Richard Boyd Barrett at the launch of the group's alliance last month.

Richard Boyd Barrett at the launch of the group's alliance last month.

IRELAND’S NEW LEFT-WING alliance is asking that it be given as a party option by pollsters ahead of the general election.

Paul Murphy TD and Richard Boyd Barrett TD say that they don’t want their Anti Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit party to be grouped with ‘Independents/Others’ when polls are being conducted.

The two left-leaning groups recently announced that they are to run candidates under the same banner in the forthcoming vote and Murphy says he wants them “correctly treated as one entity”.

Their election candidates, he says, will have AAA-PBP and a joint logo beside their names on the ballot paper.

In a poll published by the Sunday Times over the weekend, Anti Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit garnered a support level of 9%, two points above the Labour party.

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Murphy says this support level is being achieved despite people not being given AAA-PBP as an up-front option.

In a letter to polling companies today, Murphy outlined how he feels this is ‘understating our potential support’:

We understand that polling companies have not included Anti Austerity Alliance or the People Before Profit in their initial list of parties given to people, leaving it to the person being polled to volunteer their support for our organisation or requiring that they say they support ‘independents and others’ before clarifying that they support AAA or PBPA.

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The issue of smaller parties being treated differently than larger parties has been raised for some time now, not just by the parties in question here but other minor groupings as well.