Election 2024 live updates: Mick Wallace confirms he will run, Soc Dems pledge to reintroduce ban on no-fault evictions

It is another busy day on the general election 2024 campaign trail.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, junior Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill and Senator Barry Ward have sett out Fine Gael’s justice policy, Fianna Fáil revealed its plans to tackle crime and keep communities safe, Labour unveils its health policies and the Social Democrats publishes its housing policy.
It’s a week since the election was called and we have our first opinion poll taken during the campaign in today’s Irish Times. It’s good news for Fine Gael – at 25 per cent, the party has a clear lead over its rivals in Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, both on 19 per cent. There’s a caveat, though; Fine Gael is down by a couple of points, and Simon Harris’s satisfaction rating is down by five points.
If you have anything that you feel could or should be highlighted, you can email me on [email protected]. I’m also on X at @rmcgreevy1301
The Green Party are out launching their campaign in Cork, and leader Roderic O’Gorman has issued a warning about climate progress if his party aren’t back in government after the election.
He said the Greens played a central role in reducing carbon emissions, PA reports.
Last year, Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 6.8 per cent with reductions in almost all sectors.
It was the lowest that greenhouse gas emissions have been in three decades, and below the 1990 baseline, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Mr O’Gorman said that Ireland’s emissions are at its lowest in 30 years.
He added: “I’m not confident that if the Greens aren’t part of the next government, whatever its makeup, I’m not confident that that progress will continue, that we will see another 7 per cent, that we’ll see the commitment of those financial resources that are necessary to deliver these really important projects that get us our cuts, but also improve people’s quality of life as well.
“I’ve said that since I became leader of the party, we as a party have to be really clear that in taking those steps to meet our reduction targets, the government always have to be helping people, have to be helping families, have to be helping businesses, have to be helping farmers.
“The government has to be helping people do this work to get these goals.”
Former MEP and TD Mick Wallace has announced he is going to stand in the Wexford constituency.
Mr Wallace made his announcement on South East Radio this morning just two weeks before the election is due to take place.
He topped the poll in the 2011 general election and was re-elected in 2016 finishing third. He was elected to the European Parliament in 2019 but lost his seat this year.
He told presenter Alan Corcoran that he made his decision following consultation with his surviving children. His son Joe died earlier this year from cancer.
He said that he would put his name forward because he had been one of the few people in Dáil Éireann who knew anything about housing.
He had warned that the costs of the children’s hospital would rise well beyond €1 billion, but was ignored.
“I come from the industry. They (the Government) have moved away from the idea of providing public housing through the local authorities,” he said.
“The Land Development Agency is another scam. If the local authorities are not fit to be the conduit to provide public housing in Ireland, let’s make them so.”
He reiterated that he would not do “parish-pump politics”. Neither would he serve in Government if elected.
“Opposition is incredibly important and I don’t see much of it. I see most members of the Dáil become part of the mainstream,” he said.
“I would have been demonized in the Dáil for the police and stuff. I probably challenged the Nama stuff single-handedly.
“I made it plain that the whole children’s hospital thing was a scam when it should have cost less than a billion.”
He was very emotional when speaking about his son. “I’m not the first person to lose a son. Only those who have that experience understand what it is like.
“We have to get on with life as best we can. You don’t get over it. You have to come to terms with it every day, but you have got to keep going. It’s not easy.”
Wexford is likely to be an extremely competitive constituency wit three outgoing TDs James Browne (FF), Verona Murphy (Ind) and Johnny Mythen (SF) all standing. Labour’s Brendan Howlin is retiring as is former Fine Gael minister Paul Kehoe.
Both Labour and Fine Gael will hope to retain the seats through Cllr George Lawlor and the two Fine Gael candidates, Cllr Bridín Murphy and Cllr Cathal Byrne respectively.”
A day after Micheál Martin called for a ceasefire between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, a very personal row has broken out between the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee and Fianna Fáil’s spokesperson on justice Jim O’Callaghan.
The issue was laid bare on a RTÉ Prime Time debate about crime on Thursday night in Limerick.
Mr O’Callaghan, who is a senior counsel, famously turned down a junior ministry in the Coalition Government in July 2020 stating that he felt he would be more effective as a backbencher.
During tense exchanges, Mr O’Callaghan said Ms McEntee had taken on board many of his recommendations.
Presenter Fran McNulty said to Ms McEntee: “You listened to your Coalition partners, you just didn’t listen enough”.
“With all due respect,” McEntee responded, “Jim was asked to be a minister in the Department of Justice and he turned it down. I have turned up day in, day out.”
Ouch!
