Close to 700 candidates -- 686 or 687 if the Ceann Comhairle is included -- have been nominated to contest the upcoming general election, including sitting TDs, senators and councillors, former TDs and other people who have previously held electoral office as well as a number of first-time candidates, writes Dr Adrian Kavanagh of the Geography Department.

    All have either been selected by parties to contest the general election or, in the case of non-party candidates, have declared an intention to contest the upcoming election.

    So, what do we know about the candidate selection trends? Here are five takeaways.

    More women candidates than at any other time in the history of the State

    Given that the gender quota is increasing to 40% for this election, this is perhaps not that surprising, but the extent of the increase may well be greater than might have been anticipated. 215 female candidates have been selected to run in the general election by the different political parties or 41.7% of all political party candidates.  The overall number of selected/declared female candidates, as of now, stands at 246, marking an increase of 84, or 52%, on the previous record level of 162 at the 2016 General Election.

    The Green Party and Aontú have selected more female candidates than male candidates, but all of the nine larger parties have achieved the 40% gender quota target.

    Party by party graph view of female candidates displaying the quota percentages of females running in 2024

    At the 2016 and 2020 elections, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael struggled to achieve the 30% gender quota target. Both often had to revert to adding extra female candidates, with many being added almost at the last minute to reach the quota. Many of these were untried in electoral terms, to the extent that it might be argued that some could have been almost viewed as "paper candidates".

    Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have generally managed this time around to remain on target to reach the gender quota target, despite this increasing from 30% to 40%, as constituency-level selections have progressed. Both parties achieved the gender quota target, although female candidate levels for other parties, such as the Green Party and Aontú (as noted already), as well as People Before Profit-Solidarity and the Social Democrats, are higher.

    Some parties have seen a notable increase in their female candidacy levels at these elections, with the biggest increases being associated with Aontú (as of now, seeing an increase of 16.5% relative to their female candidacy level at the 2020 election), the Green Party (12.5%), Fine Gael (10.8%) and Fianna Fáil (10.0%). The female candidacy level for the Social Democrats has fallen by 8.8% relative to their 2020 level, but this does reflect, in part, the party's very high female candidacy level (55.0%) at the 2020 General Election.

    graph containing the change in female candidacy levels relative to the General Election in 2020

    No party will run enough candidates to allow them form a single party government

    The two traditional larger parties that used to dominate the Irish political system for most of the State's history, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, now tend to run fewer candidates than they did in the 1900s. This reflects the increased levels of political fragmentation that have been part and parcel of Irish politics over the last two decades. What is striking about the 2024 General Election is that this will be the first time in the history of the State that no party will run enough candidates to form a single party government if all/most were successful and this will be the first time that this has happened in the history of the State.

    Graph showing the total number of candidates running in the 2024 Election and comparing to the Majority needed

    The last single party government in Ireland left power in 1989, but over the following decades either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael – and usually both parties – tended to run a large enough number of candidates at general election contests to ensure they could form a single party government if all, or even most, of their candidates were elected.

    Even in the last three general elections, when the combined vote share of these parties was much lower than in previous decades, Fine Gael ran enough candidates to be able to form a single party government if all/most of these had been successful, while Fianna Fáil also did so for the 2020 election.

    For this general election, however, both Fine Gael (80) and Fianna Fáil (83) are some distance short of the number (87) needed to be able form a single party government in the next (174-seat) Dáil. While Sinn Féin will run more candidates than they did in 2020 (71), their number of candidates also falls well short of the number needed to form a single party government.

    The rise of 'New Irish' candidates

    New Irish candidates – which I will take here to mean candidates who were born outside the Republic of Ireland and did not attain Irish citizenship until some years after they moved to Ireland – have been a feature of local election contests over the past few decades. This year's local election contests saw a record number of New Irish candidates - and indeed a record number of successful candidates.

    However, these candidates have not been a feature of general election contests up to now. This, I suspect, is mainly down to the fact that the right to vote in these contests is limited to Irish and British citizens, aged 18 and over, who are resident in the Republic of Ireland, whereas the right to vote in local election contests is open to all who are resident in the Republic of Ireland and who are aged 18, and over.

