Opinion Polls

1st March, 2009

This weekend has seen the publication or analysis of two different opinion polls, the MRBI poll in the Independent and the Red C in the Sunday Business Post today. Any politician who tells you that they do not care about polls is been completely dishonest. We do care but tend to focus on the trends in them not the individual snap shots.

The only exceptions are constituency opinion polls. They tend to be one offs, in the run up to polling days. Every single detail of these polls is devoured by local politicians, eager to find out how they stand versus
local rivals. Rumours of their existence tends to spread like wildfire amongst rivals from other parties.

What do we make of these two polls, and more importantly the last number of polls ? They all confirm that FG is now more popular than FF. Unbelievable and wonderful stuff. They also show that Labour is moving forward, mostly at the expense of FF. A question raised in relation to these polls is why FG is not doing better.

We have overtaken FF. Full stop and end of story. This is a breakthrough that would not have been dreamed possible after the 07 election. Our priority must now be to consolidate at 35%. This is to counter act the
pervasive grip that FF have in every nook of Irish life and their strength in 3 seat constituencies.

We are getting to this goal but we do have a lot to do. Anyone assuming that it will be easy to dislodge FF does not know anything about them.