Gavan Reilly: Gerry Hutch and his 30% vote in Dublin Central's best-heeled area |
Politics by Numbers is a brand-new series for The Journal where broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.
THE FIGURE IN the headline on this piece is striking and unintuitive, so much so that when the calculations threw it up, I had to go back and double-check the sums.
One criticism among other candidates in the RDS over the weekend was that the media had become so fixated on 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 is (statistically) Dublin Central’s best-heeled area.
Anyone who follows politics and who knows Dublin would probably make an educated guess about what amounts to the ‘better off’ corner of the constituency. They might well suggest the ‘hipster belt’: your Stoneybatters, your Phibsboroughs, your Oxmanstown Roads – the areas where you’d regularly see someone in the Bohemians’ Fontaines DC jersey that looks like a disposable vape.
But it turns out, if you crunch the numbers, that those aren’t actually the best-off areas of the constituency. In fact, surprisingly, they’re nowhere near it. If you look up the CSO’s figures for median household income – in other words, how much cash the middle-of-the-road house brings in – then those areas (the ‘Arran Quay’ electoral districts) represent the national average.
The district with the highest median income is wonkishly called ‘Drumcondra South A’. To put this........