A councillor tried to quash my political dreams — now I help women run for local elections

After a bruising and personal presidential election, you might wonder how many women have been discouraged from entering politics. The support on offer from campaign group See Her Elected is so steadfast, you’d nearly consider running yourself, writes Clodagh Finn

Sun, 16 Nov, 2025 - 16:16

Clodagh Finn

In 2008, two years after she lost her husband James to cancer, Michelle Maher decided that she would make a good county councillor.

She saw so much that was wrong around her — the footpath that wouldn’t take a double buggy, the bockety slide in the playground — and decided she would take action.

She wasn’t sure how to go about it, so she made an appointment with her local councillor. He took one look at her, a young widow and mother of two, and ushered her and her political ambitions out the door.

His parting shot still rings in her ears: “There are easier ways to make €12,000”, or whatever the annual stipend was for county councillors at the time (it’s €31,356, plus expenses today).

It still rankles that she didn’t think of the witty retorts until much later, a classic case of staircase wit, but there was an upside; something of the political ambition sown by her mother while growing up in Donegal was reignited.

She remembered that her mother, Marie McGinley, used to sit at the kitchen table, with one or two newspapers in front of her, and speak to the line-up of all-male politicians on TV.

“You know,” she used to say, “you’d think there wasn’t a woman in the country with a mouth on her at all.”

Maher’s local authority ambitions might have been quashed, but her contribution to political life — and women’s increasing participation in it — was only beginning.

She enrolled as a mature student at Maynooth University and qualified with a degree in history and politics.

Later, with encouragement from Professor Mary Murphy, she graduated with a PhD.

Maher — who uses the Dr title because so many women don’t — was lecturing part time when, in 2019, she saw that Longford Women’s Link was looking to recruit a programme manager to run See Her Elected (SHE), an initiative to encourage more women into politics.

This was a job that would allow her to do what that councillor had failed to do all those years ago — support women in rural Ireland to run for local election.

In academia, Michelle had studied how county councils provided a pipeline for election to the Dáil, but now she had a way to look at the pipeline into county councils and show women how to take the first steps towards local power.

Shortly after SHE was set up in January 2020 — with funding from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage — covid pushed the endeavour online.

That was a blessing in disguise because what was intended to be a six-county project in the Northwest Midlands became nationwide.

In the five short years since then, the results have been so impressive that the organisation was shortlisted at the Political Leadership Entrepreneur Network awards, run by the Better Politics Foundation, in Berlin last week.

Here is the story of that success in figures: In last year’s local elections, SHE supported 40% of the 679 female candidates who ran for election.

Of the 247 women elected — about 25% of the total — 99 of them had availed of its support.

While the percentage of women elected did not increase, the numbers running were the highest in Irish history.

Now, SHE is looking ahead to the local elections of 2029 and urging women to get involved now.

Michelle Maher, Programme Manager See Her Elected and Megan Flynn Dixon, Communications, Development Manager and Elaine Duggan, Digital Media and CRM Co-ordinator

What those statistics can’t communicate, however, is the infectious enthusiasm of Maher and the other members of the team, Megan Flynn Dixon, communication and development manager, and Elaine Duggan, digital media and customer relationship management coordinator.

They have facts, figures, and any number of tips to the ready — from how to get a nomination to using a wooden spoon while leafleting to stop your fingers getting chewed up by rusty letterboxes. A series of election workshops is already up and running and next week, a new guide to running in local elections will be launched.

While the SHE team makes sure nobody goes into the race with rose-tinted glasses, the support on offer is so steadfast that you’d nearly consider running for office yourself.

And that, in the wake of a bruising presidential election. Why would anyone want to run for political office, local or national, when ‘smearing the bejaysus’ out of the opposing candidate was considered a valid strategy by someone with the political experience of Ivan Yates, a former Fine Gael minister?

Maher was shocked by those comments, but she sees them, and the many others that target women in particular, as a spur to action rather than a block.

“So there are people who think that women have no place in politics. I think that is something which would drive me,” she says.

“It’s almost like there’s a moral imperative for us to prove them wrong and to keep going because to not do anything allows people who hold that perspective to be the winners and they shouldn’t be.”

Rousing words for sure, but ones backed up with a series of solid practical steps designed to demystify local politics and help women to participate.

One of the first suggestions is to actually go to a council meeting. If nothing else, you’ll pass a series of portraits of former members — almost all male — on the way into the council chamber.

The SHE programme manager remembers seething as she passed by “the wall of men”, but she was also so heartened to hear another woman remark on the imbalance too.

Going to a council meeting will also show anyone interested in running for local election that councillors are just ordinary people.

“Their qualifications are that they know their communities and they know their way around. You don’t need degrees in engineering or transportation or logistics or social policy to be a local councillor.”

One of the reasons women don’t put themselves forward for local elections is that they don’t see the work they do as valuable; that perception needs to change, she says.

Once, in an effort to highlight the hidden work that women do, Maher refused to replace a towel in a downstairs room of her Westmeath home to see how long it would take before either of her children, then a pre-teen and early teen, noticed.

The answer: Forever and a day.

After several weeks, it became so filthy she took it to the washing machine but didn’t replace it.

Then, she left a fresh towel on top of the banister to see if it would make its way downstairs. It didn’t.

She laughs at the anecdote, but, it provides a potent example of how women’s work in the home and in the community is unseen and unappreciated, though it is vital, often filling the many gaps in government services.

“Women aren’t afraid to get involved in things,” Maher says.

“They’re on parents’ associations, they’re packing bags in supermarkets to raise funds. They’re on residents’ associations, they’re helping out and they’re doing the kind of work that makes them extremely well-qualified to be county councillors.”

It will still take a significant shift in attitude for the women themselves to see that, but SHE is doing all it can to facilitate the change.

Its online sessions are flexible to fit in with women’s busy and unpredictable schedules.

When the team offered one at 7am, they thought there would be few takers, but several women sat in front of a Zoom camera, often in their pajamas, to carve out an hour to hear more about running for election.

There are many challenges, not least of which is the sitting incumbent who may have a link to the community going back generations.

But you don’t have to have a “granny in the graveyard”, to use a term coined by one election watcher, to build a network and an effective campaign.

Speaking of campaigns, here’s Maher’s final pitch to encourage any interested women to get involved: “If you want to see yourself as a county councillor in 2029, the work you do now in 2025 and into 2026 will give you a really, really solid fondation. So get your hands on the See Her Elected guide to running in the 2029 local elections and sign up for our workshops.

“We’d love to see you.”