Sinn Féin did best among those aged between 18 and 24 with 31.8% of voters in that age range giving their first preference vote to the party, according to the Election 2020 Exit Poll.

However, the party did poorly among older voters with just 12.2% of over-65s indicating their support for the party.

In contrast, 30.2% and 29.7% of over-65s indicated they were voting for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil respectively. The Green Party also made significant gains, rising to 7.9% and will certainly return considerably more TDs to the next Dáil.

The party polled strongly, 14.4%, in the 18-24 age bracket but it will have been expected after the Green wave.

The final opinion poll before Saturday’s vote – on Monday of last week – placed Sinn Féin as the most popular party (25%), followed by Fianna Fáil (23%) and Fine Gael (20%).

However, given that Sinn Féin only ran 42 candidates across the 39 constituencies it was difficult to extrapolate how that would manifest in terms of overall seats. Sinn Féin has traditionally performed worse in elections than in opinion polls, however they seem to have broken that trend in this election.

Exit polls are highly indicative of the likely outcome but they come with a health warning of a margin of error of 1.3% and recent elections have seen much greater variance.

For example, in the 2016 general election the exit poll put Sinn Féin on 16% but it ended up receiving 13.7% of the vote. The same poll also placed Fianna Fáil on 21.1% but it ended up with 24.3%.

The poll of 5,000 voters around the country was commissioned by RTÉ, The Irish Times, TG4 and UCD, and released as voting closed at 10pm on Saturday night.