Mr O’Callaghan responded: “I just want to say, in terms of what Helen said, I have been far more effective as a backbench Fianna Fáil TD.”
He then went on to list all the recommendations he claimed the minister had taken on board – the Children’s Act, knife-crime, garda recruitment and the designation of safe countries.
Mr McNulty responded: “It sounds like you haven’t been in Coalition together”.
On Friday Ms McEntee was scathing about the previous night’s exchanges: “There are probably women all over the country who will understand it when men try to claim credit for their work.”
Extending free GP care to all children under 18, plans to hire 700 nurses and delivering 300 hospital beds per year are among the Labour Party’s election promises aimed at transforming Ireland’s health service, writes political correspondent Cormac McQuinn.
The party is pledging to establish a €1 billion Sláintecare Transition Fund to accelerate reforms.
It says it will hire 50 GPs per year and expand GP training places by 20 annually.
Labour would lift what it argues is an ongoing recruitment embargo in health and guarantee jobs for all health graduates.
It has a proposal to convert vacant HSE properties like Baggot Street Hospital into housing for key workers.
Labour would use €500 million of the Apple tax windfall to roll out digital health records.
Duncan Smith, the party’s health spokesman said: “We cannot afford to continue on the current trajectory of overcrowded hospitals, staff shortages, and underfunded community services.”
He said his party’s plan would “rebuild capacity, and efficiency in our health service, support the healthcare workers and build a better healthcare system, together.”
Does the Irish media bring up the issue of Sinn Féin’s past links with the Provisional IRA up too often?
Appearing on the Free State Podcast, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald agreed with host Joe Brolly that the Dublin media (as opposed to its northern equivalent) brings up the Provisional IRA as a means of discrediting the party in the here and now.
She responded by stating there was a “reluctance on the part of the Free State establishment to move on”.
“You don’t ask somebody who was a baby in the 1970s about something that happened in the 1970s. That’s not a reasonable proposition. You wouldn’t ask it of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or the Labour Party.
“It is not reasonable to approach people from Sinn Féin in that way. We can debate history. We can talk about the past.”
The issue was raised on the Inside Politics podcast on Wednesday. Political correspondents Jack Horgan-Jones and Jennifer Bray deny this is the case.
The issue of the Provisional IRA is rarely brought up with the party nowadays.
They all explain how the scandals surrounding Sinn Féin are different from those surrounding other parties.
You can listen back to the podcast from 7.30 to 14.30 here.
Former MEP and TD Mick Wallace has announced he will be standing in the Wexford constituency.
He made the announcement on South East Radio’s Morning Mix programme.
Wallace was elected to Dáil Éireann twice previously topping the poll at his first attempt in Wexford in 2011
He then ran for the European Parliament and was elected in 2019.
He failed to get re-elected in the Euro elections earlier this year losing out to Fianna Fáil’s Cynthia Ní Mhurchú.
Wallace said he thought long and hard before making up his mind to stand and says his future political career lies in the hands of the electorate of Wexford.
The Social Democrats have launched their housing policy this morning in Marino, north Dublin, writes Sarah Burns.
It sets out putting affordability “centre stage”, and building a total of 303,000 new homes between 2026 and 2030.
It also includes a ban on no-fault evictions and holding a referendum to put the right to a home in the Constitution.
The policy sets out a ban on the bulk purchase of homes by increasing the special rate of stamp duty on such purchases to 100 per cent.
Parties are battling it out in 43 constituencies – four more than last time in 2020. There are four constituencies considered bellwethers where results should signal how the overall result plays out. Harry McGee, Jennifer Bray, Andrew Hamilton and Barry J Whyte report.
Fine Gael’s proposals to introduce facial recognition technology (FRT) to help investigate serious crimes will not affect the civil liberties of citizens, outgoing Minister for Justice Helen McEntee has insisted.
The party was launching its justice policy in Dublin with a raft of proposals including the recruitment of 6,000 additional gardaí, a new prison at Thornton Hall, full roll-out of body-worn cameras, and the use of FRT.
The specific proposal on FRT envisages its use for serious crimes with a maximum sentence of five years or more and for missing persons cases.
The Meath East TD said that if FRT was deployed it would have expedited the investigation into the Dublin riots last November by a considerable period of time.
In some instances it is also proposing the use of live FRT in cases of terrorism, national security and missing persons.
Ms McEntee insisted that there would be strict safeguards in place to ensure that FRT is used appropriately.
“I am very firmly of the view that our Garda Síochána should be provided with the technology and with the tools that they need to be able to respond to Serious Crime.”
“We saw last year in November in our city centre, we had guardians trawling through thousands of hours of CCTV footage to try and identify culprits, to try and identify those who were involved in the riots.
