The nominated Social Democrats leader was the most mentioned of the seven party leaders on Twitter during last night’s General Election debate, according to data compiled for RTÉ News by the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology.
Stephen Donnelly was referenced in 3,183 tweets during the televised two-hour head-to-head with the six other party leaders on RTÉ One Television.
In total, there were 59,233 tweets posted between 9.30pm and 11.30pm that were directly related to the debate and/or the General Election.
The ADAPT data also shows that Mr Donnelly generated the strongest positive reaction on Twitter during that time.
52% of tweets mentioning the Wicklow TD expressed sentiment that could be considered to be positive, with 20% negative.
The next most mentioned candidate was Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, who was referenced in 2,220 tweets.
Sentiment in those posts was more or less equally one third positive and one third negative, with the balance neutral.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny was the third most referred leader in tweets during the debate, with negative sentiment at 46%, slightly higher than the positive sentiment at 33%.
In fourth place in the table of most mentioned leaders was Tánaiste Joan Burton.
She was referenced in 1,932 tweets, with 43% of those negative and 34% negative.
Richard Boyd Barrett was the fifth most talked about leader, with 1,367 mentions. 44% of those expressed positive sentiment, with 28% negative.
Overall, the Social Democrats and the Labour Party had around the same number of mentions during the course of the debate.
Both recorded around 1,800 party mentions, with Fine Gael coming in, in third position with around 1,600.
Notably, despite their absence from the debate, the Green Party was the fourth most referenced party during the seven-way debate at the University of Limerick.
When it came to issues, healthcare was the most mentioned topic by those referencing the debate and/or the election during the event, followed by finance, crime/justice and housing.
The SentiWords system developed by ADAPT for RTÉ News uses a sophisticated combination of keywords and common election-related hashtags to record the volume of tweets around candidates, parties and issues, and measure the sentiment expressed in them.
There are around one million Twitter users in Ireland, around a third of whom use it daily.
However, when it comes to political issues traffic on the micro-blogging site is often dominated and therefore potentially skewed by political activists and media.
Meanwhile, Twitter said there were 69,281 tweets around the General Election between 9.05pm and 11.40pm last night - the period from just before the debate began until just after it ended.
There were over 69k Tweets sent during tonight's #leadersdebate #GE16 pic.twitter.com/Br0zTkBkl3
— Twitter Dublin (@TwitterDublin) February 16, 2016
Data compiled by Twitter found that Joan Burton was the most mentioned leader during the course of the debate.
The next most talked about leader on the micro-blogging platform was the Taoiseach, followed by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams and Social Democrats nominated leader Stephen Donnelly.
Lucinda Creighton, Micheál Martin and Richard Boyd Barrett came in fifth, sixth and seventh places respectively.
On the party front, Fine Gael got the most mentions, followed by Labour, the Social Democrats, the Green Party, Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Renua.
By RTÉ's Science and Technology Correspondent Will Goodbody
