. University Studies Abroad Consortium (Madrid).

Ph.D. Thesis "Modernisation, Changes and Development in the Irish Party System, 1958-96",

(European joint Ph.D. degree).

Interests and activities: Steering Committee member of the Spanish National Association of

Political Scientists and Sociologists; Steering committee member of the European Federation of Centres

and Associations of Irish Studies, EFACIS; Member of the Political Science Association of Ireland;

Founder of the Spanish-American Association of the University of Limerick (Éire) in 1992; User level in

the command of Microsoft Office applications, graphics (Harvard Graphics), databases (Open Access)

SPSSWIN and Internet applications.

Abstract: The Irish Party System has been considered a unique case among the European party systems. Its singularity is based in the freezing of its actors. Since 1932 the three main parties has always gotten the same position in every election. How to explain this and which consequences produce these peculiarities are briefly explained in this article.

Rezumat: Sistemul Irlandez al Partidelor Politice a fost considerat un caz unic între sistemele partidelor politice europene. Singularitatea sa este bazată pe menţinerea aceloraşi actori. Din 1932, primele trei partide politice ca importanţă au câştigat aceeaşi poziţie la fiecare scrutin electoral. Cum se explică acest lucru şi ce consecinţe produc aceste aspecte, se descrie pe larg în acest articol.

At the end of the 1950s the term ‘system’ began to be used in Political Science coming from the natural and physical Sciences. It was David Easton who first defined the theory of systems applied to the Social Sciences. A political system is ‘an analytical tool designed to identify those integrally related aspects of concrete social activity that can be called political’ (Easton, 1953, p.61) and therefore it is part of the social system. Likewise, Easton identified the central question of Political Science: how do the political systems persist and how do they change and adapt to the changes of the environment (Easton, 1965, Ch. 3)? The party system is one of the subsystems that structure the political life. It ‘is a pluralistic system of parts that forcibly express the opinion of the governed’ (Sartori, 1976, p. 29). Defining the concept ‘political party’ is not an easy matter. Indeed it has changed throughout the centuries and it has not been applied to the same kind of relatively-organised groups of people. We will use the concept related to the democratic systems of government, since this is what really concerns us here. A political party is an organisation which is mainly characterised by competing for votes in the electoral processes (Panebianco, 1989). It is important to focus on the idea of organisation, because an organisation is also a type of system in itself. Therefore, inside a political party certain processes are taking part, through which political demands (inputs) become public policies (outputs). We will call these inputs ideological demands and individual demands, and their corresponding outputs collective incentives (eg. a reform on taxation) and selective incentives (eg. a ministerial appointment) (Panebianco,1989, Ch 1).

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As an organization, a political party will be first interested in surviving. In order to attain such a goal there must be an inner balance between both inputs and outputs. Any imbalance will lead either to the split of the organization or to its extinction. Logically, political parties do not continuously maintain the same level of inner balance. This depends on both the inner changes in the power structures of the organization and the dynamics of the party system which they form part of, that is, the formation of and participation in government. Finally, parties as well as party systems are very sensitive to changes within the socio-political environment. The Irish party system has been traditionally considered as being unique among the European party systems due to the characteristics of the political parties which shaped it and also due to the nature of the period during which they were building up. We will be led, however, to speak of the ‘not so-amazing case’ of Irish system (Kissane, 1995). The analysis of the party system formation periods has been usually done following Rokkan’s theory of political cleavages (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967 and Rokkan, 1969). According to this, it is not easy to say which was the cleavage from which the Irish parties originated. We can identify two different moments in the building of the Irish party system. First, we find the pre-independence period. The political arena was divided between those seeking independence from the United Kingdom and those looking for economic class balance. Since the former overwhelmed in numbers the latter, the independence issue became the shaping cleavage. Thereby, we can identify a predominant centre-periphery cleavage moulding the system in this first historical moment. The main actor of this time was Sinn Féin which filled the whole independentist movement. Once independence was obtained (1921), the partition of the island, and the way in which this independence has been reached, became the most important issue in the political agenda. Sinn Féin suffered an imbalance which led it to split into two groups, one supporting the Irish Free State Treaty and the other rejecting it. Eventually this exacerbated crisis of collective incentives in the predominant organisation produced a civil war (1922-1923). The group supporting the Irish Free State Treaty abandoned Sinn Féin and founded Cumann na nGaedheal (1922), later called Fine Gael (1933). The other group retained the name of Sinn Féin and kept themselves out of constitutional politics. Otherwise, at 1927 Sinn Féin had split again and a group led by Eamon de Valera left the party to create Fianna Fáil and move into the constitutional arena. This new party, in the 1927 elections, succeed in coming second to Cumann na nGaedheal. From 1927 onwards these two political parties have always occupied the heartland of Irish party system. They have also been the parties which have obtained the most votes and by the 1932 elections Fianna Fáil had moved into the top position which it retained after this. According to Rokkan’s theory and limiting ourselves to the civil war, we could conclude that the cleavage from which the party system emerged is a non-conventional one. But if we focus on the electoral dimension the former conclusion does not seem to hold. Until 1927 when Fianna Fáil first entered electoral competition, the ‘Irish electorate were far from unanimous that the treaty issue was the most important one’ (Garvin, 1977, p. 169). However, this rapidly became the issue, particularly after Fianna Fáil’s entry into the Dáil. Nevertheless, ‘the dichotomy in which (the party system) was based was less the reflection of division in the community than the cause of them’ (Chubb, 1992, p. 92). ‘Ironically it was de Valera (...) who clear-headedly perceived that the Civil war fissure, though a deep and bitter one, would not inevitably reproduce itself as the fundamental alignment in Irish politics’ (Bew et al., 1989 p. 29). After 1927 Fianna Fáil’s language increasingly focused on the economic and social themes. At the same time Cumann na nGaedheal, the party of government, evolved towards very conservative positions. In its movement towards this increasing conservatism the party of government was helped by the Labour Party. This party came from the British political tradition and has always remaind as third party. It failed to place itself as one of the dominant parties, and was not able, more importantly, to attract the electoral support of social groups traditionally attached to the labourist and socialist movements. ‘The Labour Party chose the national approach which culminated in the severing of the

