CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article today contained an incorrect interpretation of tallies around Gerry Hutch’s share of the vote in Drumcondra South A in Dublin Central. While the raw tally data was exported correctly, the formulas used to find the aggregate votes for each electoral district contained discrepancies which gave incorrect vote totals (and therefore percentages). We apologise for this error and have corrected the below article accordingly. 

ONE CRITICISM AMONG other candidates in the RDS over the weekend was that the media had become so fixated on the pseudo-celebrity candidacy of Gerard Hutch – all clamouring to join him on the canvass in his working-class heartlands – that the rest were deprived of the oxygen they crave.

It’s a fair critique, and I don’t intend to spend too long here discussing him, his past or his platform. But suffice to say, I suspect even Hutch himself would be surprised to see how well he did in what are notionally some of Dublin Central’s better-off areas. 

The first thing to say about the figure in the headline is that the stat only tells half the story. The same electoral district that includes the IFSC also includes some of Ireland’s most underprivileged areas, including Sheriff Street. ‘North Dock C’, as the area is wonkishly labelled by State cartographers, is very much a tale of two Irelands: the affluent one driven by professional services, and the one left behind when the revenues don’t always flow into the streets nearby.

If you crunch the numbers from the constituency as a whole from the unofficial (yet comprehensive) tallies of individual ballot boxes, the performance of Hutch – and of Malachy Steenson, whose candidacy was more overtly critical of national policy on immigration – in that specific area jumps........

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