TDs will get lessons to cope with stress

Lunchtime Dáil courses offered ahead of election

DÁIL deputies are being offered courses to deal with stress ahead of the next general election – with many Coalition TDs expected to lose their seats.

The Oireachtas training unit will be running lunchtime seminars ahead of the Dáil returning this month after the break for summer.

Its ‘learn at lunch’ seminars run from 12.30pm to 2pm from Monday to Friday next week and are being offered to all members, political personnel and staff working at the Oireachtas.

There will be room for 25 people at each session and attendees are asked to bring a light lunch although tea and coffee will be provided by the training unit. The theme of the seminars is ‘boosting your resilience’.

A memo offering the courses said: ‘Resilience is the ability to persist in the face of adversity and to be able to bounce back from difficult situations.

‘The seminars will help individuals to improve personal, team and organisational resilience.’

Topics to be covered will include ‘visualising success, increasing self-esteem and taking control’.

The courses will urge politicians and staff to ‘be more optimistic, manage stress, improve decision making, deal with conflict, know when to ask for help and plan to learn’.

By law, a general election must be held by the end of spring and, based on current polling, Government parties Labour and Fine Gael are facing a tough time from the electorate.

The latest Sunday Times Behaviour & Attitudes poll showed the two parties on a combined rating of 33 per cent, down from their election high of 37 per cent which secured them 113 of the 165 available seats. The next election will return only 158 TDs.

Most polls predict Independents will win about 30 per cent of the vote. But Adrian Kavanagh, a specialist in election statistics, predicts this will not translate into a similar representation of seats.

His latest commentary is based on the Sunday Times poll which gave Independents and others a tally of 28 per cent (down 4 per cent) as opposed to Fine Gael’s 27 per cent and Labour’s 6 per cent.

Dr Kavanagh said: ‘Support levels for the “Independents and Others” grouping stand at an exceptionally high level in this poll, even though this grouping has lost some ground since the July poll.

‘But it is worth noting that seat l evels f or the Independents’ grouping can be notably harder to glean than would be the case for the larger political parties.

‘First of all, opinion polls usually measure support for “Independents and Others” and not just Independent candidates.’

In this grouping are smaller parties and alliances such as Renua Ireland, the new Social Democrats party, the Workers Party, the AntiAusterity Alliance/Socialist Party, People Before Profit Alliance and, occasionally, the Greens.

He said: ‘The nature of this grouping means that support levels do not usually translate as neatly into seat gains as would be the case with parties such as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

‘Vote transfer levels across this grouping will generally not prove to be as strong as the extent of intra-party vote transfer levels enjoyed by the larger political parties, who in turn often enjoy a “seat bonus” at most general election contests.’

He said votes for Independents located in the centre-right of the political spectrum were probably more likely to be transferred to the two main parties than to leftleaning independent candidates.

‘In a similar vein, Renua Ireland and the centre-right independents are probably less likely to draw large numbers of transfers from left-wing independents than candidates from Sinn Féin, People Before Profit or the Anti-Austerity Alliance/Socialist Party are.

‘Votes won by the “Independents and Others” grouping tend to be shared across a larger number of candidates than would be the case with the larger political parties, with a significant number of these candidates also having little or no chance of winning seats,’ Dr Kavanagh said.

‘Learn how to bounce back’