This weekend’s Irish election was a truly historic event. For almost a century, politics in the southern state had been dominated by a right-wing duopoly of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. As recently as 2007 those two parties received 68.9 percent of the vote — this weekend that number fell to 43.1 percent.

Sinn Féin, a party of the Left, won the election with 24.5 percent of the popular vote. Only running too few candidates prevented them from being the largest party in the Dáil today. But many other left-wingers, from the center-left to more radical varieties, were elected on their transfers. The Green Party, meanwhile — a center-left party with some more radical activists among its grassroots — received 7.1 percent of the vote and a historic high of twelve seats.

The exit poll suggested that the vote was generational. Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year olds, Sinn Féin won 31.8 percent of the vote, while the Greens (14.4), the radical Left People Before Profit (6.6), the Social Democrats (4.1), and other left-leaning parties also performed well. Among twenty-five- to thirty-four-year olds, the numbers were similar, with Sinn Féin winning 31.7 percent of the first preference vote. This was almost the same as the number won by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil combined (32.5).