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link with the Irish Trade Union Congress in 1930 to demonstrate that the party was more than a political appendage of the trade union movement’ (Bew et al., 1989, p. 36). Fianna Fáil through a very clever strategy quickly filled up the free political space left by the Labour Party. Fianna Fáil’s manifesto of June 1927 contained 12 proposals, out of an overall of 15, taken from the previous Labour Party manifestos (Mitchell, 1974, p. 224). ‘It is important to recognize that the intranationalist conflict between Fianna Fáil and the Cumann na nGaedheal was also complemented by a significant division on overall economic and social policy which acted to polarise the parties to an even greater degree’ (Mair, 1987, p. 17). The question of annuities would inspire the devotion of the socialist sympathisers within Irish society to Fianna Fáil electoral force. Fianna Fáil, from then on, would appear as the working-class’ interests defender. We could argue that, though not in a convetional way, the Irish party system also emerged from Rokkan’s economic cleavage. The economic cleavage together with the previously mentioned cleavage, the confrontation centre-periphery, shaped the party system and almost froze it from 1932 till the beginning of the 1970s. Fianna Fáil was the undefeated winner after every single election, followed without exception, by Fine Gael, which had their permanent partner, the Labour Party, who generally found itself in third position. There have been and there still are other political parties who have taken part in the Irish electoral market, but either they have disappeared after a short success (Clann na Poblachta, Clann na Talmhan) or they have remained as small parties (Democratic Left, Progressive Democrats). Nevertheless, the role of these small parties has changed very much from the 1980s onwards as we will see later. It is necessary, when speaking about the Irish electoral process and its devices of competitive election and representation to understand why the party system hardly changed over a period of fifty years. The Irish general elections are characterised by two main factors; Proportional Representation - Single Transferable Vote system and the size of the electoral constituencies. In briefly examining these two factors we will only focus on the elections to Dáil Éireann. These elections are by law required to be held at least once every five years. ‘In practice, on average, they occur about once every three years’ (Chubb, 1992, p. 97). Indirectly this process produces a government as well as a popular assembly, for the party or group or coalition of parties that wins a majority of seats thereby acquires the right to form a government. To choose their representants the citizens use an election system known as Proportional Representation by means of the Single Transferable Vote in multimember constituencies. ‘Under the Single Transferable Vote system, the elector has the opportunity to indicate a range of preferences by placing numbers opposite candidate’s names on the ballot paper. If the voter so indicates, a vote can be transferred from one candidate to another to make up that candidate’s quota (the number of votes necessary to secure election) or if, owing to the poor support given to the prior choice, that candidate is eliminated from the contest. Voters need not to vote for all the candidates, but those who do vote for more than one must number their preferences continuously (...) if the number elected at the first count is less than the number of places to be filled, as it usually is, a process of transferring votes takes place in the subsequent counts untill all the seats are filled. First, the excess votes of any candidate who has won a seat -that is, votes in excess of the quota- are distributed proportionally to the second or next available choice of the winner’s supporters. If, when no surpluses remain to be distributed, there are still seats to be filled, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his or her votes are redistributed according to the next available preferences indicated. The transfer of the excess of votes of elected candidates and of the votes of eliminated candidates continues untill all the seats are filled’(Chubb, 1992, p. 133-134). In regard to multi-member constituencies, Bunreacht na hÉireann provides that ‘no law shall be enacted whereby the number of members to be returned for any constituency shall be less than three’ (art. 16, 2, 6°), and that ‘the total number of member of Dáil Éireann shall not be fixed at less than one for each 30,000 of population, or not more than one member for each 20,000 of population’ (art.16, 2, 2°). Likewise, the Oireachtas is required to revise the constituencies ‘at least once every

