Will Ireland be invaded by the UK before 2030 in the event of a Sinn Fein Taoiseach in next elections
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N/a if no Sinn Fein Taoiseach Yes if afterwards and before 2030 UK (or a successor state) launches a military campaign to occupy territory on the island of Ireland not currently within Northern Ireland. See this article for an argument that it may happen https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2022/0511/1297303-ireland-britain-sinn-fein-conservatives-imperialism/
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It's probably even worse than what you say given there's not going to be a 100% chance of a Sinn Fein Taoiseach before 2030 anyway, so it's not just the lack of monetary interest that is causing this.
This market is interesting, because it illustrates a case where it is very unlikely that its price accurately reflects the sentiments of market participants. I'm sure someone has come up with a clever name for this, and, thinking about it, I guess it probably applies in non-prediction markets as well. The issue arises when a market is a long way from expiry, and is moderately but not extremely mispriced (say, 10-20% away from the real price). At the time of writing, this market is sitting at 16%. Idiotic clickbait headline from someone who should know better notwithstanding, I'm sure that the vast majority of people would put the chance of this resolving 'YES' within a rounding error of 0. So, why isn't the market lower? The mechanism for correcting the price should be that I can profit by doing so. There are two ways I can make money by correcting a mispriced market: First, the market can resolve in my favour. This will happen here - but not for another eight years (because I'm betting *against* the event occurring, I have to wait out the clock). Even for real money, 16% over 8 years is a poor return; it's just not worth the opportunity cost. So I won't be hodling my short. Second, I expect that lots of other people will agree with me, driving the price down, after which I can cash out early - effectively, the 'greater fool' theory, except that in this case I *agree* with the other participants about the 'true' value of the market! However, for this to work I have to feel that I either have some 'special' or inside knowledge that means I'm better placed to recognize the mispriced market than every/most of these other chumps, and get in there first. But this question is so obviously 'NO' that no-one outside of Boston could honestly bet YES (and, so far, no-one has). So, I don't think there are going to be any greater 'fools' to take advantage of. So I can't cash out early, so I shouldn't bet. And thus, the price asymptotally approaches an artificial floor of the 'real expected probability' (i.e. 0-1%) plus the opportunity cost of holding till 2030, plus some minor bonus of 'greater fools' getting out early - because after a certain point, it's too expensive to pick up even the free money. If I'm right about the expiry being an issue here, I'd expect the price to start dipping again when we get much closer to 2030 (assuming this market and this website still exist then...) when people start seeing the opportunity of quick & easy returns. So, is this a 'failure' of the market in that the price doesn't accurately reflect what people think the real probability is? Or is this just how markets are expected to deal with long-term contracts, and I should be a lot less certain than I am? I'm going to write up this scenario in a bit more detail and then go and ask some professional commidity traders if they see this play out in 'real' markets.

@JohnRoxton A tweet from EY reminded me that I never updated this comment. From chatting to energy traders, this issue doesn't really seem to apply in their world, for two main reasons.

TL;DR: Comparisons to commodity markets are not useful or particularly relevant here. This was not a productive avenue of exploration.

1) Taking a position in a 'real' market is a much bigger deal than betting on Manifold (obviously - but the scale may not be obvious). Suppose that you want to bet that the price of TTF in 2030 will 'go up' vs the current price. I can't actually find any evidence that anyone has done this outside of some Gazprom-run LTCs, but the last public price for a 2028 trade is ~€30/MWh. The smallest trade you can normally make in that market is 5MW, so you're looking at 5 x 24 x 365 x 30 = €1.3m notional volume. Because this position is so far in the future the collateral requirements for this will be massive - that position will likely have massive swings in profitability until it closes (nb I'm using 'collateral' here as a shorthand for whatever risk mechanism is used to allow the trade to take place, which will vary depending on where and with whom you're trading). This massively increases the opportunity cost of such a trade and makes it very unlikely for it to be the best EV of your cash even if you're 100% accurate!

Which, according to my logic in the post above, ought to make the pricing even worse in these futures markets than it is in Manifold because it's harder for people to correct it, which brings us on to:

2) The pricing in these markets isn't as wrong.... because it just doesn't exist. As I said above, there are no public trades available for 2030 TTF. Some firms will have done private deals but those will be directly linked to securing physical supply and have motives that aren't 100% profit-related (eg they've been made by or at the demand of govts who are just spending other people's money and don't care much about value). Internally, firms will have their own predictions of the value but they won't be sharing those and there's no profit motive to contribute that knowledge to a market for reason (1).

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