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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 3, 2026

Winners, losers and a PM on the brink - what to expect in next week's elections

Ireland is preparing for two Dáil by-elections on May 22, 2026, in Dublin Central and Galway West, following the vacancies created by Catherine Connolly's election as President of Ireland and Paschal Donohoe's resignation from Fine Gael. The elections arrive at a politically sensitive moment for Taoiseach Micheál Martin, whose authority has been weakened after he backed former Dublin GAA manager Jim Gavin for a candidacy that collapsed amid revelations about Gavin's personal financial issues. Martin has nonetheless restated his mandate to lead Fianna Fáil into the next general election.

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⚡Both sides have significant internal splits on this story. Arguments below represent the dominant positions — see The Divide below for the full picture.

A sitting Prime Minister facing potential electoral defeat raises the fundamental question: when voters turn on an incumbent, are they rejecting a failed record or punishing necessary but unpopular choices? Next week's results will show which interpretation wins.

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Gavin fiasco reveals leadership competence
Conservative
The Gavin debacle isn't bad luck — it's diagnostic. When a Taoiseach personally champions a candidate who collapses under basic vetting, you're watching a leadership culture that prioritises the big gesture over institutional competence. Martin owned that failure by standing in front of it.
Liberal
You're right that Martin owned it, but you've misread what it reveals. He didn't reach for Gavin because of poor vetting culture — he reached for him because substance wasn't available. When your housing record leaves you nothing to sell, you go hunting for star power. The vetting failure was a symptom; the record is the disease.
Conservative
If the record is the disease, the leadership is the immune system that failed to respond to it. A party with a coherent governing identity doesn't need a celebrity candidate in a constituency it once owned — the reach for Gavin confirmed that Fianna Fáil has neither the record nor the narrative to run on.
Liberal
Agreed — and that's precisely why losing Dublin Central to Sinn Féin or a left independent won't just be a bad headline. It'll be a fifteen-year absence extended, in a constituency that's handed them the bill for exactly the governing failures you're describing.
Structural by-election pattern versus specific verdict
Conservative
Government parties have won 3 of 25 by-elections in thirty years — none since 2014. That pattern has outlasted multiple Taoisigh, multiple economic cycles, multiple coalitions. No individual leader has cracked it. Martin saying 'I have a mandate' into an RTÉ microphone doesn't change arithmetic that durable.
Liberal
That pattern actually cuts against your argument. If every government loses by-elections regardless of who's in power or what they've done, then two lost seats proves nothing specific about Martin's record or this coalition's failures — it's generic incumbency noise. You can't simultaneously claim the pattern is structural and that these results are a damning verdict on this government.
Conservative
Twelve consecutive years with zero wins stops being structural noise and starts being a cumulative signal. The pattern doesn't exonerate Martin — it indicts every government that kept the same housing and planning failures in place across the full thirty-year run.
Liberal
Exactly — and that's the progressive case in full. When 'anyone but them' persists across multiple governments, multiple crises, multiple Taoisigh, voters aren't just venting. They're telling you the problem is systemic, and the system is one this coalition has been part of for most of that period.
Dublin Central's fifteen-year constituency absence
Conservative
Fianna Fáil hasn't held a seat in Dublin Central since Bertie Ahern walked out the door in 2011. Fifteen years. If that seat falls to Sinn Féin or a left independent on May 22, the question isn't about one bad night — it's about whether Fianna Fáil retains any organisational capacity to fight a general election in urban Ireland.
Liberal
Fifteen years of absence is exactly the right frame, but you're drawing the wrong conclusion from it. Fianna Fáil didn't lose Dublin Central because of weak organisation — they lost it because a teacher in Cabra or a nurse in Phibsborough can't afford to rent an apartment in the constituency where they work. Organisation can't fix a record that voters experience every time they open a letting app.
Conservative
Both things are true, and you've just made the conservative case for why Fianna Fáil needs to get the policy right, not just find better candidates. But a party that can't hold urban seats can't form governments — and a weakened Fianna Fáil doesn't strengthen the centre-right, it fragments it in ways that benefit exactly the populist alternatives neither of us should want.
Liberal
The fragmentation risk is real, but notice what you're conceding: the coalition's failure on housing hasn't just cost them votes, it's destabilised the very electoral coalition you're depending on to keep the populist right out. That's not an argument for defending the record — it's the strongest argument for changing it.
Galway West's left-independent political culture
Conservative