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twelve years, with due regard to changes in the distribution of population’ (art. 16, 2, 4°). Successive Electoral Amendment Acts have altered the number of members and constituencies. But in general we find that the average number of the seats for constituency, over all since 1961, is four, or rather between three and five. Therefore, we are speaking in practice of small multi-member constituencies, which effects the electoral system level of proportionality. The Irish electoral system produces a very high standard of proportionality in elections (Katz, 1983, Bartolini & Mair, 1990). This means that the number of seats returned by every political party is very close to the number of first preferences, both measured in percentage, received by each one of them at the polls. High rates of proportionality have several clear effects. The most important is the stability of the party system and voting alignments. Though the opposite has been largely argued (Duverger, 1956), ‘it is clearly silly to conclude that Proportional Representation causes the multiplication of parties’ (Rae, 1971; Sartori, 1976; Bartolini & Mair, 1990; Lijphart, 1994). Moreover, ‘in most cases electoral systems function to the advantage of large established parties and to the disadvantage of the small established parties and insurgents’ (Rae, 1971, p. 169). On the other hand we have the question about the size of the constituencies. The smaller a constituency is, the less proportional the result is. Given that we concluded Irish constituencies were small, we can only argue that the effect of high rates of proportionality produced by the Single Tranferable Vote system are counterbalanced by the effect of the size of the constituencies. The small number of seats offered in most constituencies leads to clientelism. Due to the ambiguity of the Irish electoral system, voters indicate preferences for individual candidates rather than for parties as such and so may orientate only to individual candidates (Carty, 1981; p. 62, Mair, 1987, p. 61-62). Clientelism and brokerage in Irish politics would seem to underline the importance of personalistic rather than partisan links between voters and politicians (Komito, 1984). In Ireland we find two levels of party and electoral competition. ‘The voter not only must choose which party to support, if any, but also which candidate within the party to rank in the highest position’ (Mair, 1987, p. 67). Thereby, the importance of the secret garden of Politics: candidate selection procedures (Gallagher & Marsh, 1988). The logistics bias of Irish electoral behaviour is also recognizable in the nomination strategies of parties (Busteed, 1990). The high rates of proportionality and the clientelistic and localistic patterns of voting behaviour are two main factors to understand the freezing of Irish party system. A frozen party system is simply that which ‘intervenes in the political process as an independent system of channelment, propelled and maintained by its own laws of inertia’ (Sartori, 1969, p. 90). It is usually argued that the Irish party system stayed in this state till the mid-1970s. We can define the Irish party system between the mid-1930s and the mid-1970s, as a ‘predominant-party system’, that is, ‘a type of party pluralism in which -even though no alternative in office actually occurs- alternation is not ruled out and the political system provides ample opportunities for open and effective dissent, that is, for opposing the predominance of the governing party’ (Sartori, 1976, p. 200). Such alternation did actually occur (in 1948-51 and 1954-57) in the only way it could occur, by the formation of an anti-Fianna Fáil coalition. In spite of these facts, we cannot consider the Irish party system as something different than a predominant-party system, for it ‘fares better in terms of nearing or surpassing the absolute majority threshold’ (Sartori, 1976, p. 197) than the other predominant-party systems which have been studied. By the end of the 1950s, the economic crisis which has produced very high rates of unemployment and emigration obliged the Irish government to start a process of economic modernization that would lead to a socio-political modernization of Ireland. The crisis was so sharp that ‘the real question people asked in the 1950s was not whether the State should expand but whether the nation would survive’ (Breen et all., 1990, p. 35). Though it might be argued at the beginning it had no effect on politics, it would produce a complete revolution a decade later. The 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion ‘led to changes in the role of the Irish State that were revolutionary’ (Breen et all., 1990, p. 6). Indeed, we could well argue that ‘Ireland’s first pork barrel election was fought in 1951, marking economic nationalism as

