Labour’s Eoin Holmes has done spectacularly badly in the Meath East by-election. Holmes ran in part on a social issues agenda. He made lots of noise about Labour’s stance on abortion and same-sex marriage, and had Ivana Bacik (pictured) as a prominent part of his campaign.

It did him no good whatsoever.

Clearly voters in Meath East had no interest in abortion or gay marriage and it is astounding Holmes should have thought otherwise. This was an election about economic issues first and foremost, just as the next General Election will be.

This will not stop Labour pushing its radical social agenda, but it should tell Fine Gael that outside of certain middle class enclaves there are no votes in that agenda, not even for Labour itself.

It is true, of course, that Fine Gael’s candidate, Helen McEntee, was not harmed by Fine Gael’s support for abortion legislation. But there are probably two main reasons for this.

The main one, to repeat the point above, is that most people are not interested in the social issues at election time one way or the other.

A second reason is that pro-life groups made no real attempt to make an issue of abortion in the by-election because of the difficulty of speaking about the suicide ground for abortion given the tragic circumstances of the death of Shane McEntee, Helen’s father.

But another point is that Helen McEntee didn’t run on a social issues agenda and didn’t ask to be judged on that agenda. Eoin Holmes did, and he bombed.