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Wicklow gym owner and former journalist Rob Carry is running in the upcoming general election as an Independent.
Carry (42) says he decided to enter politics this year fuelled by a desire “to effect as much positive change” in his community as possible.
Speaking to Gript, Carry, who says he believes his community work and commitment to helping people are a good foundation for his entry into politics, said he believes that Independent candidates are “going to be the story of the election”.
He says that he stood in Bray West as an Independent candidate in the local elections “with a tiny, self-funded budget” where he came up against “big hitters from the Green Party, Fine Gael, the Social Democrats and Sinn Fein”.
A former member of Sinn Féin, Carry says he left the party after the Parnell St. school stabbing last year after being disappointed by what he called the party’s lack of response to the incident.
“I wanted somebody, just anybody to say, ‘Okay, if we were in power this wouldn’t have taken place and this individual wouldn’t have been in our country,” he said.
He said the kind of reaction he wanted from the party “never happened” and he was left feeling as if he was “waiting for it to happen again”, he said drawing parallels with the murder of Aisling Murphy.
“Nobody seemed to want to change anything,” he said.
Having “narrowly missed out” on a seat to the “big teams” in the locals, Carry says he now hopes to get over the line in the general elections as a candidate for Wicklow.
Among the issues he says he wishes to tackle should he be elected are housing shortages, lack of access to GP services, school places, and Special Needs Assistants.
He says that hospital waiting lists “are through the roof and traffic is getting out of control across the county” and that new housing estates are being “thrown up without commensurate infrastructure and everyone is suffering as a result.”
Describing the N11 in the mornings as a “car park” he accused the government of building houses with no due regard to the services available in rural areas of Wicklow or how the growing population is impacting on those already living in the country.
Carry says that this is “the result of poor governance” and that the “buck stops with our TDs”.
“Migrant centres with no planning permission are springing up all over the county and our hotels are closed to tourists. This has to stop – we need a return to normality,” he said.
Speaking of the closure of The Grand Hotel in Wicklow town, which is now accommodating hundreds of asylum seekers, as well as the closure of Wicklow Court House, he said that these decisions “don’t send the right message”.
He said that “if the same faces are reelected in Wicklow people can only expect “more of these same policies.”
“I’m concerned that if something doesn’t change, in five more years Ireland and Wicklow will be unrecognisable.”
Carry, who described himself as a “nationalistic person” says he feels that Independents are in a good position to win seats saying, “there’s a lot of discussions going on in the background among various independents, and I’d be pretty confident that if a few of us get over the line, there will be more working groups developed.”
“There is going to be cooperation there as a means of maximising the impact that we can have as independents in raising the issues in our own constituency and national issues also,” he said.
“I’m a nationalistic person, and I do feel like that I have an obligation to do whatever good I can in whatever small way I can,” he said, adding that he wanted to “maximise” the “ positive influence” his work as a coach has on people.
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