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the successor to nationalism based on a self-reliant Irish identity’ (Breen et al., 1990, p. 17). The search for votes resolved less around the old issues of Nationalism and the role of the Catholic Church and more around promises of economic and social progress. ‘This was made possible both by Church and State rapprochement and by the fact that Irish electorate had never fully shared the Church’s aversion to State expansion’ (Breen et al., 1990, p. 34). The major long-term consequence of this political realignment was to establish two potential sources of parliamentary majorities: Fianna Fail and a rainbow coalition of anti-Fianna Fail parties. Moreover, Sean Lemass, under whose government the 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion had been implemented, ‘launched a drive towards social and economic reform which, inter alia, was to cement its alliance with the working class and the trade unions’ (Mair, 1987, p. 55). The 1960s reconsolidating of the traditional party system owed at least as much to the actual strategies of those parties as to any inherited legacy of the past. The effects of economic modernisation on the party system, began when Sean Lemass decided to leave the Fianna Fail leadership in the hands of Jack Lynch at the end of the 1960s. Lynch was seen by the other ex-candidates to leadership as a party caretaker. This led the party to an unprecedented lack of cohesion in government on some crucial issues. This fact produced an imbalance of selective incentives inside the party and threatened its unity, thus shaking the whole party system. ‘There was a danger perceived by some of the senior members of Fianna Fail, that the new economic policies and the economic growth associated with them, could threaten the party’s portrayal of itself as a national movement sensitive to the interests of the plain people -workers and small farmers’ (Bew et al., 1990, p. 89). Eventually this would be also perceived both by the leftist and rightist wings of the Fianna Fail’s electorate during the 1970s. This produced a crisis of Fianna Fail’s collective incentives which would lead to the breaking down of the predominant-party system pattern. The increasing dissolution of the party into rival camps threatened the party’s reputation for fundamental unity and cohesion, one of its most significant electoral resources. Charles Haughey, who later became Taoiseach, ‘came to epitomise what critics and some party members saw as the dangerously organic link between the party and the more unsavoury elements of the indigenous bourgeoisie’ (Bew et al., 1990, p. 90). The 1969 Referendum to amend the Constitution and allow the replacement of a Proportional Representation electoral system for a first-past-the-post one was perceived by the Irish electorate and especially by Fianna Fail’s electorate as a reason to believe what the critics had to say against the new Fianna Fail leaders. The immediate consequence was that the Amendment Bill was rejected and Fianna Fail lost its first national poll since 1932. Fianna Fail was shocked by an inner crisis that would lead it to the opposition bench for some years. This situation gave the chance to Fine Gael and the Labour Party to reorganize their ranks and begin a new strategy of political rapprochement. The latter had pursued an independent strategy which was accompanied by an increasingly radicalized electoral appeal between 1957 and 1973 (Gallagher, 1982). Labour had seen its electoral support growing in the 1960s, but found itself unable to translate this growth into Dáil seats. The result was the continuance of Fianna Fail in office while both Fine Gael and Labour Party grew increasingly frustrated with the persistent politics of opposition. ‘The Labour Party was obliged to revert to an alliance with Fine Gael (...) The problem with such a strategy has been that it has weakened Labour’s independent appeal’ (Mair, 1987, p. 56). Voting for Labour meant voting for Fine Gael. This strategy changed somewhat after 1982, but nevertheless, ‘Labour finds itself strategically constrained by the logistics of party competition’ (Mair, 1987, p. 57). The Labour-Fianna Fail coalition of government between 1993 and 1995 only confirms this argument. Thus, viewed as part of the left, Labour’s debility is even more evident. We could conclude saying that the inner problem of the Labour Party is the lack of collective incentives in the implementation of its government programmes, because such a coalition strategy drove it to centripetal positions, more and more distant from the social, economic and political demands of the working-class. Therefore, the Labour Party has had to face an increasing challenge coming from the left of the Irish political spectrum. ‘The small left-wing Worker’s Party (Democratic Left after 1992)

