FG making up ground on FF, finds opinion polls

THE Government is losing support and Fine Gael is fast making ground, according to two new opinion polls.

If accurate, they mean the General Election should be one of the most closely fought for some time.

Red C’s monthly tracking poll, published in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, shows support for Fianna Fáil down a point to 35% since this time four weeks ago.

A separate poll, conducted by Millward Brown-IMS and published in the Sunday Independent, similarly showed a one-point drop in support for Fianna Fáil, putting the party on 38% as against 39% in January.

Both polls show support for Fine Gael increasing, though by different levels. The Red C poll has Fine Gael rising four points to 27%, while the Millward Brown poll shows the party rising one point to 23%.

While there are clear disparities between the polls in terms of the support levels, they suggest an underlying trend: Fine Gael is gaining at Fianna Fáil’s expense.

Yesterday, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern preferred to highlight the different figures in the polls rather than analyse the fall in support for his party.

“The real poll isn’t that long away, so I think we’ll wait for that one,” he said.

When pushed, he said he believed Fianna Fáil’s current support level was between 37% and 39%. Given the party achieved 41% in the last general election, seat losses would be inevitable, if Mr Ahern is correct.

Elsewhere in the polls, Labour remained more or less static, while the Greens saw their support increase.

The Red C poll showed a one-point decrease in support for Labour to 11%, while the Millward Brown poll showed the party holding on 12%.

Red C had the Greens on 9%, up one point, while Millward Brown also had them up one to 6%.

Both pollsters put Sinn Féin on 8%, although Red C suggested the party had fallen two points to that level while Millward Brown found it had risen a point.

The PDs were static on 3% in the Red C poll, but fell by one point to 4% in the Millward Brown survey.

Meanwhile, Mr Ahern appeared to back PD leader Michael McDowell’s insistence that stamp duty could be reformed by the summer if the current government was returned to power.

“I think the concept, if you were doing something, the PD position of doing it early after the election makes sense, because otherwise you would have a long period of uncertainty in the market,” he said.

“Our position, as Brian Cowen stated, is we’ll do nothing to affect the property market because of the huge employment in it.”