While the Irish ‘far right’ (much hyped online) struggles to make any impact, a notorious gangster has benefited from a surge of support in the Dublin Central constituency.

With 9.5% of first preferences in this four-member seat, Gerry Hutch (known as ‘The Monk’) stood a good chance of being elected while the multiple stages of redistributing voters’ second, third, fourth (etc.) preferences were being compiled.

But at the final stage of the count, Hutch narrowly lost the fourth and final vacancy to Labour’s candidate Marie Sherlock.

The result is nevertheless a grave embarrassment for Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who topped the poll in this Dublin Central seat where she was first a candidate in 2007 and has been a TD since 2011, but whose vote collapsed from 35.7% to 19.5%.

Gerry Hutch was by his own admission one of Ireland’s most active gangsters for many years. He had more than thirty criminal convictions before his 18th birthday and went on to be involved in a series of infamous armed robberies.

In 2021 he was extradited from Spain to stand trial for a gangland murder, but was acquitted last year after a trial surrounded by controversy. A former Sinn Féin councillor, Jonathan Dowdall, who was allegedly a co-conspirator with Hutch in the murder of David Byrne in 2016, gave evidence for the prosecution. The Dublin court took the view that Dowdall (as an admitted criminal himself seeking witness protection and plea bargains) could not be trusted without further corrorborative evidence.

It’s very obvious that Hutch standing against the Sinn Féin leader in her own constituency is part of ‘payback’ for this perceived betrayal by a former SF councillor and criminal. For several years, Mary Lou McDonald has failed to answer repeated questions about the extent of her and her party’s knowledge of her former councillor’s criminal activities, and the broader gangland scene surrounding Hutch and his rivals.

Hutch’s gang was involved in a long-running, widely reported feud with the rival Kinahan cartel. The feud included the murder of Hutch’s nephew Gary near Marbella in 2015, and his brother Eddie Hutch (Sr.) in Dublin in 2016.

It seems clear that large numbers of Dublin’s White working class have (despite their enthusiasm for theoretically anti-immigration rioting last year) turned their back on the ‘far right’ and voted instead for a celebrity gangster. It’s interesting to see that when the number two Sinn Féin candidate was eliminated, 108 of her voters’ next preferences went to this celebrity gangster rather than to SF’s leader. And when McDonald herself was elected in the next round of redistribution, a plurality of her surplus transferred to the celebrity gangster rather than to any of the leftist or establishment parties.

It was also curious that the votes of the two far-left candidates (when redistributed) transferred very differently. The arch-Putinist Clare Daly (whose mysteriously well-financed campaign contrasted with a low vote and tiny activist base in the real world) was the first ultra-leftist to be eliminated, and predictably 456 of her votes (well over a quarter) went to her fellow leftist, the Trotskyist candidate from ‘People Before Profit’; and 389 to a less extreme leftist party, the Social Democrats. But 137 Daly preferences went to the gangster candidate Hutch; more than the 118 that went to Labour and the 94 that went Green.

Whereas when the Trotskyist PBP candidate was knocked out next, 83 of his preferences went to the gangster, well below the 252 that went Labour, 202 to Green, and a whopping 1,335 to the Social Democrats. What this tells us is that while Daly and the PBP were both far left, the latter’s support was more middle-class and educated, while a large part of Daly’s vote came from the Dublin underclass and others that were attracted to ‘celebrity’ candidates and criminals.

Moreover, when the anti-immigration independent candidate Malachy Steenson was the sixth candidate eliminated (after polling 4.9% of first preferences) the majority of his votes transferred to Hutch. Even though Steenson is a solicitor (with a background in militant republicanism before his recent turn to anti-immigration populism) his supporters chose a notorious criminal as their second preference!

Hutch was only defeated because, unsurprisingly, middle-class Dubliners whose first choice was the Greens or an establishment party, gave their eventual preferences to Labour.

Some H&D readers (especially abroad, where Ireland is romanticised to an absurd degree) might be surprised by this surge of support for a celebrity gangster. We aren’t.

But the good news is that were Hutch to be elected when the count continues at 10 am today (Sunday), it would be a further humiliation for Sinn Féin and the IRA leadership.