The Irish election results are now all counted, although some recouts will be going on for the rest of the week. In one constituency there was only one vote between two candidates from the same party.

The results are very interesting in a number of ways, but the main one is that the main Government party Fianna Fail (FF) will be returned with about 80 seats. As there are 166 seats this leaves them about 3 short of an overall majority. Their junior partners the Progressive Democrats (PDs) had been written off by many prior to the election but came back with 8 seats - 4 more than they had before. A new FF/PD coalition would have 88 seats - a comfortable majority and would no longer be depending on independents (if that makes any sense!) to form a Government. However the FF leader Bertie Ahern also has other options - he could look for support from some of the 15 independent candidates (3-4 of whom are former FF members) of possibly talk to the Greens abiut a coalition. FF/PD is the most likely, but there will be some tight bargaining to be done, and there was some mud slinging between the parties during the election, which wont help.

The big story in the Election is the collapse of the vote of the main opposition party Fine Gael (FG) who have gone down by 23 seats to 31. Labour are just behind FG on 21, which represents no change on their outgoing position.

The main seat beneficiaries from this collapse are

Independents +8 to 15 PDs +4 to 8 Greens +4 to 6 and Sinn Fein +4 to 5.

Sinn Feins 5 seats were won in Cavan/Monaghan (out-going), Louth, Kerry North and two in Dublin. They polled 6.5% of the national vote and apart from theur wins they had a number of other good showings mainly in Dublin.

The way the numbers have worked out its now almost certain that the question of their being asked to participate in Government will not arise.

So it looks like 5 more years of Fianna Fail, supported either by the PDs the Greens or independents. The opposition is now so fragmented its difficult to see how they can even re-group for the next election - but its a long way to 2007.