Adrian Kavanagh

First posted 1st July 2013 with updates as new candidate nominations announced. Any links in this post are to online announcements of candidate selections and are not specifically links to candidate webpages.

The first of my rolling blog posts in which I detailed the latest information as to candidate selections relating to the different political parties and grouping and/or candidate declarations (as in the case of the non-party grouping). The rule of thumb was that I would add party candidates only after they have been officially selected to run for the party at a selection convention or by some other means. The first post in the series outlined candidate selections for the Green Party.

The Green Party currently has two County Councillors and eleven Borough/Town Councillors (following the defection of Brian Meaney to Fianna Fail and Niamh Fitzgibbon to Fine Gael). After the party’s significant loss of local representation at the 2009 local election and its loss of all national representation at the 2011 General Election, a strong performance in the 2014 local elections will be vital in relation to the party’s rebuilding process after the fall out of its period in government between June 2007 and January 2011.

Forty seven officially selected 2014 Local Elections candidates for the Green Party across forty seven different conventions/electoral areas (34.3% of all electoral areas).  A significant proportion of these candidates (twenty one) are contesting local electoral areas in the Dublin region. This is down significantly on the seventy seven candidates who contested the 2009 City and County Council elections for the party, although the number of Green Party female candidates has only fallen by two. The party is not contesting a number of electoral areas in which it previously held seats, such as Muinebeag (includes the old Borris constituency), Naas and Lucan (although former Green Party TD/councillor Paul Gogarty is contesting Lucan as an independent candidate).

Female candidates account for fifteen of the Green Party candidates (31.9%) – in 2009 17 female candidates accounted for 22.1% of all the Green Party candidates in that election.

The party’s two sitting County Councillors, Marianne Butler and Malcolm Noonan, (who are also both Borough/Town Councillor), have been selected to contest the 2014 elections, as has Mark Dearey, who is currently a member of Dundalk Town Council and who won a seat in Dundalk South at the 2009 Local Elections before becoming a member of Seanad Eireann some time after that. Two other Town Councillors, Shane Fitzgerald (Celbridge-Leixlip) and Danny Forde (Wexford), are also contesting the election as noted below.

The list of Green Party candidates includes:

Charlie Ridgway was initially selected to contest Pembroke-South Dock, but has withdrawn from the contest and Claire Byrne will now be the Green Party candidate for that electoral area.

Many thanks to Roderic O’Gorman, as well as to the Green Party headquarters and Marianne Butler, for providing a number of these Green Party candidate selection details.