“Facial recognition technology would ensure that that could be done in a matter of hours, in a matter of days, and that people could be before the courts with that clear evidence and hopefully prosecuted it in a much quicker timeline.
“I don’t think anybody should apologise for providing the gardaí with the tools that they need.”
She argued that in certain circumstances gardaí should be allowed to use FRT in real time where there is a risk to national security, a terrorism threat, or where a person is missing, where we know time is of the essence.”
Asked about the implications this would have for civil liberties, she said there would need to be very clear oversight.
“It would have to be preauthorised, that there would have to be engagement with our judiciary.”
Health is the second most important issue at 18 per cent, according to the latest Irish Times/Ipsos poll.
Yet Ireland’s spend on health at €5,998 per person annually is the third-highest per capita in the EU behind Luxembourg (€6,590 annually) and Denmark (€6,110).
Ireland’s health spend is almost 50 per cent higher than the EU average which is €3,685 per person annually.
This information comes from data on healthcare expenditure published by Eurostat and relate to the spend in 2022. This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article on healthcare expenditure.
In 2022, in the EU, the ratio of current healthcare expenditure to GDP stood at 10.4 per cent. The highest relative expenditures were recorded in Germany (12.6 per cent of GDP), France (11.9 per cent) and Austria (11.2 per cent).
In contrast, healthcare spending in Luxembourg was 5.6 per cent of GDP, in Romania 5.8 per cent and in Ireland 6.1 per cent of GDP.
As GDP is not a reliable indicator of the true size of the Irish economy, the Irish health spend was much higher than that. The Gross National Income (GNI) would suggest that Government health spending was 11.3 per cent in 2022. That does not include the billions that Irish people spend on private health insurance.
What are the issues that Trinity College Dublin students care about most? Sarah Burns has been speaking to them. Sienna Ní Riordáin (below), who is originally from South Africa and now living in South Dublin, is particularly impressed with the Social Democrats and likes watching Instagram reels of their party leader Holly Cairns speaking in the Dáil.
“I think it’s genius, because young people want to passively consume political content,” she says. “They want to open Instagram and have it right in front of them.”
Read the full article here.
What are the issues that exercise voters the most, according to the latest Irish Times/Ipsos survey?
The cost of living is by far the most important issue at 30 per cent.
This should worry the Government parties as inflation is the principal reason why Donald Trump has won a second term as US president.
Voters were prepared to ignore all the issues surround him and to punish Kamala Harris for the rampant inflation which occurred on the Biden administration’s watch.
Closer to home there has been an increase in the proportion of voters saying that the country is generally going in the right direction, up by five points to 42 per cent. This roughly correspondents with the combined vote of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (44 per cent).
Yet half of voters (50 per cent) say the country is generally going in the wrong direction, down by four points since last February.
Voters were also asked what was the issue that will have the most influence on their vote.
Next on the list of priorities was health (18 per cent) and house prices (17 per cent), followed by immigration (9 per cent), the economy (6 per cent), the cost of rent (6 per cent), law and order (5 per cent), climate (4 per cent) and tax (3 per cent).
The big winners, according to the latest poll, is independents who are up four points to 20 per cent.
It’s an indication of how fiery the general election coverage has become on the airwaves that Matt Cooper practically yawns in excitement as he surveys the campaign to date. “It really hasn’t caught alight, has it?” the presenter observes on The Last Word (Today FM, weekdays), as he looks back on the first week of electioneering, write Mick Heaney in his very popular radio review.
“I think we can safely say the nation has released a long breath and is bored already,” replies his guest, Prof Gary Murphy of DCU. Candid though this verdict may be, it’s hardly the cue for wavering listeners to stay tuned for the next fortnight, particularly given that the calm and careful Cooper isn’t naturally inclined towards creating on-air fireworks.”
You can read it here.
The Government parties of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are on 44 per cent between them (FG 25 per cent, FF 19 per cent), but there is no room for complacency in their campaigns, political editor Pat Leahy suggests.
He writes: “With many voters unlikely to finally make up their minds until closer to election day, the race seems set to tighten further.
“Fine Gael is well out in front on 25 per cent and Harris remains the most popular party leader with a 50 per cent satisfaction rating. But its lead over Fianna Fáil has been cut from eight points in September to six today and with so many new Fine Gael candidates up against proven vote-getters in other parties, things could get even tighter.
“Either way, with Irish politics marked by extreme volatility in recent elections, it is too early in this campaign to be in any way definitive about the outcome. Fine Gael is six points up at half-time; that’s a decent lead but it’s all still to play for.”
You can read his full analysis here.