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| - A general election surge in support for Sinn Fein, once the political wing of the IRA, on Sunday upset Ireland's traditional two-party grip on power. Irish officials were counting votes following Saturday's election with an exit poll forecasting Prime Minister Leo Varadkar's incumbent Fine Gael party facing a three-way dead heat. An Ipsos MRBI survey of around 5,000 voters predicted that centre-right rivals Fine Gael and Fianna Fail and leftists Sinn Fein had each received 22 per cent of first preference votes. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have traditionally taken turns in power. "It seems that we have now a three party system," said Varadkar at the counting centre for his Dublin West constituency. "That is going to make forming a government quite difficult." Counting is expected to continue on Monday, with analysts saying it could take two to three days before full results are known. Varadkar failed to take the first of four seats as the count unfolded, with a Sinn Fein candidate announced as the first new lawmaker in his region. Varadkar is still expected to take one of the remaining seats once vote transfers are accounted for, but it remains a sharp blow to morale for the premier. Ireland uses a single transferable vote system to elect multiple deputies from each of the 39 constituencies. At 2100 GMT The Irish Times reported 33 of the 159 seats in the Dail, the Republic of Ireland's lower house of parliament, were filled with 23 going to Sinn Fein. But due to ballot transfers, an overall seat forecast cannot be extrapolated from the exit poll or from the early set of lawmakers elected. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald arrived at the main count centre in the capital to a huge fanfare from supporters and was returned to her central Dublin seat on Sunday evening. "This is changing the shape of an old Irish politics. This is not a transient thing, this is just the beginning," she told reporters. In the last election in 2016, Sinn Fein got 13.8 percent of the vote. McDonald said the two other main parties were "still in a state of denial, they're still not listening to what the people have said". The 50-year-old said she ideally wanted "a government with no Fianna Fail or no Fine Gael in it" and had made contact with smaller parties, but added: "I will talk to and listen to everybody." Sinn Fein -- which advocates joining Ireland and the British territory of Northern Ireland -- did not field enough candidates to form a majority government. Varadkar reiterated his campaign position that he would not form a coalition with Sinn Fein because of their past links to the Irish Republican Army paramilitary. "Nobody can be forced into some sort of forced marriage or forced coalition," he said. Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has previously said he would not back Fine Gael in a "grand coalition". But on Sunday night seemed to soften his stance against a potential coalition with Sinn Fein. "This is not just a change election -- it has changed Irish elections themselves for the foreseeable future," wrote columnist Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times newspaper. "For a huge chunk of voters, change is being seen as something that comes from outside the system." Sinn Fein was "once inextricable from the IRA" and considered a "pariah" he said, but younger voters in particular were drawn by their promise of addressing income inequality. Notably, the exit poll put Sinn Fein comfortably ahead with voters aged 18-24 and 25-34, with support at 32 percent in each age bracket. But even once the make-up of the new chamber emerges, it could take much longer to cobble together a government. Following Ireland's 2016 election it took 70 days before a new minority coalition government was formed under Fine Gael. jts/har
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