Local/ EU elections who will you Vote for

None of the government parties will get my vote. I am leaning towards voting for Independents.

My top concerns are health, housing and cronyism.

I am not sure who my local reps so will have to do some online research.

Well they have all been fairly quiet up recently. I wouldnt vote for any currently sitting MEP or Councillor. They didnt see this developing? I had my awakening 15 years ago travelling. I will vote for any candidate previously unelected personality. They knew this was coming if not part of the plan. All their buddies are running IPAS accomodation through shell companies.

Major concerns are law and order, accomodation and defense. They are all either asleep at the wheel or part of the corruption.

Lot of people looking at Independents as they feel the centralised main parties do little or nothing for them, outside of big business and big property.

And there is the problem with the Irish system, only vote for who you want. You don't need to go all the way 1-20. If you only like 2 canidates, vote for them, no one else. Don't waste time going lowest preferences.

You need only assign preferences to as many candidates as you actually have a preferences; you can leave the rest blank. But, two points about that:

1. This isn't a "problem with the Irish system"; it's a strength. Here in Australia you're supposed to express preferences all the way down. This has the result that, if you can't form a preference between the Monarchist White Residents God Save The King Party and the Law & Order Loyalty and Traditional Values Party, neither of which you know anything about, you either have to assign them random preferences or risk your strongly-felt first preference for Labour or Liberal or the Greens or whoever being disregarded because you have spoiled your vote.
2. The preferences you can express include negative preferences. If you loathe two candidates, but loathe one of them a bit more than the other, you can reflect that in your preferences. The only candidates you should leave with no preference at all are those among whom you are completely indifferent; you would be equally happy, or equally unhappy, to be represented by any of them.

I wanted to post this here earlier nut couldn't find the thread when I logged on again. I think Stephen Collins is worried that the plebs might vote for someone he doesn't approve of.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/04/19/irish-voters-must-realise-that-sending-characters-to-strasbourg-could-harm-our-country/

This exactly.

Another poster said "Give your lowest preferences to the fantasists and the grandstanders".

Surely you wouldn't give them a vote at all? Why would you give a vote to someone you think is a fantasist?

But that takes the fun out of the PR system for me.

I don't always agree with Stephen's viewpoint but on this occasion I agree with him.

Our representation in the EU matters.

In the local elections I will vote for the best person to represent my views on local issues.

I'll go all the way down the list, a few old reliables and a couple of promising newcomers will be near the top.

If you are in a 4/5/6 seater then 4/5/6 people are going to be elected. So by only voting for 2 candidates you are leaving it up to everyone else to decide who is elected.

Personally I'd recommend that you do at least 4/5/6 votes based on the amount of seats, if necessary voting for your 'least worst' option at each step if you don't have anyone left you feel positive about. That way you theoretically have some say in every seat allocated. Entirely up to you obviously, and at another level I'm not bothered as by definition you increase the power of my lower preferences by not doing any yourself.

Well Donald,

That's an interesting (and not doubt time consuming) piece of work to by the Dublin Enquirer to be fair to them to get responses from every running candidate on a range of topics.

Not really helping the notion that SF candidates won't open their mouths until head office tell them what to say there folks 🙄

Now, this is the kind of refreshing honesty I can get behind 😁

This. It is probably unlikely that your 20th or 21st preference will become effective, but stranger things have happened. If your first prefernce goes to a candidate who stays in the race a long time but is eliminated on (say) the 10th count, your vote will be transferred to your "next effective preference". After 10 counts, a lot of the people to whom you gave your 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc preference will already have been eliminated or elected, and your vote will transfer to the next candidate to whom you have assigned a preference who is still in the race. That could be quite a low preference but, if a low preference becomes effective, it's just as effective as your first preference would have been.

Conside this hypothetical: there's one seat left to be filled, and it's going to be filled by either the grandstander or the fantasist. Do you have any preference at all about which of them should fill it, or are you genuinely completely indifferent as between these two possiblities? If you have even a mild preference for one of them over the other, give that one a higher preference.

1. The Irish political parties (like parties in other member states) are part of political groupings in the Parliament. E.g. Fine Gael are part of the European Peoples Party (Christian Democrats). While the European political parties don't form a government, their respective strengths in the Parliament do influence the makeup of the Commission and the allocation of the Commission portfolios, and of course it also determines the allocation of parliamentary positions, chairpersons of committees, etc.
2. There are constituencies in the EU elections for the same reason that there are constituencies in national elections; to make the voter's choice manageable. It's bad enough to face an EU ballot paper with maybe 25 names on it; do you really want to have to face a ballot paper with 75 names on it? Plus, electing candidates based on geographic constituences fosters a connection between voters and their representatives.

You can be sure that local people in communities who have experienced the so called Dept of Integration might beg to differ. What use are local councillors if they have no say in what happens locally.

These elections will be used by the public to give the incumbents an almighty kick up the arse and may well bring them crashing down.

As to OP, I'll vote for any sane candidate not aligned with above shennanigans

With regret I will not be voting for a local candidate who has helped me in the past, on principle alone I can't bring myself to vote FG this term.

It the local reps who are members of any of the established parties (fg,ff, greens, sinn fein, SDs, pbp) really gave a crap about immigration crisis, tourism, or anything else affecting communities they would have already resigned from those parties.

Don't ever be fooled by fookers speaking with forked tongues telling the locals one thing, but still supporting the hierarchy in charge of this calamity.

I notice some are trying to play this as if local councillors who are members of the parties in government or in opposition have absolutely nothing to do with the state of things.

They may not be able to vote in the Dail, but they are giving their complete support to the people that do by simply continuing their membership of the parties and running for election for those parties.

If you do not agree with what parties are doing in the dail then how can you vote for any of their members.

It is the same party, the councillors (and MEPs) have the same leader as the TDs that troop into the dail to back their leaders in votes.

If we want change in Ireland you will not get it by voting in the same old parties.

If you want the parties in the Dail to really listen to you now, you will not get them to listen if you back their MEP and council candidates.

They will continue to p**s all over you as your vote is taken for granted.

Just for the sake of completion it's up to the individual countries to decide how many constituences they want to have. Most countries only have a single national constituency. The countries that don't are:

• Belgium (3)
• Ireland (3)
• Italy (5)
• Poland (13)
• Germany has a mix of a national constituency and 16 state level constituencies

The countries that vote on a national basis mostly use a list system.