The winds of change in Donegal are the same as in Dublin – so you can stop sneering

AS THE country awoke to a new dawn on Saturday morning with constituency after constituency repealing the Eighth Amendment, only one county stood apart. It became clear early on that Donegal would buck the national trend.

On ‘Morning Ireland’, Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty was declaring it a tight battle. By the evening – long after many constituencies had called it – the result from the Aura Leisure Centre in Letterkenny came in. It was tight as predicted but it was a No.

On social media, the place named as the coolest on the planet by ‘National Geographic’ was trending with people asking why was Donegal so out of kilter with the rest of the country.

This is by no means an apologia for the No vote in Donegal, but when you crunch the numbers you get a sense of why the county voted the way it did.

The results for the county showed 32,559 people voted to repeal while 35,091 voted against. In percentages the Yes side garnered 48.1pc of the vote while No got 51.9pc. Turnout at 57pc was lower than the national average of 64.51pc.

While some of the online comments about the vote have been ungracious, Donegal man Noel Sharkey took to Twitter to remind people there were more No voters in Dublin than in Donegal and to say that the thousands of Yes votes in the county were Ireland’s.

At the count centre, canvassers for Yes reported many spoiled votes with an X in one box scribbled out to be replaced by an X in another, showing right up to the minute of polling that people were conflicted.

This may also go some way to explain a turnout that was lower than the national average – people were genuinely torn over which way to vote.

When you break down the figures there is cold comfort for No voters who were quick to declare Donegal some kind of morally superior fiefdom to the rest of the country.

The demographics show that the under-25s played a hugely important role in securing the landslide victory nationally. The latest CSO figures show a 6.5pc drop in the number of young adults in Donegal in the 19-24 age category between the census of 2011 and 2016. Higher-than-average unemployment and resulting emigration are the main reasons for their exodus.

We know from the exit polls that nearly 60pc of the over 65s voted No. The most recent CSO figures show that between 2011 and 2016, the number of people aged 65 and over increased from 21,471 to 24,989 in Co Donegal. That’s a 16pc increase.

According to the 2016 census the under-35s account for 26pc of the population in the county compared with 30pc nationally.

When the boxes in Donegal were opened they showed the Yes and No votes going toe to toe in many electoral areas. In Letterkenny, the county’s biggest town, the vote was overwhelmingly for repeal.

Milford, Downings, Ramelton and Carrigart all voted Yes while in the Inishowen towns of Moville, Buncrana and Carndonagh, the vote was split almost exactly 50/50.

IN south Donegal, the further you moved to Sligo, the stronger the Yes vote became. This shows the Donegal vote was in a sense a microcosm of the rest of the country, split along rural/urban lines and not significantly bucking the trend nationally.

While the words seismic have been used to describe the result

What you are looking at is a 34-point swing since the 1983 vote, which is the same as the rest of the country