DUBLIN — Ireland’s governing Fine Gael party suffered a loss on its home turf Friday in a by-election dominated by arguments over the country’s dysfunctional housing market.
The defeat in Dublin Bay South — home to some of Ireland’s most exclusive neighborhoods and tech giants — means Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s party retains only 34 seats in the 160-seat lower house of parliament, Dáil Éireann.
The result also rattled Prime Minister Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil, a broad-church party that dominated Irish politics for decades but is struggling to maintain a distinctive identity as it works alongside Fine Gael in government for the first time.
While Fine Gael’s candidate came second, Fianna Fáil’s finished a dismal fifth in a 15-candidate field in what was its worst by-election performance in history.
The victor, Ivana Bacik, is the opposition Labour Party’s high-energy leader in the upper house, the Seanad, and the granddaughter of a Czech postwar immigrant who co-founded Waterford Crystal.
A barrister and criminal law lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, she has represented the university in the largely unelected Seanad since 2007 while repeatedly trying (and failing) at each election to win a seat in the more influential Dáil.
Bacik has won broad public respect as a campaigner on progressive and feminist issues, including same-sex marriage and abortion rights. They were legalized by referendum in 2015 and 2018, respectively.
“I’m a veteran of so many referendum campaigns that I’m never confident of a result. I’m just so honored,” Bacik said from the Royal Dublin Society count center.
She fills a parliamentary vacancy created when one of Varadkar’s close lieutenants in Fine Gael, former housing minister Eoghan Murphy, resigned after bearing the brunt of public criticism over the previous Fine Gael minority government’s failure to fix chronic housing supply problems.
Nowhere is this pressure felt more than in the traditional Fine Gael stronghold of Dublin Bay South, which includes the parliament, the embassy belt and Ireland’s most eye-popping prices for homes amid scarce national supply.
Unusually for Ireland, more than half of the constituency’s voters are renters, among them an oversized share of EU nationals who relocated to work in the European bases of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and LinkedIn. Many live in high-end apartments controlled by international property investment trusts that, wooed by government tax breaks, have flooded the market since 2016. Dubliners on modest wages are finding it next to impossible to rent an affordable home anywhere in the district.
Bacik’s win poses no immediate threat to Ireland’s three-party government, formed in mid-2020 following a general election in which the nationalists of Sinn Féin narrowly won the popular vote. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael united against the enlarged Sinn Féin, making it the main opposition for the first time.
Fine Gael spent much of its Dublin Bay South campaign warning of a potential Sinn Féin upset, including a widely derided tweet issued an hour before polls closed Thursday night.
Staying above that fray, Bacik won 30.2 percent of first-preference votes, while James Geoghegan of Fine Gael came second on 26.2 percent. Sinn Féin’s candidate, former MEP Lynn Boylan, finished a distant third on 15.8 percent.
The other two government parties fared far worse, recording heavy falls from their 2020 shares of the vote: Claire Byrne of the Green Party won 8 percent, Fianna Fáil’s Deirdre Conroy just 4.6 percent.
An anti-vaccination activist and pandemic conspiracy theorist, Dolores Cahill, also contested the election. Police blocked her from the count center because she refused to don a mask as the presiding electoral officer required. She attracted 0.6 percent of votes.