No Irish Party Seen Emerging With Majority : Europe: In vote on abortion issues, only the one allowing travel appears to be winning.

LONDON —  Early returns from Ireland’s national election suggested late Thursday that no political party would gain a majority to govern and that a referendum allowing legal abortion in special cases would be defeated.

The tallies indicated that Prime Minister Albert Reynolds’ Fianna Fail party, Ireland’s largest, would lose several seats. The No. 2 party, Fine Gael, also was slipping, while the No. 3 Labor Party appeared to be sharply up, the early results showed.

In the separate, three-part abortion referendum, preliminary counts showed voters rejecting the legalization of abortion, even when the mother’s life was endangered; they also apparently would not allow the dissemination of information on the procedure. But voters seemed to favor the right of women to travel abroad to undergo an abortion.

As for the ruling of the nation, preliminary results suggested that Fianna Fail would remain the country’s largest party, with about 70 seats out of the 166 in the Dail, the Irish Parliament. That would leave it without an overall majority. Fine Gael, under party leader John Bruton, is expected to win close to 50 seats.

The Labor Party, with its popular young leader Dick Spring, was expected to double the number of seats it holds to about 30. Spring’s party, therefore, could emerge as the kingmaker in a new coalition, because the top officials of the two leading parties both insist they want to lead a new government.

Irish voters went to the polls on Wednesday in a national election, called early because of the collapse of the last coalition government under Fianna Fail’s Reynolds. He served in office for only nine months before he fell out with his coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, a small faction led by Des O’Malley; Reynolds provoked his problems when he insulted O’Malley, then refused to apologize.

Under Ireland’s complicated proportional representation system, vote-counting is done by hand. It is laborious and slow. Final results on national parliamentary seats and the abortion issue probably will not become available until today.

But even the initial projections suggested that the election had buttressed some would-be political dynasties with these results:

* Former Prime Minister Charles Haughey’s son, Sean, seemed assured of a Dail seat in Dublin.

* Eamon O’Cuiv, grandson of former President Eamon de Valera, was winning in Galway.

* Sile de Valera, another Eamon grandchild, was fighting to regain her place in County Clare.

* Eithne Fitzgerald, daughter-in-law of former Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald, seemed to be doing well in Dublin.