The next local elections, which are held every five years, are set for 7 June 2024.
So we’ve built a voter guide to help you figure out which candidates are standing in your local electoral area, and decide who to give a preference to when the day comes.
It includes the two local authorities we cover regularly: Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council.
We ran a survey earlier this year, asking what issues voters wanted to hear from candidates about.
I sorted through the issues to find the eight most-mentioned ones for Dublin city and Fingal. Then I asked all the candidates I could find what they’d do about those issues.
Dublinvoterguide2024.ie includes their answers to these eight questions.
Although we’re launching this voter guide today, it’s not complete yet – and I’d be really grateful if you could help me fill in the missing pieces.
Will you help us make this guide more complete?
I’m sure I’ve missed some candidates.
There’s no official list yet for candidates for the local elections, so we’ve built this based on Maynooth lecturer Adrian Kavanagh’s lists on his website, plus local knowledge of our reporters and readers, and candidates writing in to say “Me too!”
So far, I have 183 candidates on the guide. If you’re aware of any others standing who I haven’t included yet, please let me know: sam@dublininquirer.com.
Also, there are lots of candidates in the guide who haven’t yet sent me answers to the eight questions. Only about half – 88 – have so far.
If there are candidates standing in your local electoral area who haven’t sent answers, but you’d like them to, we’ve set up an easy (we hope) way for you to give them a nudge.
On those candidates’ pages on our election guide, there’s an easy way to send them an email.
Please be polite, they may be juggling a full-time job with being a councillor, with canvassing in the evenings, with family responsibilities, with who knows what, and struggling to find the time for this too.
They may also have never got my email because I sent it to the wrong address, or because it was intercepted by a spam filter.
But a few cordial asks from potential voters might get the questions to these candidates, and help move answering them up their priority list.
So I’d be grateful for any help you could offer on that front.
Want to build a voter guide for another council area?
Tewson Seeoun has made the code for this voter guide website open-source.
So if you want to use it to put up a voter guide for another council, you can – and we’d love it if you would.
If you want to do that, and need any help figuring it out, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me or Tewson.
I’d be especially pleased to see news organisations put up voter guides for the other two local authorities in Dublin: South Dublin County Council and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.