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continued to expand, and consolidated a secure parliamentary presence. This meant that Labour was increasingly obliged to compete on the left, which placed inevitable strains on its centrist coalition strategy’ (Mair, 1990b, p. 137). This could be one of the reasons for the bad results it polled in the 1997 elections. Fine Gael could be defined as the non-Fianna Fail voter’s party. At least this was its competitive strategy for many years. Otherwise, we must argue that Fine Gael’s Just Society proposals of the end of the 1960s and the period of Garret FiztGerald’s leadership marked the attempt to turn the party from its traditional conservative stance. From the beginning of the 1970s onwards, Fine Gael and Labour pursued social democratic policies with a stress on social justice, pluralism, and a controlled economy. This allowed them both to challenge for the middle ground and to provide a credible and viable alternative. ‘It was in this sense that an alternative government proved possible, that the electorate became aware of the possibility of an alternative, and that the party system changed’ (Mair, 1990b, p. 137). ‘By 1986, the party system was in flux’ (Mair, 1987, p. 217), since there was an available electorate and an increasing competitive electoral market. At the 1987 elections ‘at least one in every six voters altered their voting behaviour’ (Gallagher, 1987, p. 84). This supposed the highest rate of volatility ever scored in the Irish electoral history, and a very sharp figure for Irish volatility standards. It was, however, the split in Fianna Fail that led to the creation of the Progressive Democrats at the end of 1985 which became the catalyst of change at this particular time. The failure of Fianna Fail to win a parliamentary majority in 1987 led to an unstable period of minority government followed by the unsuccessful attempt in 1989 to mend the situation. These failures finally induced its leaders to abandon a half-century-old policy of going it alone and to enter into coalition with the Progressive Democrats. ‘At last, this key distinguishing feature of the Irish party system may have become a matter of historical record rather than a feature of contemporary reality’ (Mair, 1990a, p. 213). We think so, and from then on Irish politics has fitted more easily into the theory and practice of coalition governments than they had hitherto. We can conclude saying that by the 1970s ‘nothing was the same’; the fact that Fianna Fáil was unable to get a stable electoral majority, the continuity of the Labour Party-Fine Gael coalition governments and the split in Final Fail which led to the appearance of Progressive Democrats all go to show this. The balance inside Fianna Fáil was very precarious in 1985. A crisis of selective incentives caused some of its TDs to leave the party and found one of their own, the Progressive Democrats. Given the relative electoral weakness of Fianna Fáil, Haughey was obliged to take them into account in 1987 in order to form a parliamentary coalition majority. The predominant-party system pattern was definitively in ruins. The subsequent elections have only gone to show this. The government between the Labour Party and Fianna Fail was the clearest indication that the old mould was not working anymore. The 1997 elections’ results and the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats coalition government demonstrate this. The previous confrontation, Fianna Fail against a rainbow coalition of anti-Fianna Fail parties, has disappeared. There still persists a centripetal competition in the electoral market, kept up by a sort of bipolar subsystem of alternative coalitions. However, it seems that there is no going- back to the predominant-party system (Mair, 1990, p. 129-142). On the contrary, now we can argue that since the end of the 1970s a new party system pattern has been taking shape in Irish Politics. We can call this new pattern, a moderate multipartism system, that is, a party system ‘characterized by a relatively small ideological distance among its relevant parties, a bipolar coalitional configuration and centripetal competition’ (Sartori, 1976, p.179). As we have seen, it did not happen because of the shocking ideological changes occurring in the political parties. But, indeed, ‘even a small ideological space allows, along other dimensions, for a relatively high fragmentation’ (Sartori, 1976, p. 287) of the party system. Apart from changes induced by party competition, doubtless growing industrialization, urbanization and secularization, that is, the processes associated with modernization have definitively contributed to transform the party system

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and the parties themselves. Ireland has just begun to adopt the pace of party system transformation which many other advanced European societies have taken.

APPENDIX: General Elections in the Republic of Ireland (Dáil) from 1922 to 1997: First preference votes (percentages) and seats (in brackets).

