Chance of the sitting government being re-elected
Every one of the 5,000 simulations, binned by FF + FG + Ind's combined seat total. Bars at or past the dashed line are simulations where the coalition keeps its majority — currently 55.1% of them.
Shape of the Next Dáil
Each dot is one of the 174 Dáil seats, at its projected median outcome. Hover a seat for its party.
Seat Projection Over Time
Projected Dáil Éireann seats, re-simulated at every poll since the November 2024 general election (40 points). Each point re-runs the same Monte Carlo model on that poll's weighted average as it stood on the day — this is how the seat projection has actually moved over time, not just where it stands today. All parties are trackable, not just the three largest, and whole coalitions can be tracked as a single combined-seat line too — use the toggles below to add or remove one. Shaded bands show each line's 10th–90th percentile simulated range, the same uncertainty measure as the "Seat Projection" bars above.
Seat Change Since 2024
Median projected seats today, minus each party's actual seats won at the November 2024 general election — every party, ranked by the size of its swing.
Seat Projection
174-seat Dáil · 88 for a majorityMedian seats from 5,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the current house-effect-adjusted polling average(polls to 31 Jul 2026), applied to the 174-seat Dáil using each party's 2024 vote-to-seat efficiency. Simulated polling errors are drawn from normal distributions and correlated across parties (government vs opposition, established parties vs independents), matching how real polling misses behave. Faint bars show the 10th–90th percentile range. Hover any bar for that party's full seat distribution and exact run counts, or click a party's name to open its full profile. The red dashed line marks the 88-seat majority threshold.
Where this model is least certain: "Others" (the general independents bucket) is the widest uncertainty band on the chart, because it isn't one party with one national vote share — it's dozens of local candidates whose fortunes depend on constituency-level factors this model can't see. Vote-to-seat efficiency factors are calibrated against the actual November 2024 result, so the model reproduces that election almost exactly when fed 2024's own vote shares — the uncertainty shown here is specifically about how much national vote shares might move between now and the next election, not about the seat-allocation method itself.
How to read this: Bar length = projected median seats; the dashed grey tick on each bar marks that party's actual seats won at the November 2024 general election, so the bar's growth or shrinkage past that line is the swing this model is projecting. The whisker below each bar is the 10th–90th percentile range. "Poll %" is the party's current weighted average across Red C, Ireland Thinks, and Ipsos B&A polls; "vs '24" is the same comparison as a number. Projections assume national swing — they can't capture local candidate effects, and small parties' seats are especially sensitive to transfers under PR-STV.
Possible Coalitions
For each combination, the share of the 5,000 simulations in which its parties jointly reach 88 seats. That share is pure arithmetic on simulated seat counts — the note under each card adds the political context the numbers alone can't: whether it's the actual government, or a combination the parties themselves have ruled out.
The actual coalition in office since Jan 2025: FF, FG and the Regional Independent Group of TDs led by Michael Lowry.
The Social Democrats have not ruled this out, but have not been approached by FF/FG either.
Independent Ireland is a distinct party from the general-independents bucket above, and is currently in opposition.
Labour served in coalition with both FF and FG previously (2011-16, 2020-24).
A five-party left bloc large enough on paper, but Labour and the Social Democrats have both resisted being junior partners to Sinn Féin.
The two-party core of the sitting government, without its independent TDs.
Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have explicitly ruled out coalition with Sinn Féin — arithmetically possible, but the parties themselves say it won't happen.
How This Model Is Calibrated
Turning a national vote share into seats isn't 1-for-1 — under PR-STV, the same vote share buys different parties different numbers of seats depending on how efficiently their vote converts: how concentrated or spread out their support is, and crucially, how well they draw transfers from other parties' eliminated or surplus candidates. This model handles that in two layers. First, each party's own historical (seat share ÷ vote share) ratio across the last five general elections, recency- weighted, sets a baseline "efficiency" factor — a party's real track record, including its real transfer performance, baked into its historical seat count even though no transfer round is simulated directly. Second, a transfer-affinity adjustment reacts to today's specific poll mix: if parties that transfer well to a given party (e.g. Social Democrats and Labour for Sinn Féin) are currently polling stronger than they did in 2024, that party's conversion rate nudges up from its historical baseline, and vice versa — the "Transfer env." column below.
