Bertie Ahern looks assured to cling to the post of Irish Prime Minister for a third term after a cliffhanger election campaign.

As counting got under way across Ireland at 9am today, an exit poll suggested that Mr Ahern's Fianna Fail party had secured 41.6 per cent - an unexpectedly large share of the vote.

If born out by the ballot boxes, this is would deliver Fianna Fail's sixth straight election victory. It represents slightly more than the party polled in the 2002 general election, when it won 81 seats in the 166 seat Dail, and went on to lead a coalition government - although political analysts suggest that in the event, the final result may not be as strong as in 2002.

The win would be a personal triumph for Mr Ahern, to recover after negative publicity about his personal finances gave Fianna Fail a disastrous start to the campaign.

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Today’s result confirms Bertie Ahern as the Republic’s most successful leader ever - truly he is, as his nickname has it, the "Teflon Taoiseach"

David Sharrock

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Mr Ahern repeatedly had to fend off questions about his financial affairs, and rebut a determined effort by the two main opposition parties to oust him.

He concentrated during the campaign on his record in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland, and stewarding his country's economy to become one of Europe's richest.

The opposition party Fine Gael, which had hoped to lead an Alliance for Change alternative government with the Labour Party, polled 26.3 per cent of the vote in the Landsdowne Market Research exit poll. Labour secured 9.9 per cent, down one per cent, the poll said.

Fine Gael was not admitting defeat, however. "This is yet another poll and my experience has been that they tend to understate Fine Gael and overstate Fianna Fail," said Frank Flannery, the party's election director.

The exit poll placed Sinn Fein up 1 per cent on 7.3 per cent - far short of the breakthrough it had been hoping for - and the Greens up one per cent on 4.8 per cent.

The 41.6 per cent finding for Fianna Fail was up on the 38 per cent the party managed in the last opinion poll of the campaign.

In a more worrying development for Mr Ahern, the Progressive Democrats - a pro-business party which was the junior partner in his coalition over the last five years - saw its support fall by more than a third to 2.6 per cent.

Mr Ahern may yet have to search for a new coalition partner in order to guarantee a parliamentary majority for his government.

"It is going to definitely be an extremely close, long process," said Roger Jupp, the head of the polling company.

"Bertie Ahern is going to be taoiseach," said Noel Whelan, an analyst. "The question is, who is going to be in government with Fianna Fail."

First results from the count are due this afternoon. In some areas however the count is likely to continue long into the night, and may have to resume tomorrow.

The exit poll, commissioned by the Irish broadcaster RTE, interviewd 3,200 voters outside 166 polling stations across all 43 constituencies yesterday. It has a margin of error of 2.5 per cent, although in the 2002 election it was accurate to within one per cent.

As the morning wore on, there was more good news for Mr Ahern personally. With a fifth of the boxes opened in his four-seat constituency of Dublin Central, he was polling around 31.5 per cent of the vote, with Labour TD Joe Costello on 14.9 per cent, Tony Gregory, a veteran independent TD, on 14.1 per cent, and Pascal Donohoe of Fine Gael on 9.5 per cent. Sinn Fein and the Greens also contested the constituency.

Mr Ahern is already the second-longest-serving taoiseach in Irish history behind Eamon de Valera, the founder of Fianna Fail, who won seven elections between 1932 and 1957.

Ireland has a complex electoral system of proportional representation that allows people to vote for local candidates rather than national parties, and to rank the candidates in order of preference. This means that ballots must be counted up to a dozen times, as votes are transferred from the most popular and least popular candidates to others.

While the final number of seats won by parties broadly reflects their share of the vote, it is not an exact science. The fact that Fine Gael and Labour campaigned so closely together this time might give their alliance a slight advantage when votes are transferred, analysts say.

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