Gavan Reilly: Nervous times for TDs as the borders are redrawn

If you meet a politician in the coming days, be advised: they might be a little more excitable than usual. Political Super Bowl is afoot, you see: the new Electoral Commission has formally come into being, and commenced the process of revising the Dáil boundaries ahead of the next general election.

There’s nothing that gets the juices of an everyday TD flowing faster than the prospect of their constituency boundaries being revised: knowing the lay of the land is quite literally the lifeblood of their jobs. But this year’s revision will be greater awaited than most: it could be the most meaningful revision of the boundaries for decades.

That’s because the size of the Dáil has been fairly static in the last four decades. The population has risen by 50% in the last 42 years (3.34m in 1979 to 5.01m in 2022) but the Dáil has shrunk marginally in the same time, from 166 seats to 160. 160 is now simply too few to comply with the Constitution, which requires there to be at least one TD for every 30,000 people in the State - so the number simply has to rise to at least 169, and probably well into the 1970s.

But the people running the review of boundaries know that there’s virtue in going on the larger size now, in order to offer predictability for the future. There’s little point setting a Dáil of 172 seats if this number is rendered insufficient by another census in 2027. Better to create more seats now, so that the Dáil can operate at a fixed larger size for a generation.

That’s why we might go from a Dáil of 160 seats up to 180 – something which changes the political landscape dramatically.

A huge number of extra seats means a better chance of current TDs hanging onto their seats – albeit, perhaps, with the consequence of having to learn the terrain of a radically revised constituency.