Adrian Kavanagh, First posted 7th November 2018, with updates as new candidate nominations announced. Any links in this post are to online announcements of candidate selections – there will be no specific links to candidate web pages.

The sixth of my series of rolling blog posts, in which I detail 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 here is that I will add party candidates in most cases only after they have been officially selected to run for the party at a selection convention or by some other means of candidate selection. I try my best to find information about local election candidate selection conventions, but in some cases this information is hard to find and occasionally it can be some time after a convention takes place before I find this information and hence am in a position to update this page accordingly.

The post will focus on Green candidate selections ahead of the 2019 City and County Council elections. 

The Green Party currently has twelve City and County Councillors, the same number as that won by the party at the 2014 City and County Council elections. After the party’s significant loss of local representation at the 2009 local election and the loss of all its national representation at the 2011 General Election, a strong performance in the 2014 local elections proved to be vital in relation to the party’s rebuilding process after the fall out of its period in a coalition government with Fianna Fáil between June 2007 and January 2011. One of the successful Green Party candidates in this election – Catherine Martin – subsequently went on to win a seat in Dublin Rathdown in the 2016 General Election.

The party will be hoping to build further on the results of the 2014 elections, especially as more time has elapsed now since the conclusion of its period in the ill-fated coalition government and as the party regains its old “transfer friendly” character. The process of rebuilding the party – now assisted by the regaining of state funding after the Greens won more than 2% of the national vote at the 2016 General Election – has further continued and a number of party candidates will now have gained experienced from having contested the 2014 and/or 2016 elections, even if they did not win seats in these contests. However, the decision to reduce the size of constituencies (i.e. the number of seats per constituency) might create problems for Green Party candidates in some constituencies, especially as the relatively large numbers of seats per electoral area at the 2014 elections did help the party in winning/regaining some of its seats.

As of now (3rd May 2019), eighty two Green Party/Comhaontas Glas local election candidates are listed on this page. Thirty six of these candidates are women (43.9%) and forty six of these are men (56.1%).

Eleven of these candidates (13.4%) are incumbents (sitting City/County Councillors) – 19.6% of the male candidates are incumbents, while 5.6% of the female candidates are incumbents. At least two (2.4%) other candidates have previously held electoral office (e.g. former TD/Senator/Councillor).

The candidates that have been officially selected to contest the 2019 Local Elections as Green Party/Comhaontas Glas candidates include:

(Please note that, as in the other similar posts, any links that are provided here are to posts/newspaper reports offering “evidence” of their candidatures and will normally not link back to candidate websites.)

On 15th November 2018, a selection convention in Clare selected Roisin Garvey to contest Ennistimon and Barry O’Donovan to contest Killaloe, as reported on The Clare Echo website (16th November 2018).

I will be adding to this list as and when I come across further Green Party candidate selections.