    Some New Irish candidates did contest past general elections as independent candidates, but achieved little in the way of success in recent years. One of the most high profile of these candidates was former Laois county councillor, Rotimi Adebari, who won 628 first preference votes in Laois-Offaly at the 2011 election. Of course, Mossajee Bhamjee won a seat for the Labour Party in Clare at the 1992 election.

    This year’s election, however, sees a number of New Irish candidates being selected by political parties. Cllr Helen Ogbu will contest Galway West for the Labour Party, for instance, while Monaa K Sood (Kildare South), Carol Okeke (Longford-Westmeath) and Monica Oikeh (Cork South-Central) are contesting the election for the Green Party,  and Manju Devi is contesting Dublin Fingal East as a Fianna Fáil candidate and Mehdi Özçınar is running for Sinn Féin in Cork East.

    There are going to be some very long ballot papers

    There often tended to be very notable differences in terms of the number of candidates running in different constituencies. Urban constituencies often tend to have slightly larger numbers due to the larger number of political parties/groupings that tend to contest these as compared with the more rural constituencies, and the number of candidates is often, but not exclusively, related to the number of seats being contested in a constituency.

    At the 2020 election, 20 candidates contested the Wicklow constituency, while only 9 candidates contested the Cork North-West and Meath West constituencies. The degree of variation between the constituencies with the biggest and smallest number of candidates was even greater at the 2016 election, with 21 candidates contesting Dublin South-West and only six candidates contesting the Laois constituency.

    Given that there is a record number of candidates contesting the upcoming election, it is not surprising that there is an overall increase in the numbers of candidates contesting different constituencies. Eight constituencies will have twenty, or more, candidates contesting these, while the average number of candidates per constituency is 16. Louth is the constituency with the most candidates, with a record-equalling 24 candidates, just ahead of Cork South-Central (22) and Cork North-Central, while the newly created Wicklow-Wexford constituency (10) will have the lowest number of candidates.

    What is especially interesting about this election is the fact that the average number of candidates running in the rural constituencies (15.81) is higher than the average number running in the Dublin constituencies (15.25), with the highest average number regionally being associated with Connacht-Ulster (16.57).

    A large number of political parties will contest this election

    In contrast with countries using first-past-the-post electoral systems – the US with just the Republicans and Democrats being a very obvious example here – Ireland's PR-STV electoral system allows smaller parties and independents the chance of representation, especially in areas/constituencies where that party’s support is especially strong (and where they also might be in a position to avail of vote transfers).

    The increased levels of political fragmentation in the Republic of Ireland over the past number of decades – contrasting with the 1969 election in which all, bar one, of the seats were won by either Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Labour (and no other party won a seat at the 1969, 1973 and 1977 elections) – has, in turn, seen an increase in the number of parties winning seats in Dáil Éireann.

    The number of officially registered political parties that are represented in Dail Éireann spiked over the past year. The creation of Independent Ireland, which drew three non-party Dáil Éireann into their ranks, means there are now 10 political parties represented in the Dáil or 11, if People Before Profit and Solidarity were listed as separate parties.

    The overall increase in the number of political parties in the Dáil is also reflected in an overall increase in the number of officially registered political parties, with a number of new parties being added to the official Register of Political Parties in the months leading up to June’s local elections. There are now 30 parties on this official list and 21 of these parties will be running candidates in the upcoming general election, although some will be running a very small number of candidates and some are just running one candidate.

    In addition to this, there is, of course, a large number of non-party candidates contesting the upcoming general election. 131 non-party candidates contested the 2020 election, while 163 contested the 2016 election and 197 contested the 2011 election. The overall trend across the previous two elections amounted to a decline in the number of non-party candidates, although the 2011 number marked very large increase on the number of non-party candidates who contested the 2007 election (107 candidates).

    The overall increase in the number of smaller political parties, especially across the last decade, may well be absorbing a number of people who may have otherwise decided to run as non-party candidates if these parties did not exist. That being said, however, this year sees an overall increase in the number of non-party candidates relative to the 2016 and 2020 elections (albeit not reaching the very high 2011 level), with 172 non-party candidates running in the 2024 General Election.  
     
    Adrian Kavanagh’s elections analysis website (adriankavanaghelections.org) includes a full, constituency-level, listing of the candidates who will be contesting the 2024 General Election, as well as other articles analysing the upcoming election and previous electoral contests.

    An earlier version of this article was published on the RTÉ Brainstorm website on 8 November 2024.