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Dee Makofane

Dee Makofane

Dublin-based Irish politics commentator and host of the "Politea with Dee" podcast, UCD politics graduate and former RTÉ News intern.

Jun 17, 2026

4:44
And for those who are interested, could you kind of give us, this is probably like a five hour answer, but kind of give us the gist of our political system and how that kind of functions?
4:55
Okay so yeah so every five years four to five years we have a general election and then we vote for RTD so it's not like you're voting for the whole government you're just voting for your local person so that's when the posters come up and you have like you know the Green Party, Fianna Fáil, Fianna Gael, Sinn Féin all of those people so you vote like what's it called proportional representation so you vote one two and three based on who you want to see in government so So once those votes are kind of tallied, say, who would I use as an example? We can say like there's the Dublin Central election happening soon, the by-election.
5:33
So if we had like Mary Lou, I mean, she's already in government.
5:37
Sorry, let me think of who's actually in there right now.
5:42
We have Owen O'Kanavan who's there.
5:44
We have Jeanette Horner.
5:46
So say you wanted to put them two, one and two.

10 MINS LATER

15:22
And then we had our presidential election a few years later and it's all left this vote left transfer left the left wing politics blah blah blah versus right wing then you hear things like center right and all this kind of thing so could you for those of us who are only kind of getting to grips with that kind of language can you maybe explain that for us

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