The arrival of my polling card yesterday indicates that the general election in Ireland on Friday 29th November is approaching rapidly, so I thought I’d give a rundown of the 16 candidates who will appear on the ballot paper for my constituency, Kildare North.
Kildare North will return 5 TDs (Teachta Dála, or Deputies), one more than last time because of the population growth in the area. The current TDs are Réada Cronin (SF; Sinn Féin), Bernard Durkan (FG; Fine Gael), James Lawless (FF; Fianna Fáil) and Catherine Murphy (SD; Social Democrats). The latter is retiring so will not be standing at this election. The current government is a coalition of FG, FF and Green Party TDs.
The Single Transferable Vote system is used, meaning that voters have a single ballot paper on which they rank the candidates in order of preference. The candidate with the lowest number of first-preference votes is eliminated and their second preference votes redistributed. Candidates are thus progressively eliminated until the requisite number of TDs is selected.
There are three FG candidates: Bernard Durkan, Joe Neville and Evie Sammon). They are based in Maynooth, Leixlip and Celbridge respectively so are presumably hoping that local voting will work out in their favour. The idea presumably is that Bernard Durkan would be first choice in Maynooth, etc. However, I’ve already had canvassers arguing that I should put Joe Neville first. I won’t be voting for any of the candidates anyway, but I would be very amused if their decision to put three candidates forward backfired. Incidentally, Bernard Durkan is 79 and has been a TD since 1982. The leaflet I got from him promised “New Energy” for Kildare North. Yeah, right…
There are two FF candidates, James Lawless and Naoise Ó Cearúil; the latter was elected to the County Council this summer. I find FF indistinguishable from FG. Together or separately these two parties have governed the Republic since its creation and a change is long overdue.
The two Sinn Féin candidates are the incumbent Réada Cronin and Caroline Hogan. I haven’t seen any posters for Réada Cronin up in Maynooth, so I assume the campaign team is saving their resources for elsewhere. Maynooth is not traditionally an SF stronghold.
With Catherine Murphy not standing, the Social Democrats ran a process to select a replacement candidate, which was won by Aidan Farrelly (who actually works at Maynooth University) who is the official SD candidate. That doesn’t end the story, however. Former SD member Bill Clear is standing as an Independent because he didn’t get selected. Adding to the fact that Catherine Murphy had a considerable personal following, this looks like a bit of a mess for the Social Democrats whose vote will probaboly be reduced and split. It may be in order to capitalize on this that SF added a candidate; they only fielded one last time round.
Now we’re into the (probable) also-rans. Angela Feeney is standing for Labour. She is an active member of the Council, representing Maynooth, but it’s not clear whether she has reach over the rest of the constituency. Vincent Martin represents the Greens who haven’t previously been strong here. The Green Party in Ireland is nowhere near as left-wing as corresponding parties in the UK and elsewere. It often seems like the bicycle division of Fine Gael. Leah Whelan is standing for People Before Profit – Solidarity, the only really left-wing party standing in Kildare North.
Then we have we have a number of generally disagreeable (to me) fringe party candidates: Una O’Connor is standing for Aontú, a reactionary splinter group of people previously in Sinn Féin and Sean Gill for the Centre Party of Ireland, an ironic name for what is far-right splinter group of FG previously known as Renua. Gerry Waters is standing from the Irish Freedom Party. He was struck off the medical register for refusing to administer vaccines and has unsupportable far-right opinions on other issues. Last and by all means least is Avril Corcoran who is candidate for The Irish People, a far-right nationalist party which is part of the National Alliance of like-minded bigots.
It’s probably obvious which 11 candidates I’m not going to be voting for, but I’ll leave you to guess in what order I will rank the other 5!
P.S. LinkedIn didn’t like this post:
In the Dark 