Thoughts from the hustings in Dún Laoghaire

Finally, It's Election Day.

That's one of my favourite pics from the Campaign - Cllr. Ruairí Holohan buying 5c lemonade from some sharp business women in Carysfort Park in Blackrock, just a stone's throw from the Smurfit Business School. It was real lemonade, complete with pips.

That was the day it hit 25 degrees in the shade, and was much appreciated. Over a drink in Tonic on Temple Road later on that evening I tried to persuade Ruairí not to climb the old diving platform at Blackrock Baths to put a poster on the top, but I sensed I wouldn't win the argument.




Here I am in the back of Cllr. Tom Kivlehan's van on Corbawn lane in Shankill. It was like an oven in there yesterday, and you couldn't see a thing, as you tried to hold on through the mini-roundabouts.

Tom can eventually win over almost anyone at the doors:
-"Look, it's between Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and myself for the last seat. You need a green voice on the Council."

Unfortunately, by the time he's done this, the rest of us have the entire road completed, but tenacity is vital part of any councillors' work. Tom's brother-in-law is a printer and that gave us a very nice turn-around for last minute leaflets last Wednesday.


That last pic is of Cllr. Gene Feighery and some of her crew at around nine o'clock last night in Dalkey. Our smile's are a bit Queen Motherish, but that's got to be expected in the last hour of a campaign. Gene's husband Aidan used his management skills to arrange for a 12,000 print run of "Why Me?" newsletters to be distributed around her ward yesterday morning and I'm sure they'll swing a few wavering voters.

Clearly under the influence of Tom, I had a long wonderful conversation at a door in Dalkey last night. An elderly women - Eithne Doog had memories of my grandmother, which was quite extraordinary, as she would have died around 1963, the year I was born.



We ended up in Finnegans Pub in Dalkey afterwards for refreshment.That's where the fun started. Trevor Patton (The Patton Flyer candidate) and his crew appeared to have lost their way while canvassing pubs from early on that evening, and were in fine form. "Fight for your flights" is his slogan, not the most compatible with the Green Party's founding principles, but he was buying and we didn't complain. His other tag line is equally compelling: "If you can't beat them, join them, ... then beat them."

His mates were taking bets on how many votes he'd get. I put €5 on Trevor getting 273 votes, so we'll see how that pans out. If Patton is elected it'll be the first time on the face of it that a bus has won an election, but stranger things have happened in Irish politics. I like the way his flyers (Patton Flyer, boom, boom) have the timetable printed on one side. He reckons he's got about €50,000 worth of free advertising from his campaign. Hmmm. Several photos were taken as the night wore on, but hopefully none of them will see the light of day. All of his crowd had the whole cauliflower rosettes thing going on with red and green colours and goldy writing "Vote Trevor" which was a bit confusing towards the end of the evening. I summed it up as being a curious mix of Mayo meets the Tories in the Shires circa 1972, but I liked his style.

Today's relatively quiet. A few phone calls, a clatter of emails, and hopefully a trip to the movies this evening.

Good luck to all our candidates out there, I wish you well.

Walking in sunshine

Sixty hours until the polls open, more or less, and only mad dogs and candidates are braving the midday sun.

It's hot on the Dún Laoghaire Riviera, damn hot. Factor 50 all round this week, short-sleeved shirts, and 24 degrees in the shade. I'm avoiding the baseball cap though, as William Hague and George W. aren't exactly role models.

Broken windows, homelessness, dog dirt, selective mutism, the 45 bus. You see, and hear it all. One of the real challenges of politics is being able to absorb the extremes of views that you experience from one doorway to the next. Someone who works for Anglo-Irish tells me that he's taken to describing himself as a civil servant when people asks him what he does. Another is worried about noise from a partying neighbour.

These pix are from a few weeks ago when we had a whistle-stop tour with John Gormley and Deirdre de Burca through the Dún Laoghaire Dáil constituency. That's Cllr. Ruairí Holohan in the top photo, along with John Gormley walking on water in the middle of Dublin Bay. Deirdre de Burca, our candidate for Dublin is in the background. Karin Dubsky from Coastwatch Ireland had invited John out to Booterstown Strand to celebrate Biodiversity Day, and watch oyster spat being released.

