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 fourth 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 the Social Democrats.

As the party was founded just over a year after the 2014 Local Elections, the Social Democrats obviously were not in a position to contest these elections. However, a number of defections from the independent ranks/from other parties to the Social Democrats in the years after that party was founded meant that there were seven Social Democrat City/County Councillors ahead of the 2019 Local Elections. The 2019 Local Elections saw the party win nineteen seats (and four of these successful candidates would go on to win seats a few months later in 2020 General Election). Some promising poll figures in recent months following Holly Cairns’ election as the new party leader, added to the fact that the party has had a further five years to become organised/established and identify potential new party candidates, suggest that the party could make gains at the upcoming local elections. However, a major swing to Sinn Fein could potentially close off some of the opportunity spaces that might be open to candidates from the Social Democrats, and indeed other parties/groupings.

As of now (6th May 2024), seventy seven Social Democrats local election candidates are listed on this page. Thirty nine of these candidates are women (50.6%) and thirty eight of these are men (49.4%).

Eighteen of these Social Democrats local election candidates are currently sitting City/County Councillors (incumbents) – 23.4% of the total. 26.3% of male Social Democrats local election candidates are incumbents, as opposed to 20.5% of female Social Democrats candidates. Five (27.8%) of these Councillor/incumbent candidates were co-options.

To the best of my knowledge, at least seventy two Social Democrats selection conventions have taken place, as of now (with Social Democrats candidates now selected to run in at least 43.4% 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 Social Democrat 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 Social Democrat candidate selections.