Catherine Connolly's retirement creates a genuine opening, but the fragmentation between Sinn Féin and independent progressive candidates could hand the seat to an unexpected winner. The left's underlying demand — housing, cost of living — is coherent, but coherent demands don't win seats when the votes split four ways.
Liberal
Connolly didn't just hold that seat — she defined it. Her politics were rooted in housing rights, Irish language protection, and consistent skepticism of developer-led planning, and the constituency elected her because of those views, not despite them. The fragmentation is a tactical risk, but the underlying political culture is real and durable — you can't wish it away by pointing at vote-splitting.
Conservative
Nobody's wishing it away — but political cultures that don't consolidate don't win seats. If the progressive vote fractures and a coalition-aligned candidate squeaks through, you'll have proven that the left-independent tradition in Galway West is a cultural identity without electoral discipline.
Liberal
Or it proves that a constituency with a coherent progressive demand deserves candidates who earn that vote rather than inherit it — which is a harder test, but a more honest one.
Immigration pivot costs coalition credibility
Conservative
The honest conservative concern is that a weakened Fianna Fáil fragments the centre-right in ways that benefit populists with no interest in fiscal discipline or immigration enforcement — both of which are pressing concerns voters in Dublin and Galway are actually weighing. The coalition needs to hold that ground, not surrender it.
Liberal
When a government that cannot house its nurses starts competing with the hard right on who sounds toughest about borders, it loses both arguments at once — it looks neither competent nor principled. The lurch on immigration hasn't shored up the centre; it's alienated the progressive urban voters in both constituencies who might otherwise have given the coalition a reluctant pass.
Conservative
You're describing a government that should have fixed housing first and avoided the immigration debate entirely — but that's not a rebuttal to enforcement as policy, it's an argument about sequencing. A government with a credible housing record could hold both positions without the contradiction you're describing.
Liberal
Possibly — but this government doesn't have that record, which means the contradiction isn't theoretical. Voters in Dublin Central and Galway West are being asked to reward a coalition that delivered neither homes nor coherence, and the by-election results will tell us exactly how much patience they have left for that offer.
Conservative's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is the RTÉ finding that the internal move against Martin collapsed without materialising — which suggests Fianna Fáil has already made its peace with his leadership and the by-election results, however bad, may not trigger the reckoning conservatives expect. If the party has no credible alternative and knows it, the pressure from a double loss may simply dissipate rather than force structural change.
Liberal's hardest question
The 30-year by-election losing streak genuinely cuts both ways: if every government loses by-elections regardless of performance, it is harder to argue these results represent a specific verdict on this coalition's housing failures rather than a generic incumbency penalty. A Martin loyalist could reasonably say two lost seats proves nothing about 2027.
The Divide
*Within the government, Fianna Fáil faces a reckoning on Martin's leadership; in opposition, the left struggles to consolidate its anti-coalition message.*
MARTIN LOYALISTS
Martin retains his mandate; the Gavin episode is damaging but does not fundamentally undermine his authority heading into the next election.
“I will fulfil my mandate into the next elections.” — Micheál Martin
FIANNA FÁIL INTERNAL CRITICS
The Gavin debacle exposed poor leadership judgment and weak by-election results could trigger a reassessment of Martin's suitability to lead.
SINN FÉIN / MAINSTREAM LEFT
The by-elections offer a chance to hold government accountable on housing and cost of living and confirm Sinn Féin as the leading opposition force.
INDEPENDENTS / GALWAY LEFT
The left vote is fragmented between Sinn Féin and independent progressive candidates inheriting Catherine Connolly's activist base in constituencies like Galway West.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides agree that the Jim Gavin candidacy collapse exposed a real failure in Fianna Fáil's institutional decision-making process, not mere bad luck—the disagreement is only about what consequences that failure will trigger.
The real conflict
They differ fundamentally on causation: conservatives locate the by-election pattern in generic incumbency penalty and voter protest cycles (structural), while liberals locate it in specific coalition failure on housing and cost of living (performance-based)—this determines whether May 22 results will be read as temporary or diagnostic.
What nobody has answered
If Fianna Fáil loses both seats on May 22 but then wins the general election in 2027 on the back of coalition arithmetic and vote transfers, will the party and political observers finally accept that Irish by-elections genuinely tell us nothing about general election outcomes—or will they continue to treat them as meaningful verdicts, forcing an endless cycle of interpretive gymnastics?
Sources

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