Fianna Fine Labour Republican Progressive other parties Fáil Gael Party Parties * Democrats ** 1922 21.3 (36) 38.5 (58) 21.3 (17) ------18.4 (17) 1923 27.4 (44) 39.0 (63) 10.6 (14) ------23.0 (32) June 1927 26.1 (44) 27.4 (47) 12.5 (22) 3.6 (5) --- 30.3 (35) Sept 1927 35.2 (57) 38.7 (62) 9.1 (13) ------17.1 (21) 1932 44.5 (72) 35.3 (57) 7.7(7) ------12.6 (17) 1933 49.7 (77) 30.5 (48) 5.7 (8) ------14.2 (20) 1937 45.2 (69) 34.8 (48) 10.3 (13) ------9.7 (8) 1938 51.9 (77) 33.3 (45) 10.0 (9) ------4.7 (7) 1943 41.9 (67) 23.1 (32) 15.7 (17) ------19.3 (22) 1944 48.9 (76) 20.5 (30) 8.8 (8) ------21.9 (24) 1948 41.9 (68) 19.8 (31) 8.7 (14) 13.3 (10) --- 16.3 (24) 1951 46.3 (69) 25.8 (40) 11.4 (16) 4.1 (2) --- 12.5 (20) 1954 43.4 (65) 32.0 (50) 12.1 (19) 4.0 (3) --- 8.6 (10) 1957 48.3 (78) 26.6 (40) 9.1 (12) 7.0 (5) --- 9.0 (12) 1961 43.8 (70) 32.0 (47) 11.6 (16) 4.2 (1) --- 8.3 (10) 1965 47.7 (72) 34.1 (47) 15.4 (22) 0.8 (1) --- 2.1 (2) 1969 45.7 (75) 34.1 (50) 17.0 (18) 0.0 (-) --- 3.2 (1) 1973 46.2 (69) 35.1 (54) 13.7 (19) 2.1 (-) --- 3.0 (2) 1977 50.6 (84) 30.5 (43) 11.6 (17) 1.7 (-) --- 5.6 (4) 1981 45.3 (78) 36.5 (65) 9.9 (15) 2.5 (2) --- 6.1 (8) Febr 1982 47.3 (81) 37.3 (63) 9.1 (15) 1.0 (-) --- 5.3 (7) Nov 1982 45.2 (75) 39.2 (70) 9.4 (16) 0.0 (-) --- 6.3 (5) 1987 44.1 (81) 27.1 (51) 6.4 (12) 1.9 (-) 11.8 (14) 8.7 (8) 1989 44.1 (77) 29.3 (55) 9.5 (15) 1.2 (-) 5.5 (6) 10.4 (13) 1992 39.1 (67) 24.5 (45) 19.3 (33) 2.3 (-) 4.7 (10) 10.2 (11) 1997 39. 3 (77) 27.9 (54) 10.4 (17) 2.5 (1) 4.6 (4) 14.3 (13)

Notes:

* "Republican Parties" includes the (Official) Sinn Féin (1927 and 1973-77) , Clann na Poblachta (1948-65), Aontacht Éireann (1973) and the (Provisionnal) Sinn Fein (1981-97).

** "other parties" includes the Farmers’ Party (1922, 7.8%-7TDs; 1923, 12.1%-15TDs; June1927, 8.9%-11TDs; Sept1927, 6.4%- 6TDs; 1932, 2.1%- 3TDs), the National Centre Party (1933, 9.2%-11TDs), Clann na Talmhan (1943, 10.3%-13TDs; 1944, 10.8%-11TDs; 1948, 5.5%-7TDs; 1951, 2.9%-6TDs; 1954, 3.1%-5TDs; 1957, 2.4%-3TDs; 1961, 1.5%-1TD), the National Labour (1944, 2.7%-4TDs; 1948, 2.6%-5TDs), the National Progressive Democrats (1961, 1.0%-2TDs), and the Green Party (1987, 0.4%-0TDs; 1989, 1.5%-1TD; 1992, 2.8%-1TD; 1997, 2.5%-2TDs), as well as other small political groups and independents. Since 1981, Sinn Féin the Workers' Party and its successors, the Workers' Party (1981, 1,7%-1TD; Febr1982, 2,3%-3TDs; Nov1982, 3,3%-2TDs; 1987, 5.0%-6TDs; 1989, 5.5%-6TDs; 1992, 0.7%-1TD) and offshoots, Democratic Left (1992, 2.8%-5TDs; 1997, 2.5%-4TDs), are also included in "other parties".

(Source: data from PSAI Press).

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References

1. BEW, P.; The Dynamics of Irish Politics, 1989 London: Lawrence & Wishart HAZELKORN, E.; PATTERSON, H.

2. BUSTEED, M. A. Voting Behaviour in the Republic of Ireland: A Geographical Perspective, 1990 Claredon Press: Oxford

3. CARTY, R. K. Party and Parish Pump: Electoral Politics in Ireland, 1981 Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press

4. CHUBB, B. The Government and Politics of Ireland, 3rd ed. 1992 London: Longman

5. GALLAGHER, M. Political Parties In the Republic of Ireland, 1985 Manchester: Manchester University Press

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