Today we’re launching our voter’s guide to candidates running for the 63 seats on Dublin City Council.
Using it, you can see who’s running in your local electoral area, and what they say they’ll do – if elected – on 10 key issues, from housing to climate change, cycling to green spaces. Have a browse through and see who you want to vote for on 24 May.
If you haven’t sorted your voter registration yet, you still have until 5 May to register, or to update your address, or whatever you need to do. You can vote in this election whether you’re an Irish citizen, a citizen of another EU country, or a non-EU citizen – just so long as you live in Dublin and are over 18.
If you’re not sure which local electoral area you’re in, you can have a look at this map – or at which candidates are putting up posters near you. The boundaries of the local electoral areas have changed since the last local elections.
A Community Effort
We’ve had loads of help putting together this voter’s guide.
First we spent about a month asking our readers what issues they wanted us to ask the candidates about, and about 200 people took the time to get back to us – some with very brief answers on Twitter or in Facebook comments, and some with very extensive ones by email.
We compiled those into a list of the top-10 most-mentioned issues, which we call our “citizens’ agenda”. Then it was time to put those issues to the 125 candidates we have been able to identify (so far), from a dozen parties and running as independents.
Since we’re a tiny team here at Dublin Inquirer, we enlisted 11 of our readers to help find contact information for all these candidates, get in touch with them, and convince them to take the time out of their hectic schedules to complete our questionnaire and return it to us.
Then we lightly edited their responses for typos and the like and took all this information and built a home for it on our website.
So a big thank-you to all of these good people for their efforts – we couldn’t have done it without them, and we really appreciate all their help. And now I’d like to ask for a little help from you.
If you start using this voter’s guide and find that candidates in your area haven’t yet had time to complete our questionnaire and return it to us, could you please send them a polite email and ask them to do so? (We’ve provided contact info.)
We’ve had 68 candidates respond so far, but we’d really like to get all of them to do so, if possible.