1959 Irish presidential election

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use Hiberno-English Template:Infobox election The 1959 Irish presidential election was held on Wednesday, 17 June 1959. Éamon de Valera, then Taoiseach, was elected as president of Ireland. A referendum proposed by de Valera to replace the electoral system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote with first-past-the-post voting which was held on the same day was defeated by 48.2% to 51.8%.

Nomination process

Under Article 12 of the Constitution of Ireland, a candidate for president may be nominated by:

• at least twenty of the then 207 serving members of the Houses of the Oireachtas, or
• at least four of 31 councils of the administrative counties, including county boroughs, or
• themselves, in the case of a former or retiring president.

Outgoing president Seán T. O'Kelly had served two terms and was ineligible to serve again. On 27 April, the Minister for Local Government signed the ministerial order opening nominations, with noon on 19 May as the deadline for nominations, and 17 June set as the date for a contest.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> All Irish citizens on the Dáil electoral register were eligible to vote.

Éamon de Valera, who had served as President of Dáil Éireann and President of the Irish Republic from 1919 to 1922 during the Irish revolutionary period, as President of the Executive Council from 1932 to 1937, and as Taoiseach from 1937 to 1948, from 1951 to 1954, and was serving again from 1957, was nominated by Fianna Fáil on 12 May.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He had served as Fianna Fáil's leader since its foundation in 1926. Later reports revealed that de Valera requested Oscar Traynor, the Minister for Justice, to issue him with a certificate of citizenship, as he had been born in the United States. This was kept confidential.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Seán Mac Eoin, a Fine Gael TD who had been the party's candidate in the 1945 presidential election, was nominated again by the party on 15 May.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

During the campaign, the far-right micro-party Lia Fáil called on its followers to support Seán Mac Eoin over de Valera. The party gave 25 reasons for this position, with some of those reasons being that de Valera "was an alien" (de Valera had been born in the United States, but had been raised and living in Ireland since the age of 2), was a puppet of the British, that he was "the darling" of Protestants, Freemasons and the British Army, and that "his satanic lust for power motivates every act of his life". The paper's reasons for supporting Mac Eoin were because he was "an honest-to-God Irishman of our flesh and blood whose father and mother we know" and his military background.<ref name="Madden">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Alan Kinsella Podcast">Template:Cite podcast</ref><ref name="Madden Times">Template:Cite news</ref>

Patrick McCartan, who had also been a candidate in the 1945 election and had served as a senator for Clann na Poblachta from 1948 to 1951, was nominated by two county councils only, short of the four required for nomination.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Eoin O'Mahony also sought and failed to secure a nomination by county councils.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Éamon de Valera was inaugurated as president on 25 June.

Result

Results by constituency

Constituency	De Valera		Mac Eoin
	Votes	%	Votes	%
Carlow–Kilkenny	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|20,023	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|58.0	14,521	42.0
Cavan	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|13,912	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|56.6	10,669	43.4
Clare	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|19,095	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|65.0	10,270	35.0
Cork Borough	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|19,390	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|55.8	15,340	44.2
Cork East	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,117	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|56.6	9,295	43.4
Cork North	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,754	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|54.2	10,793	45.8
Cork South	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|11,909	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|53.5	10,367	46.5
Cork West	10,235	48.5	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|10,861	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|51.5
Donegal East	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|15,521	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|69.1	6,934	30.9
Donegal West	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|9,616	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|62.8	5,700	37.2
Dublin County	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|19,449	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|52.9	17,292	47.1
Dublin North-East	6,133	47.9	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|6,682	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|52.1
Dublin North-Central	16,417	48.5	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|17,446	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|51.5
Dublin North-West	7,707	46.3	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|8,941	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|53.7
Dublin South-Central	11,819	49.6	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,010	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|50.4
Dublin South-East	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|10,363	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|50.8	10,034	49.2
Dublin South-West	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|16,195	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|51.0	15,551	49.0
Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|16,911	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|53.0	14,982	47.0
Galway North	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|9,037	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|62.7	5,368	37.3
Galway South	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|11,710	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|66.6	5,868	33.4
Galway West	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|10,134	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|69.0	4,548	31.0
Kerry North	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,361	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|61.7	7,680	38.3
Kerry South	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|7,472	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|57.7	5,481	42.3
Kildare	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|10,794	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|52.4	9,791	47.6
Laois–Offaly	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|20,059	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|58.8	14,045	41.2
Limerick East	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|15,942	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|59.2	11,007	40.8
Limerick West	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,918	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|62.4	7,799	37.6
Longford–Westmeath	16,234	48.1	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|17,534	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|51.9
Louth	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|13,646	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|55.2	11,076	44.8
Mayo North	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|9,219	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|62.0	5,651	38.0
Mayo South	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,925	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|55.1	10,538	44.9
Meath	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|13,940	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|58.9	9,710	41.1
Monaghan	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|11,028	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|60.0	7,361	40.0
Roscommon	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,188	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|53.5	10,599	46.5
Sligo–Leitrim	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|16,081	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|52.7	14,449	47.3
Tipperary North	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|12,253	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|60.2	8,104	39.8
Tipperary South	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|16,568	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|58.2	11,900	41.8
Waterford	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|15,679	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|61.7	9,715	38.3
Wexford	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|17,290	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|55.9	13,667	44.1
Wicklow	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|10,959	bgcolor="Template:Party color"|57.9	7,957	42.1
Total	538,003	56.3	417,536	43.7