John took a lift in Ruairí's electric Reva car to Blackrock where we chatted away to people on the Main Street before hopping on a DART to Dún Laoghaire to catch up with Cllr. Gene Feighery . We walked along Georges Street to Sandycove Glasthule, where I think we canvassed an unfortunate woman three times on the stretch of road between the Shopping Centre and the People Park. We kept passing her out and then dropping back. The good news was she started off promising us a number 3, and we got her to a number one on the basis that we'd stop tormenting her and get back on the DART, which is what we eventually did.

In Shankill we walked down to the end of Corbawn Lane to have a look at coastal erosion. The railway has had to be moved back twice in the course of the twentieth century to avoid being washed away, and yet there are still some councillors who want to rezone lands by the water's edge. Dubious rezonings have plagued Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council over the years. I was glad to see that Cllr. Tony Fox was refused a nomination from Fianna Fáil. Apparently he received money from Frank Dunlop, but I was saddened to see that he's put his name forward as an independent candidate. In Shankill our candidate is Cllr. Tom Kivlehan (pictured to my left). Tom has stood up to those who wish to rezone the lands beside Clontra House, on the water's edge.We had a mellow couple of hours listening to people's concerns as people came and went from the local Spar. The Ryan Report had just come out, and people were absorbing the horror that it documents. Perhaps some sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission is needed to fully address the contents of the Report.


Finally a couple of recommendations: Claire Wheeler is running for the Greens in Dublin's South Inner City ward, and has a long track record in providing for communities. She's an engineer by background, and called for a clean and sparkling Dublin Bay long before many others supported the cause. I'd say give your second preference to Mannix Flynn, not for his awesome poster, but for his wealth of experience, as well as his artistic and literary integrity.

In the North Inner City, David Geary is our candidate. Dave lives in Stonybatter, and works in wind energy. I'm hoping people will give their second preference to Patrick Maphoso, who I almost persuaded to run for the Greens five years ago. It's not that often that you can someone with a strong track record with the ANC a vote!

Ups and downs on the campaign trail

"Hey Mister"
-"Just a second"
I'm at the top of a ladder, half-way up a pole trying to feed one plastic poster-tie into another on Deirdre de Burca's poster. Finally it catches and I pull it tight.
"Mister"
-"I'll be with you in a second!"
I thread the plastic tie through the lower part of the poster. Once you've locked the poster-tie in, it can resist gale force winds, if done correctly. I clamp the end of plastic tie between my teeth and pull hard. Not exactly ideal from a health and safety perspective, but it does the job. Finally, I finish securing the poster, and climb down the ladder.
-"Mister"
"Yes?
-"Mister, your poster is upside-down.
"@#*%~!"
I walk back to the car, and take out a kitchen knife reserved for these occasions. It's started to rain again, the kind of rain we've had for the last two weeks - first one or two drops, then a downpour. Back up the ladder, knife in my mouth doing a fair impersonation of Captain Jack Sparrow getting ready to repel boarders. I'm at the top of the ladder, and spend a few minutes trying to ease the poster ties apart with the tip of the knife so that I can re-use the ties. Eventually I give up and attempt to sever the tie to release the poster. As I cut through the plastic there's a loud bang and a bright yellow flash. The knife falls and I slide down the ladder faster than a sailor in one of those World War Two films just after the torpedo hits the ship. Unlike our candidate Martin Hogan a few weeks ago, I'm still in one piece. I look back up the lamp post and as I do there's another flash and a puff of smoke from the electrical junction box half-way up the pole.
"Hey Mister"
-"Yeh"
"That's deadly, it is, can you do it again?"
It's time to move on, and find a safer lamppost for Deirdre de Burca's poster.

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That photo shows Cllr. Gene Feighery and Cllr. Ruairí Holohan on the stump on the Blackrock Bypass last Friday. They're giving out Hazel tree nuts and saplings as part of Ruairí's 'Brown Envelope' campaign. It's brought a smile to people's faces, and is the kind of soft sell that works well as part of wider campaign. Ruairí also has a good pitch at the doors:

"Look, I'm not going to talk about the recession, I can talk to you about Home Energy Grants, or the Gardening course that we're running in Blackrock.

It seems to be working well, by all accounts. He also told our monthly Green Party meeting in Dún Laoghaire that he's been dropping apple pies in to every convent in his ward with 'Green Party' written on the plate, and then drops by to collect the plate a few days later, and tries to persuade them to use their land for allotments.

