After hours of futile searching for a graphic on the internet I decided to take a break and surf my favorite on-line site, The Irish Times. As I was scanning '97 election results I was astonished to find a graphic, it was merely a chart but better than anything else I'd been able to find.

The section is a special edition tracking the election called, Election '97 Online. There were charts of party seats both after the last election and before this election, and also a break down of alliance support. These really aren't that impressive so I decided to continue to scan in search of something more interesting. As I came to the bottom of the page, I encountered a map of Ireland broken up into it's individual Constituencies. To my suprice as I dragged my mouse over the map I noticed that each Constituency provided a defferent link. This was a very amazing graphic so I decided to link to the Consituency of Carlow-Kilkenny, out of sheer curiosity.

Following this link, there were similar results but limited to the results for the individual constituency. These results included number elected and number of newly elected results from the '97 General Election. There was also a chartual breakdown of party percentage of the vote. These were still only charts and I was yet to be that impressed.

Down the side I noticed a link to the polls, and decided to follow it. Here I found a pie graph of a previous weeks Irish Times Opinion Poll. Now this was a very effective graphic, which made the results tremendously easy to visualize. From this graph it was evident that the strongest party was Fianna Fail, but there was still a high percentage of undecided vote. I found this graph so effective that I thought it would be worth it to link to the article accompanying it.

Now here is where I found an extremely impressive web site. There were pie graphs on party support, probablility of voting, and coalition preferences. These pie charts were all very well labeled and effectively done. They were done with bright and eye catching colors which really made the results stand out at you and be all the more clear. It was obvious which coalitions Irish people find the most acceptable. The labeling and use of color as well as the form of the graphs made them easy to understand. This was extremely visually effective. To my surprise, I was also able to link to line graphs on party support and leader satisfaction. These graphs used different textures in an extremely effective way so that you could really visualize leader satisfiaction and party support, by year and leader or party.