| Party | 2007 | 2011 | 2016 | 2020 | 2024 | Efficiency | Uncertainty | Transfer env. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6.9% | 9.9% | 13.8% | 24.5% | 19.0% | 0.99× | ±29% | +0.8% | |
| 27.3% | 36.1% | 25.5% | 20.9% | 20.8% | 1.12× | ±12% | -0.7% | |
| 41.6% | 17.4% | 24.3% | 22.2% | 21.9% | 1.11× | ±19% | -0.3% | |
| — | — | 3.0% | 2.9% | 4.8% | 1.15× | ±26% | +0.3% | |
| Independents | 9.4% | 15.4% | 20.2% | 13.5% | 15.5% | 0.72× | ±22% | +0.3% |
| — | — | — | — | 3.5% | 0.65× | ±14% | -0.1% | |
| 10.1% | 19.4% | 6.6% | 4.4% | 4.7% | 1.07× | ±23% | +0.4% | |
| — | — | — | 1.9% | 3.9% | 0.31× | ±13% | -0.5% | |
| 4.7% | 1.8% | 2.7% | 7.1% | 3.0% | 0.49× | ±61% | +0.3% | |
| — | — | 3.9% | 2.6% | 2.8% | 0.88× | ±24% | +0.9% |
The blank cells above (e.g. Social Democrats/Independent Ireland before they existed as parties) mean an efficiency factor rests on fewer than five real elections. The Uncertainty column is the per-trial jitter the Monte Carlo simulation applies to that factor: each party's own real volatility across the elections it contested (Fine Gael's efficiency barely moves election to election; the Green Party's has swung from 0 seats to 12 at similar vote shares), shrunk toward a typical party's volatility when — as with Social Democrats or Independent Ireland — too few elections exist to trust that party's own number yet. This is why some parties get a visibly wider seat range below even at a similar vote share, not just the ones with the least historical data.
On vote transfers specifically: no digitised count-by-count transfer data exists for this model to run an actual PR-STV count, but the pattern is well documented in every count since PR-STV's introduction. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael transfer relatively well to each other and to Independents; Sinn Féin has historically drawn weaker transfers from the traditional "civil war" parties' eliminated candidates than its first-preference vote alone would suggest, while doing well within a left-leaning bloc (Labour, Social Democrats, Greens, PBP–Solidarity); and Independents' transfers are the most candidate-specific and least predictable of all. Those persistent patterns already show up in the efficiency column — it's why Sinn Féin's efficiency factor sits below Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael's despite broadly similar vote shares in recent elections. The "Transfer env." column is the more dynamic layer on top: it's a party-size-weighted transfer-affinity score for the CURRENT poll mix, compared against the same score for the 2024 result, capped to a modest ±a few percent nudge on top of the historical efficiency factor rather than a full transfer simulation.
Model Accuracy: Backtested Against Real Elections
Rather than just asserting the vote-to-seat conversion above works, it's checked directly: for each of the last 5 general elections, the efficiency-factor lookup is recomputed using only the other 4 elections — so the election under test was never part of its own training data — then applied to that election's real first-preference vote shares with no random noise, and compared to the seats actually won. Since these are real, not polled, vote shares, this isolates how well the vote-to-seat conversion mechanism itself tracks a genuine PR-STV outcome, separately from any polling error.
| Election | Total seats | Mean seat error |
|---|---|---|
| 24 May 2007 | 166 | ±5.3 seats |
| 25 Feb 2011 | 166 | ±4.7 seats |
| 26 Feb 2016 | 158 | ±2.5 seats |
| 8 Feb 2020 | 160 | ±4.0 seats |
| 29 Nov 2024 | 174 | ±3.6 seats |
Averaged across every party in all 5 backtested elections: ±3.9 seats per party. A handful of very small or brand-new parties in any given year — with fewer historical elections behind their own efficiency factor — tend to account for a disproportionate share of this error, which the per-trial jitter in the Monte Carlo simulation above widens for exactly those parties (see the sample-size note on the efficiency table above).
Monte Carlo Projections in Detail
The bars above show each party's median and 10th–90th percentile range. Below is the full distribution behind those numbers — every seat outcome actually produced across all 5,000 runs of the simulation, one small histogram per party.
| Party | Poll % | 10% | Median | 90% | Largest party |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20.9% | 26 | 39 | 52 | 46.2% | |
| 18.7% | 30 | 39 | 48 | 41.4% | |
| 15.7% | 24 | 33 | 42 | 11.7% | |
| 10.4% | 15 | 23 | 30 | 0.6% | |
| Independents | 12.4% | 12 | 17 | 23 | <0.1% |
| 6.7% | 6 | 8 | 11 | <0.1% | |
| 3.4% | 3 | 6 | 10 | <0.1% | |
| 6.2% | 3 | 4 | 5 | <0.1% | |
| 3.2% | 1 | 2 | 5 | <0.1% | |
| 2.4% | 1 | 2 | 5 | <0.1% |
Related pages
Coalition Builder
Select parties to see potential coalition seat totals
Falling short of 88 doesn't automatically rule this combination out — Fine Gael governed as a minority government from 2016 to 2020, kept in office by a confidence-and-supply agreement with Fianna Fáil rather than a full coalition. Whether a below-majority government survives Dáil confidence votes depends on which specific TDs abstain or vote to support it, which isn't something a seat-count model can determine on its own.
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