At an event held outside the GPO on O’Connell Street today, Aontú launched their 66 local election candidates for Election 2024 in addition to three European candidates and their candidate for the Limerick Mayoral elections.
Speaking at the event, party Leader Peadar Tóibín TD said the party was working hard, listening to people, and offering common sense solutions.
“We have 15 candidates in Dublin, 16 in Leinster, 17 in Munster and 18 in Connacht Ulster. 40% of our candidates are women. We have three fantastic European Parliament Candidates, Aisling Considine is running in Dublin, Aisling is an educator, she is extremely articulate bread and butter campaigner, she is a women’s rights activist and she will make a great representative for Dublin in the European Union,” he said.
Tóibín said that Patrick Murphy was running for the party in Ireland South. “He’s the CEO of South and West Fish Producers Organisation. He has years’ experience in the EU fighting for the rights of fishermen. He is the man that negotiated the withdrawal of the Russian fleet from the coast of Ireland,” Tóibín said.
Announcing Sarah Beasley as candidate for Limerick Mayor, the Aontú leader said: “Sarah Beasley is standing for Aontú in the Limerick Mayor race. Sarah has a powerful track record in terms of working with the most disadvantaged. Sarah runs a homeless outreach on a weekly basis in Limerick. She helps people who are in needed of addiction services in Limerick. She wants to be a common sense mayor for the whole city and county. This is Aontú’s largest council candidate offering. Aontú is fighting these elections with a far higher profile than in 2019. Our support is significantly higher than in 2019. Many of these candidates are now well known having been working in their communities solidly for the last 5 years. Aontú will be competing for seats in dozens of these constituencies”.
Urging voters to turnout on June 7th, Deputy Tóibín said: “On a range of different issues Aontú is the only party listening to the people. In the recent referendums, Aontú was the only party to stand with the people against every other Dáil party. Aontú was the only party which opposed the Climate Change Bill and its extra costs on families and farmers.”
“We opposed the censorship contained in the Hate Speech Bill while most of the opposition supported the Government. Only Aontú sought a respectful debate and common-sense response to immigration. Only Aontú sought a full public investigation with statutory powers into what happened to our older people in nursing homes during the Covid Crisis. We’re not just the best organised opposition to this government, we are often the only real opposition holding this government to account.”
“We oppose the EU Migration Pact. We oppose moves to an EU army. We will not vote for Ursula Von Der Leyen. We seek protections for farmers’ and fishers’ incomes. We seek to bring back into use the 3,500 empty local authority homes and the 160,000 other empty homes. We seek proper regional development to stop much of the regions falling in terms of income. We are confident as we face into the coming weeks”, he said.
At the Aontú Ard Fheis last month Mr Tóibín said that the government was not listening to the people on a whole range of issues from climate change to immigration.