This is a chart of the average monthly polls since April 2013.

With one month to go before the local and European elections, the government parties won’t be too pleased with how things are looking. Since the December high after the exit from the bailout program, the government has been beset by scandals and has taken a knock in support (though we should be careful not to apply causation to correlation). The average so far for April show a drop for Fine Gael from 26% to 25% and for Labour from 9% to 7%, from highs of 30% and 10% respectively in December.

The other main groupings have seen the benefits of this, each rising 2% since February. with Independents/Others maintaining their lead amongst opposition groupings that they’ve held since then.

Amongst the Others is the Green Party, whose support doesn’t get reported enough to be included in the data, but who in a Sunday Independent/Millward Brown poll recieved 4% which is their their best performance since well before the election in 2011. This bodes well for their hopes for a European seat which rest mainly on Eamonn Ryan in Dublin, a seat would be a huge gain for the party, morally and financially, and might signal the start of a recovery from their election wipeout.

If these results were reflected in a general election, we would see a genuine 3 horse raise for biggest party for possibly the first time ever and the first time Sinn Féin have challenged for biggest party in the south since the 1920s. Certainly it would seem to represent a major step towards their legitimisation in the eyes of a large section of southern Irish society, though they still remain a transfer-adverse party and usually perform worse in elections than polls suggest. It also has to be kept in mind that there is significant anti-established party feeling in the country, evidenced in the huge Independents/Others and Don’t Know percentages. Whether the SF vote would hold up in brighter economic times remains to be seen.

Pollsters generally ask how respondents would vote if a general election were called tomorrow, so extrapolation onto local and European elections is difficult, nonetheless we seem set to see a rebound in the Fianna Fáil vote destroyed in the 2009 locals, a reduction in the number of Fine Gael and especially Labour councillors, who performed strongly in 2009, and a possible breakthrough for Sinn Féin, who will make good use of the added resources that come with extra councillors.