Cllr. Gene Feighery, represents Dún Laoghaire, and has been pointing out that the Greens are good on planning. Gene was a founder member of CRSOS (the Combined Residents to Save Open Space) an NGO that campaigned to prevent the rezoning of the Dún Laoghaire Golf Club lands. It may well be that this green lung within Dún Laoghaire won't be developed in the short term, but it is important that a Local Area Plan is drawn up to guide development in the town. She's often seen in her electric car around the town.

Tom Kivlehan is our councillor for Shankill and Ballybrack. He dragged me up to Sandyford Luas stop a few weeks ago to take a photo beside a Luas so that we could photoshop 'Sandyford' out of the sign and substitute 'Shankill'. When the Luas gets to Cherrywood early next year, Tom will be clearing the scrub off the old Harcourt Street line to make sure it gets to Shankill and Bray a few years later. On a more practical note, he succeeded in getting the Council to shift their electricity supply to a renewable supplier.

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It may be a European and Local Election, but it is clear that many are thinking about national issues as they consider how to cast their vote in two weeks time. Few people disagree that John Gormley and Eamon Ryan are doing good work in their respective ministries. Tough decisions are being taken to ensure Ireland weathers the worldwide economic storm. Already it seems clear that the recovery is green. New jobs are being created in energy, in construction, in transport and in agriculture. Many of these are in areas of the sustainability sector that didn't exist a few years ago, or have a green hue to their complexion. One thing is sure though, the economy that was too dependent on laissez-faire construction and SUV car sales has changed, and the new green collar jobs will shape Ireland's future.

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Thanks to all you new media people for dropping in to the Oireachtas last week. My relatively tidy office that some of you saw last week has again disintegrated into squalor. I think both John Gormley, Deirdre de Burca and Damian Connon enjoyed the opportunity to talk candidly about their work. Thanks Dharragh Boyle, Mark Coughlan, Damian Mulley, Gav Reilly, Thaedydal and others for coming along. You all seem to have enjoyed your experience of the madness that constitutes the Houses of the Oireachtas.

Dún Laoghaire Baths Meeting

30th April, Kingston Hotel in Dún Laoghaire at 8.30pm. Cllr. Gene Feighery and Coastwatch Ireland will give their views, and I'll be racing out from a Dáil vote in Leinster House to catch the second part of the meeting.

I'm hoping that we'll pass a motion along these lines:

"That development proposals be prepared for the Dun Laoghaire Baths site along the following lines:

* Provide a publicly owned swimming amenity fully accessible to the general public,
* Provide a new building of no more than 2/3 storeys, in total, containing an indoor heated 25m pool,
* Provide a small number of related amenity elements including, for example, a toddlers’ pool, sea-weed baths, gym and modest café/restaurant with viewing area,
* Provide other appropriate cultural facilities in keeping with character of the town of Dun Laoghaire
* Renovate and re-landscape the existing walk-ways and maritime gardens between the Baths and East Pier in an environmentally sustainable manner and without any interference with the existing coastline beyond that absolutely necessary for the protection of the leisure amenity,
And that the Manager prepare funding options for the proposal, and provide bimonthly updates to the Council on the issue."

Seems familiar? It's what the Green Party Councillors proposed at the County Council Meeting on 10th October 2005. Sadly on that occasion we were voted down. Who knows where this one will end up...

A New Library for Dún Laoghaire?

What you think?

Here's some pix that I took of the exhibition in the County Council offices on the Marine Road. The objective of the competition was  to find a design solution for both building and site that:

* Displays innovative architecture
* Is contemporary in design
* Is sympathetic to its context
* Respects and contributes to the reinvigoration of Dun Laoghaire waterfront.

I think the view from the interior and the main hall would be amazing - quite like the main hall in the Tate Modern in London. The building is bulky, but it seems appropriate that public rather than private buildings should dominate Dún Laoghaire's skyline.

Carr Cotter Naessens from Cork submitted the winning entry, and you've got until the 21 December (from what I can gather) in which to make your views known to the Council. Then it is up to the councillors to vote on whether or not to proceed with construction. Have a look at the display in County Hall, and I'd love to hear what you think.

I'd like to see the Local Area Plan for Dún Laoghaire in place before projects of this scale go ahead, but I have no doubt that my colleague Cllr. Gene Feighery will be making that point. I'm pleased that the winning entry leaves open the option of retaining the Bowling Green on site, even though Andrew O'Connor's Christ the King Statue gets moved northwards. The new building would also be located just beside the Maritime Museum, creating a nice confluence of culture for the heart of Dún Laoghaire.

A modern Library is long overdue for the County, and I'm looking forward to a lively debate about the project.