# Irish presidential polls close as Connolly and Humphreys wait on count
Voting on the event date closed in Ireland’s presidential election, setting up a count that would determine whether Catherine Connolly or Heather Humphreys would succeed Michael D Higgins as the country’s 10th president. The BBC report says the first sign of the result would not come until the next morning, with the official announcement due later at Dublin Castle.
The contest was straightforward in one sense and complicated in another. Connolly ran as an independent backed by a broad left-leaning coalition that included Sinn Féin, while Humphreys represented Fine Gael, one of the two main parties in the governing coalition. A third candidate, Jim Gavin of Fianna Fáil, withdrew after a rental-dispute controversy but remained on the ballot because the law required his name to stay there once nominations had closed.
That procedural wrinkle matters because Ireland uses proportional representation by single transferable vote. Any votes cast for Gavin would still count and could be transferred if necessary. In a race with just two active candidates, the mechanics are less about eliminating a field of many contenders than about understanding how the withdrawn name could still affect the count.
The BBC said about 3.6 million citizens were entitled to vote, with balloting taking place at roughly 5,500 polling booths across 43 constituencies between 07:00 and 22:00. Turnout, however, was already a concern: early unofficial indications suggested it could struggle to exceed the record low of just under 40 percent recorded in 2018. That would be important not only as a sign of public engagement but also as a measure of how much political energy the contest generated beyond its headline names.
Several symbolic moments marked the day. Michael D Higgins voted, as did Taoiseach Micheál Martin and both leading candidates. The BBC also noted that 104-year-old Bridie Dunphy went to a polling station near her home in Dublin, a detail that underscored how personal and civic the day can be in Irish politics.
There was also a cross-border dimension. Irish citizens in Northern Ireland cannot vote in the election, though they may stand as candidates. The report says that anomaly remains a subject of debate among campaigners who want voting rights extended. So even before the result was known, the election was already carrying a wider argument about who gets to shape the symbolic headship of the republic.
