Cónal Thomas

So the city slickers up here in the RDS counting the tally for the Dublin Central by-election were quick off the mark.

There was people here before nine o'clock, counters were sorting through boxes, the count staff here, they were opening envelopes, they were getting everything sorted and things were on the rails very early on.

And then the tally, men and women came in, surrounded the barriers here where the votes are counted and got to the tally work very early on.

I think we had a tally, a very credible 100% tally by midday, which showed the Social Democrats candidate, Daniel Ennis, coming out on top.

And now we're seeing we've had two to three counts come through here now with a host of kind of, for want of a better word, random independents who only achieved essentially a handful of votes, maybe 100 between about four or five of them and the AIM2 candidates.

They were excluded early on and their votes distributed.

As you can imagine, with those kind of eclectic election of candidates, it didn't really go in one direction.

Exactly.

So it was a scattergun transfer on that first count being distributed there.

And then we saw the Fianna Fáil candidate, John Stevens, who is a sitting councillor, first time councillor, being excluded the next time around, as you will imagine.

you know, points for whoever guesses this, a lot of his transfers went to Ray McAdam, the Fianna Gael candidate and current Lord Mayor of Dublin, sitting Dublin City Councillor, and pushed him up the ranks.

But that's likely to be kind of the end of any good news around the Fianna Gael candidate.

So as it stands at the moment, and I suppose this is probably the way it's going to shake out in terms of one and two, even as we get closer to the end of the night, it's likely to be Daniel Ennis from the Social Democrats is going to be

the elected candidate here, followed by Sinn Féin's Janice Boylan looking like she's going to miss out.

There's about 500 to 600 votes in the difference here.

But we're seeing when you look at those ballots being opened, Conal, throughout the day here, you're seeing that Daniel Ennis is a very transfer friendly vote.

And also he'll benefit a lot from the fact that the Green Party's candidate, Janet Horner, has put in quite a stellar performance.

Now,

Now her party will say that we in the media underestimated her.

I suppose we can only go on past performance and in the last general election the Green Party were trounced for their part in the last coalition being reduced to just one TD.