Green Party MEP Ciarán Cuffe admits using fake research company to canvass voters

Cuffe used around 20 volunteers with a fake ballot paper to do a pre-election poll, pretending to be an independent research company

Fri, 11 Jun, 2021 - 11:28

Aoife Moore, Political Correspondent

Green Party MEP Ciarán Cuffe has admitted using a fake research company to canvass voters.

Mr Cuffe used around 20 volunteers with a fake ballot paper to do a pre-election poll in 2002, pretending to be an independent research company.

When approached by the Irish Examiner, Mr Cuffe said he had a hard time remembering the name but said it may have been "ABC Surveys".

When asked if he was given the go-ahead for it by Green Party head office, Mr Cuffe said: "I don't think we had a head office, we're going back a while."

Mr Cuffe was elected to the Dáil that year representing Dún Laoghaire.

Mr Cuffe is the latest politician to admit to using volunteers and party members pretending to be independent pollsters for carrying out covert election research.

Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has admitted he was aware that members of his Cork South Central constituency posed as independent pollsters.

Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party, and Sinn Féin have all admitted some party members would poll the public during elections while hiding the fact they worked for a political party.

Fine Gael's candidate for the Dublin Bay South by-election James Geoghegan also admitted he did similar work for former Fine Gael TD Lucinda Creighton, but that he did tell people who he worked for.

“I think it exposes something that most political parties in Ireland were involved in up until five, six, seven years ago,” Mr Coveney said.

Fine Gael has confirmed that some of its members, including teams working for Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, used business cards to identify themselves as being from polling companies that did not exist.

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