Candidates for the 2019 Dáil By-Elections: An Overview

Posted on September 12, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 12th September 2019

In the May 2019 European Elections Deputies Clare Daly and Frances Fitzgerald won seats in the Dublin constituency, while Deputies Mick Wallace and Billy Kelleher won seats in the South constituency. This means that their seats in the Dublin Fingal, Dublin Mid-West, Wexford and Cork North-Central Dáil constituencies are now vacant and must be filled by a by-election in each of these constituencies before the end of this year, unless a General Election is called in the intervening period.

In this post, I will be detailing the names of the candidates who have been selected to contest the Dáil by-elections in these constituencies

Currently there are twenty nine candidates listed here – eleven are female (37.9%) and eighteen are male (62.1%). This list includes three Senators (10.3%) and seventeen City/County Councillors (58.6%), including three former Dáil deputies.

As and when new candidates are confirmed between now and these elections – and as soon as possible after I become aware of this information – I will be updating this post to include their names.

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City and County Council Members – Co-options and Changes since the 2019 Local Elections

Posted on September 2, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 2nd September 2019 (with subsequent updates)

The 2019 Local Elections resulted in the election of 949 City and County Councillors. Since that election took place on 24th May 2019, I have estimated that 7 of the successful candidates in these elections (0.74% of the total number) have either stood down, been “promoted”. or have sadly passed away. 

5 of the former Councillors in this group are male (71.4%) and 2 are female (28.6%).

As Table 1 shows, 2 (33.3%) of the co-options/new Councillors are male, while 4 are female (66.7%). This means that the total number of female City and County Councillors has increased slightly (relative to the number elected in May 2019) from 224 to 226.

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The 2019 Local Elections: A Geographer’s Overview

Posted on May 28, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 28th March 2019

The 2019 City and County Council elections took place on 28th May 2019.

Perhaps the most notable trend at this election was to do with voter turnout. The average turnout level for the 2019 Local Elections is estimated to stand at 49.7%. This means that more than half the of the registered electorate did not turn out to vote in a local election contest for first time in the State’s history. To me, that’s a disaster. Furthermore, there seems to have been a notable drop in turnout levels, over and above the national average level of decline, in some working class areas, resulting in some very low turnout levels in electoral areas such as Tallaght South (26.9%), where barely over a quarter of the people, who were on the electoral register, turned out to vote.

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Friday’s Elections: Why Voting Matters

Posted on May 23, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 23rd May 2019

This year, local, European and referendum elections are taking place on Friday 24th May (TOMORROW!!!), while voters in Cork City, Waterford and Limerick also get to vote on a plebiscite on whether they will have a directly elected mayor for those local authorities. The results of these contests will be determined by many factors – some of these being local, some being national and some even having a European focus – but voter turnout levels on the day will also have a major bearing. Voting matters and – in this post – I will discuss why.

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Local Elections 2019: What is the Most Competitive Constituency?

Posted on May 23, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 23rd May 2019

Before I get (possibly deserved) flak from people who are fighting tooth and nail for seats in constituencies that are deemed as “less competitive” here, please (i) accept my apologies in advance, (ii) note that this is a simple number crunch, which cannot capture the realities of the ground game in different electoral areas – something that only politicians/voters in those electoral areas will know much about!

What is the most competitive local election constituency in the state, looking ahead to tomorrow’s local election contests? This post will attempt to offer a “rough” estimate of constituency competitiveness and – in order to do so – will involve the creation of an index – the Kavanagh Constituency Competitiveness Factor (KCCF) – which will allow for a potential ranking of electoral areas based on their individual scores.   

There are various ways that the relative competitiveness of a constituency can be measured, as will be discussed in this post.

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Links to 2019 Local Elections Candidate Selection pages on this Website

Posted on May 21, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 21st May 2019

To make it easier for readers to access all the pages relating to candidate selections for the (upcoming) 2019 City and County Council elections quickly, I will list all the relevant pages in this posts.

NB: If you do use this website/any of these pages to gain information for your work (e.g. media reports/newspaper articles, academic research…) please make sure to cite/reference this site. The information gathered on these page has taken a lot of time to do (over thirteen months work) on my part.

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Posted in Candidates, Candidates Local Elections 2019, Gender, Local Elections 2019, Retirements, Young candidates | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Political Reform in Ireland: My Personal Electoral and Political Reform Agenda

Posted on May 20, 2019 by

Adrian Kavanagh, 20th May 2019

As we approach the upcoming local, European and referendum elections on May 24th and as this is “Elections Week” for the Geographical Society of Ireland’s Year of Geography series, I have decided to mark both these events by (again) revisiting my earlier post on what I would consider my political reform priorities to be.

In my opinion, Ireland’s record on political reform very much amounts to a case of “something done but a lot more to be do”, which is rather disappointing given that there was a significant opportunity space in play to bring in political reform measures in the wake of the Economic Recession in the late 2000s. The perception, to a large degree, is that much of the reform effort across the 2010s has been driven by the belief that the Irish people had a very negative opinion of politics and that the main thing they really wanted to see changed in Irish politics was a significant overall reduction in politician numbers. However, the experience of the past few years has shown that while people may like the idea of fewer politicians in theory, they are less enthusiastic when faced with the practicalities of this. This was seen in the rejection of the Seanad Referendum in October 2013 and negative reactions to the abolition of Town/Borough Councils and the reduction in County Councillor numbers in rural areas ahead of the 2014 Local Elections.

Ultimately my sense is that more democracy – assuming that cost/benefit concerns are addressed and that real power invested at all levels, local as well as national – is better than less democracy.

My approach in terms of what I stress in terms of a political reform agenda is to be as pragmatic as popular and avoid populist and knee-jerk approaches to these issues. Reflecting the 5 C’s that act as barriers against female participation in electoral politics, I should we can talk about a different cohort of 5 C’s – the 5 C’s, or principles, that should shape all political reform processes.

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