Adrian Kavanagh, First posted 27th July 2023, 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, although there may at times be errors on my part (so please do let me know if you see any). 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 Party candidate selections ahead of the 2024 City and County Council elections. 

After the party’s significant loss of local representation at the 2009 Local Elections and the loss of all its national representation at the 2011 General Election, a good 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 that election – Catherine Martin – subsequently went on to win a seat in Dublin Rathdown in the 2016 General Election, along with a win for Eamon Ryan in Dublin Bay South. The party crested the wave of a growing concern about climate change in early 2019 and had their best ever performance in a local election contest in that year, winning forty nine seats in those election. Following a number of defections from the party in the years after the Green Party went into government in Summer 2020, the party’s overall number of Councillors has fallen somewhat (I estimate that there are now forty four Green Party City and County Councillors). In part, as a result of the party’s successes in the 2019 European Elections, the 2020 General Election and the 2020 Seanad Election, but also due to some of the party’s new Councillors retiring from politics in the years following on the 2019 Local Elections, there has been a significant turnover in terms of Green Party representatives at the local authority level and there are a number of coopted councillors among these ranks at present.

As of now (16th May 2024), one hundred and twenty nine Green Party/Comhaontas Glas local election candidates are listed on this page. Sixty four of these candidates are women (49.6%) and sixty five are men (50.4%).

Forty one of the candidates listed here (31.8%) are incumbents (sitting City/County Councillors) – 24.6% of the male candidates are incumbents, while 39.1% of the female candidates are incumbents. Twenty one of the Councillor/incumbent candidates were co-options (51.2%). Two candidates are not incumbents, but have served as public representatives in the past (1.7%).

To the best of my knowledge, at least one hundred and twenty nine Green Party selection conventions have taken place, as of now (with Social Democrats candidates now selected to run in at least 77.7% 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 Green Party/Comhaontas Glas 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.)

Thanks to all who have helped in the compilation of this list by providing information on Green Party candidates who are running in the June 7 elections, including John McGee and Lawrence Quinn-Hemmings.