Alan Barrett

Normally, you would see the support hemorrhaging from government parties and spilling over to the main opposition party.

That doesn't seem to be happening here.

But the specific point that Kevin Cunningham is making in his article is that when they ask questions of the independent Ireland and drill down into the results, the antagonism towards the government amongst the independent Ireland and AIM2P just seems to be particularly strong.

which suggests then that as things unfold over time, the probability of that group moving back to Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is probably limited.

Again, a host of other issues, though.

You know, one of the questions that's raised in another article in the papers today is where does this place Sinn Féin in terms of potential coalition partners?

Well, there's a sort of a curious result.

Obviously, if we go back to what became known as the Connolly Coalition, there did seem to be a sense that there was a coalition of partners on the left beginning where Sinn Féin, possibly Labour and the Social Democrats.

But again, if you look at the poll numbers, the group that seemed to be sort of most in favour of the protesters are fitting into the Sinn Féin, Independent Ireland and Ain't Too Brackets group.

whereas there was less support for the... For the protests.

The protests, exactly, amongst the others.

So you have this sort of schism, in a sense, sort of building where people who would have been thought to be the natural partners for Sinn Féin may no longer be the case.

And I think it's actually Eoghan O'Malley himself makes reference to something we haven't talked about for a long time, which is the possibility of a Sinn Féin Fianna Fáil coalition after the next election.

So huge amounts of movement, a huge amount of things happening.

And can I also say the other thing that's lurking in the background, of course, then is the by-elections.

And it's very difficult not to read the polls in the context of the by-elections and then the implications for the possibility of success, for example, of independent Ireland in Galway West.

And then where Sinn Féin will exactly, because again, normally at this stage in a political cycle, the main opposition party would be expected to be doing extremely well in by-elections if not winning them.

There seems to be a consensus that if Sinn Féin were to lose both, that that would be very, very damaging for them at this stage.

Shane, you were looking at that piece too.

Yeah, I mean, I find a lot of the discussion kind of troubling.