Adrian Kavanagh, First posted 4th July 2023, with updates as I become aware of candidate selections, or candidates being added to party tickets by party headquarters, Any links in this post are to online media announcements of candidate selections – for the purposes of consistency/due to time pressures, I will not be offering specific links to candidate webpages.

The second in a series of rolling blog posts relating to candidate selections/declarations for Local Elections 2024, 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 many cases this information is very 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 Fine Gael candidate selections ahead of the 2024 City and County Council elections. 

After a very strong performance at the 2009 Local Elections, where the party outpolled Fianna Fáil in a national election for the first time in its history, Fine Gael lost a number of seats at the 2014 contest. Winning 235 seats in these contests, Fine Gael once again became the second largest party at the local authority level behind Fianna Fáil, although they would retain their position as largest party in the state at general election contest at the subsequent 2016 General Election. Fine Gael fared much better at the 2019 Local Elections, however, and the party gained twenty seats in those contests.  Defections from the party reduced the overall number of Fine Gael City and County Councillors over the coming years. According to my best estimates, I currently estimate that there are 248 Fine Gael City and County Councillors.

As of now (20th May 2024), three hundred and thirty nine Fine Gael local election candidates are listed on this page.

Ninety seven of these candidates are women (28.6%) and two hundred and forty two are men (71.4%).

Candidate selections have now taken place in all one hundred and sixty six of the one hundred and sixty six electoral areas (100.0% complete) in the Republic of Ireland.

Two hundred and six (60.8%) of the Fine Gael candidates listed below are incumbents/are currently sitting County and City Councillors. 63.6% of male Fine Gael local election candidates are incumbents, as opposed to 53.6% of female Fine Gael candidates. Twenty three (11.2%) of the incumbent candidates were co-options. Seven (2.1%) of the candidates are not currently sitting Councillors, but have had previous experience of holding electoral office.

The candidates that have been officially selected to contest the 2024 Local Elections as Fine Gael candidates include:

(Please note that 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. I will generally not put in links to candidates’ own webpages here, on the basis of consistency and to manage my own time – if I do this for one candidate, I’ll have to do it for every candidate and we’re probably looking at thousands of candidates across all parties/groupings.)

Cyril Crowe was selected to contest the Killaloe electoral area, but later withdrew from the contest. Edel Gahan was selected to contest the Gorey electoral area, but is now not running in the election,

Thank you to all who have helped fill in some gaps in the Fine Gael candidate list, including William Durkan, Ian Primrose, Terry Murphy, Peter Walsh, Declan Burgess and Maurice Fitzgerald.