Here are the issues people say they want us to ask local election candidates about

With local elections planned for June this year, we’re putting together a guide to who the candidates are that are running for seats on the two local councils we cover – and what they think about a range of issues.

We’re small, so we can’t do the whole country, or even all of Dublin, just the two councils we usually write about: Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council.

As a first step, for all of February, we asked people in those two local authority areas what issues they wanted candidates running for the councils to talk about.

We asked on our website, across our social media channels, and in our email newsletter – and contacted people across the city and Fingal personally, asking them to fill out the form and request that their friends do the same.

We also paid to “boost” a post about our survey on Facebook, putting it in front of about 10,000 people, some who are followers of our Facebook page, others who are not.

By the end of February, we’d received responses from 362 people. Each usually mentioned a few different issues in their response – and sometimes a dozen or more different issues.

We’ve now made lists of the most-mentioned issues in each area. Next, we’ll put questions to the candidates about these issues over the coming weeks, and publish their answers to help people decide how to vote in June.

Dublin City Council issues

People in the city mentioned housing more than any other issue by far (128 times). It wasn’t even close.

They raised a range of different housing-related questions, but there seemed to be two main themes.

So we’re going to ask candidates, 1) how they would help get more housing built in the city – especially social and affordable housing. And also, 2) how they would improve conditions in existing housing, both social and privately rented.

We’re also going to ask about six other issues, which I’ll mention here grouped kind of by theme, rather than ranked by how often they were mentioned.

People were concerned about the absolute state of the city, saying they’d like it to be cleaner and feel safer. They want to know what candidates would do to help make that happen, if elected.

So we’re going to ask candidates, 3) what they would do to make the city feel less dirty, tackling the rubbish and dog poo all over the streets.

We’ll also be asking, 4) what they’d do to tackle vacancy and dereliction, 5) and how they could help make the city feel safer, in general.

People also said they wished it was easier to get around the city, mostly mentioning public transport, walking and cycling.

So we’ll ask candidates, 6) their views on how best to expand and improve public transport in the city, and, 7) how they could make it nicer and safer for people to get around the city on foot and by bike.

Given recent issue polling, we were surprised that immigration didn’t figure near the top of the list of issues people wanted to hear from local election candidates about.

Among people’s responses to our survey, there were only 15 mentions of immigration. Most were just the word “immigration”.

People mentioned concerns about the rise of the far right nearly twice as often (29 times), placing it among the eight most-mentioned issues.

So we’ll be asking candidates, 8) what they would do to help counter the rise of the far right, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and anti-asylum-seeker arsons?

Fingal issues

The line-up of issues people in Fingal mentioned when answering our survey was somewhat different.

Housing still topped the list, although the focus was a bit different, so we’ll be asking, 1) how candidates would help get more housing built in Fingal, if elected.

Also high on the list in Fingal was an issue that didn’t figure among the issues mentioned by people in the city: 2) what candidates would do to make sure adequate amenities and services would be added along with any new housing built.

Another Fingal-specific issue that was mentioned often was the airport, so we’ll be asking candidates, 3) what their views are on Dublin Airport’s current operations and its proposed expansion.

Based on the issues people mentioned, we’ll also be asking candidates, 4) their views on how best to expand and improve public transport 5) how they could make it nicer and safer for people to get around on foot and by bike, and 6) how they would help to make the roads safer for all road users.

As well as, 7) how they would help create more natural green spaces and promote biodiversity, and 8) how they would help provide more parks and sports facilities in Fingal.

Next steps

The influence that councillors can have on a lot of these issues is quite limited.

But we’re including them anyway, because we think people want to vote for candidates who share their values and priorities.

Besides, councillors do have some powers, as well as a public platform to advocate for changes they want to see, and the ears of council officials and sometimes party colleagues in government who might have more power.

So our next step is to make ourselves a list of every person running for the 63 seats on Dublin City Council and 40 on Fingal County Council and their email address. And then send our eight questions to every candidate and ask them to please answer them.

Once we have answers from a good bunch of the councillors, we’ll put them up on a website where voters can check who is running in their local electoral area, and what they have to say about these eight.

We’ll keep adding answers as we get them, to build as complete a voter guide as we can before election day.