Ireland goes to the polls on Friday with the incumbent coalition parties neck-and-neck with opposition party, Sinn Fein, after a campaign marked by rancour over housing and cost-of-living crises.
Polls open across the country at 0700 GMT and close at 2200 GMT as voters choose new members of the 174-seat lower chamber of parliament, the Dail, in Dublin.
Counting is not due to start until Saturday morning, with partial results expected throughout the day.
A final result, however, may not be clear for days as Ireland’s proportional representation system sees the votes of eliminated candidates redistributed during multiple rounds of counting.
Final opinion polling put the three main parties — centre-right Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, and the leftist-nationalist Sinn Fein — each on around 20 per cent.
Fine Gael, whose leader Simon Harris called a snap election earlier this month, held a solid lead entering the campaign.
Harris replaced his predecessor Leo Varadkar in April aged just 37 to become Ireland’s youngest ever taoiseach (prime minister).
Now 38, he was credited with re-energising Fine Gael in part due to his social media savvy which earned him the moniker “TikTok Taoiseach”.
But the party has lost its advantage after a viral clip of Harris in which he appeared rude and dismissive to a care worker on the campaign trail went viral.
