Fine Gael 5 seats, Fianna Fail 3 seats, Labour Party 2 seats, Sinn Fein 1 seat

Elected: Fidelma Healy-Eames FG, Maire Moloney LB, David Cullinane SF, Tony Mulcahy FG, Cait Keane FG, Terry Brennan FG, Daragh O’Brien FF, Terry Leyden FF, Ned O’Sullivan FF, John Whelan LB (Inside panel candidates underlined)

A much better result for Fine Gael this time, with the party managing to convert their weight of voting numbers into five seats on this panel. Yet again Fianna Fail could only rely on less than three quotas, based on the party’s numbers of councillors, TDs and outgoing senators, coming into this contest, but the party still came very close to winning the four seats that they managed to take in the Agricultural panel.    

Fine Gael candidates won a combined number of 445 (or 445,000) first preference votes for this panel (41.7%), while Fianna Fail candidates won 322 (3o.1%) and Labour’s three candidates won 166 (15.6%). Sinn Fein’s sole candidate won 84 (7.9%) and the two independent candidates won 51 (4.8%).

Female candidates won 28.6% of the first preference votes (305) in what proved to be a very good panel contest for them, with three female candidates (Healy-Eames, Moloney and Keane) winning seats here.  

As with the Cultural and Education panel, this panel proved a happy hunting ground for Munster candidates, with candidates from this region winning 433 votes (40.4%), as against 309 votes (28.9%) for Leinster candidates, 178 votes (16.6%) for Connacht-Ulster candidates and 151 votes (14.1%) for Dublin candidates.