Sinn Féin faces criminal kingpin in Dublin election

DUBLIN — An Irish parliamentary by-election Friday could deal a blow to Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and transform Ireland’s most famous criminal godfather, Gerry Hutch, into an unlikely kingmaker.

The closely watched contest for an open Dublin Central seat is considered Sinn Féin’s to lose. That’s because it is playing out on home turf for McDonald, the leader of Ireland’s main opposition party, who has represented the area since 2011 and topped the poll in the past three general elections in the four-seat constituency.

McDonald’s hold over the Irish republican party, which she inherited from Gerry Adams in 2018, would be shaken if she can’t deliver a Sinn Féin victory in her own power base — and the latest polling suggests her candidate, Janice Boylan, has only a razor-thin lead in the race. The contest will fill the seat vacated by Paschal Donohoe, the former Irish finance minister and Eurogroup president, who left Dublin in November to take a top job at the World Bank in Washington.

The by-election won’t meaningfully alter the balance of power in Ireland’s key lower house, the Dáil, where the center-right government of Taoiseach Micheál Martin has a stable majority. But it will provide a litmus test for where anti-government sentiment is growing most in urban Ireland — on the socialist left or the populist right.

Saturday’s outcome may depend on how many anti-establishment votes go to Hutch, a 63-year-old gangland chieftain who came excruciatingly close to winning a Dublin Central seat in the 2024 general election.

The winner will be determined by who attracts the most lower-preference votes in a system that encourages voters to rank the candidates. If Hutch finishes in third place, for example, the lower-ranking choices on his own ballots could be crucial in deciding who wins.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald delivers a keynote address at Waterfront Hall in Belfast on April 25, 2026. | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Hutch isn’t expected to win outright — polling commissioned by The Irish Times puts him on 14 percent, in third place after the Sinn Féin and the Social Democrat candidates — but he’s built a credible base among working-class voters who cheer a campaign that shuns normal media appearances and mocks traditional politicians as “the real criminals.”

Immigration on the ballot

Martin’s own Fianna Fáil party isn’t a serious contender in either by-election, particularly since the party’s former leader, Bertie Ahern, stepped down as Taoiseach in 2008 amid a corruption scandal. Ahern embarrassed Martin on the campaign trail this month by being surreptitiously recorded making comments critical of Africans and Muslims.

Immigration is potentially the pivotal issue in an impoverished inner-city district with some of Europe’s worst rates of drug addiction, and which has become home to more foreign-born people than any other part of Ireland.

A 2020 constituency analysis put Dublin Central’s population at less than two-thirds Irish, and that balance has shifted further with thousands of Ukrainian war refugees and a more recent influx of Somalis and Jordanian-passported Palestinians.

Tensions over the growth of non-white residents boiled over in 2023 when an Algerian man stabbed three young children and an adult carer outside a school, triggering racist riots that targeted shops, public transport and the police.

City councilman and candidate Malachy Steenson is wooing voters with explicitly anti-immigrant messages. Anti-immigrant voices express particular vitriol at Sinn Féin, a nationalist party that principally targets voters on the liberal left. Hutch could gain sizable vote transfers from those less popular candidates as they are gradually eliminated from the field.

Flames rise from a car and bus on O’Connell Bridge in central Dublin following the stabbing of three young children and an adult carer in November 2023. | Peter Murphy/AFP via Getty Images

While Hutch has no formal platform, he has used social media interviews with anti-immigrant activists to highlight his own antipathy to certain categories of newcomers. In one such interview recorded at his local boxing club, Hutch called for undocumented Somalis arriving in Ireland to be interned without trial at a former army base. “The illegal ones, don’t give them a penny. Feed them, put them on the boat and send them back,” he said.

On the campaign trail, McDonald and Sinn Féin try to avoid criticizing Hutch by name.

“We can’t comment on other people’s comments,” McDonald said when asked about Hutch’s call to intern asylum-seekers — a practice once employed against the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

Sinn Féin has dismissed reports of unhappiness in party ranks over McDonald’s failure to turn strong poll numbers into victories in the past two general elections. That could change if Boylan finishes second, as most polls and bettors forecast, to a smaller left-wing party, the Social Democrats.

Their candidate, Daniel Ennis, is considered more likely to win lower-preference transfer votes from backers of the main centrist government parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, when their own candidates are eliminated.

“The big question in Dublin Central is Sinn Féin,” said Gary Murphy, a politics professor at Dublin City University. “What would it say of Mary Lou McDonald and her leadership if Sinn Féin cannot win a by-election in her own heartland?”