Irish coalition parties lead local elections

By Burak Bir

LONDON (AA) - Ireland's two main ruling coalition parties Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are leading the country's local elections as the counting continues on Monday.

Prime Minister Simon Harris' Fine Gael and his main coalition partner Fianna Fail are battling for victory in Friday's elections where citizens headed to polls to also cast their votes for European elections.

Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. local time (0625GMT) and closed at 10 p.m. (2100GMT) to fill 949 city and county council seats in 31 local government authorities.

With most of the 949 seats filled, the result was seemingly worse for the Irish republican Sinn Fein party than polls suggested as Fine Gael and Fianna Fail each had 23% of the first-preference votes, while Mary Lou McDonald's Sinn Fein got only 12%.

However, Sinn Fein is still expected to end with more councilors than in the previous elections in 2019.

Speaking to the Irish public broadcaster RTE radio, Sinn Fein lawmaker Matt Carthy said there was a sense that "there was a drop coming."

"To be quite frank nobody saw these results," he added.

Independent candidates have performed well with more than 160 so far in the local elections where the voter turnout was 48.95%, according to RTE.