Ireland’s European election count gets under way

Voters headed to the polls in three elections on Friday.

As well as picking candidates to send to the European Parliament, they voted to elect a swathe of new councillors and, for the first time, some were asked to decide on a directly-elected mayor to represent them.

The first of the local election results were declared on Saturday.

More than 2,100 candidates had been selected or declared to fill a total of 949 city and county council seats across 31 authorities.

But our reporter Kevin Sharkey, who has been at a count centre in Dublin, said the first day of counting had already provided a clear direction of travel in terms of winners and losers.

The two main coalition government parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are expected to lose seats, bt they can breathe a collective sigh of relief as their losses are not expected to be on the scale many had predicted.

Sinn Féin will have more councillors elected to local authorities this time, our reporter added, but not as many as it wanted or expected.

The full results will take days to be finalised because Ireland uses a system of proportional representation which allows voters to rank candidates by order of preferences.

Ballot papers are sorted and counted multiple times by hand.