In the 2002 general election, former Tanaiste Dick Spring failed to get elected in Kerry North, despite polling almost 9,000 first-preference votes, thousands more than many successful candidates had received in other constituencies. In the 2007 general election, Cyprian Brady was elected in Dublin Central despite only receiving 939 firstpreference votes, 13% of the vote received in adjoining Dublin North Central by Ivor Callelly, who failed to be elected. However, Brady's first-preference vote is not the lowest ever received by a successful Dail candidate.

For that record, we have to go back to the general election of August 1923. This took place just after the bitter Civil War, and the anti-Treaty Republicans ran a number of candidates in the five-seat constituency of Clare. Its clear frontrunner, however, was Eamon de Valera, the leading politician on the anti-Treaty side, who had been elected unopposed for the constituency in the previous three Dail elections. He was joined on the Sinn Fein ticket by TD Brian O'Higgins, who had also been elected unopposed in the same three elections, and Frank Barrett. Not surprisingly, de Valera topped the poll with an enormous 17,762 votes . . . more than twice his Cumann na nGaedheal rival, Eoin MacNeill, and almost three times the quota. Barrett polled just 482 first-preference votes, while O'Higgins fared even worse with just 114.

However, de Valera's surplus was so large that it was inevitable he would elect one of his running mates. His transfers favoured O'Higgins, who took part in the 1916 Rising and was responsible for seeing that the Sinn Fein or Republican courts were first attempted in his original West Clare constituency. O'Higgins got more than 4,900 of de Valera's transfers, compared to just over 1,900 for Barrett, propelling him from bottom of the heap to well ahead of those candidates contesting the remaining three seats. When Barrett was finally eliminated, his transfers elected O'Higgins on the 12th count. O'Higgins ended up with 7,943 votes, 69 times more than he got in first-preference votes, thanks to the blessings of PR-STV.

O'Higgins has an incredible record in that he was elected to the first four Dala, only securing 114 first-preference votes in the process. In the first three general elections he was, like many SF candidates, returned unopposed, and it was in the fourth that he received the raft of transfers from de Valera. In that 1923 election, he lay joint last of the 15 candidates after the first count; the other candidate, who also received 114 votes, actually lost his statutory financial deposit. Patrick MacNamara of the Labour Party received 20 times more firstpreference votes than O'Higgins in that election in the same constituency and failed to be elected, highlighting the weird and wonderful workings of the PR-STV electoral system.

O'Higgins, like the other Republican candidates in that election, including de Valera, did not take his seat in the fourth Dail. Three years later, although he had been elected on the back of de Valera's transfers, the uncompromising Republican did not follow his constituency colleague by leaving Sinn Fein and joining the new Fianna Fail party. In the general election of June 1927, he stood in Clare as a Sinn Fein candidate. Although on this occasion he increased his vote more than tenfold to over 1,400, he failed to be elected.

He went on to become president of Sinn Fein between 1931 and 1933. He was editor of the