Adrian Kavanagh, First posted 27th July 2023, with updates as new candidate selections are announced. Any links in this post are to online announcements of candidate selections – there will be no specific links to candidate webpages.

The fifth 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 generally seek to add party candidates only after they have been officially selected to run for the party at a selection convention or by some other means of candidate selection (e.g., added to the candidate list by party headquarters). 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 the candidate selections for Aontú.

Aontú were founded a few months ahead of the 2019 Local Elections and the new party won three seats in those elections, with fifty three candidates having contested that election. While only the party leader, Peadar Toíbín, won a seat at the 2020 General Election, the party did fare well in some other constituencies, such as Cavan-Monaghan and Cork North-West, and with five more years to organise/become established and to allow their 2019 candidates, who might be contesting again, more time to build up local profiles in their respective constituencies, the party could be well placed to make gains at the upcoming local elections. On the flip side, the large swing towards Sinn Féin, as evident in recent opinion polls, could suggest that major gains for that party could close off some of the opportunity spaces that might be available to Aontú candidates, and indeed candidates from some of the other smaller political parties.

As of now (2nd May 2024), sixty four Aontú local election candidates are listed on this page. Twenty five of these candidates are women (39.1%) and thirty nine of these are men (60.9%).

Three (4.7%) of the candidates listed here are incumbents.

To the best of my knowledge, at least sixty two selection conventions in at least 37.3% of the one hundred and sixty six electoral areas across the state).

The candidates that have been officially selected to contest the 2024 Local Elections as Aontú 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.)

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