Friday is Independents Day for the people’s candidates

It will be interesting to see if the reaction that independents are receiving on the doorsteps will translate into votes for independents this Friday.

There’s certainly a greater willingness amongst voters, albeit a weary willingness, to listen to non-party candidates.

“We need to change the system. The communities, and not parties, need to be represented. They are not being represented. Look at what happened with the bank guarantee,” expounds Diarmaid O’Cadhla, who is running as a People’s Candidate in Cork City’s south-east ward.

Ann Hickey leans against the door of her home in Mahon as O’Cadhla describes how “the parties have the monopoly on parties rather than the communities”. He will do things differently.

“Ordinary people need to get in there. Ordinary people that are struggling to live day to day,” says Ann Hickey. She doesn’t say whether she’ll give O’Cadhla her number one but she’s “willing to give” him “a chance”.

“I always go for the underdog,” she says.

Donnacha Murphy is knocking on a door around the corner. He tells O’Cadhla he recognises him. O’Cadhla, who lives in Blackrock in Cork City, smiles delightedly as he has nothing like the poster count that the main parties have.

“Labour will be wiped out man and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are just the same side of the one coin,” thunders Murphy. “Charging us for water, that was the final straw. We need water to survive. Labour have lost touch with the people.”

Again O’Cadhla, a former students union president at Cork Institute of Technology, says he will “change the system” and “break the monopoly”. “We won’t have a party whip, there will be no vested interests,” he says as he asks the man in his 50s or 60s to read a neon yellow People’s Candidate “statement”.

Murphy promises him a vote and as O’Cadhla walks away he is still ranting about Labour and how “he’ll never vote for them again”.

O’Cadhla is one of 18 People’s Candidates who are running in Cork, Limerick, Monaghan, and Dublin. The People’s Candidates refuse to describe themselves as a party, deriding parties as “private clubs”. Theirs is a movement of reform based around greater transparency of decision making and organised monthly community meetings where people can air their opinions on decisions that are due to or deserve to be made at local and national level.

As part of these meetings, a community stance is formulated and this position is advocated at local or national government level by their elected People’s Candidate.

This is O’Cadhla’s second electoral outing as a candidate. He says people are “beginning to recognise their candidates”, even though they mightn’t yet understand the relatively simple concept that is driving them.

“It’s a simple concept but it’s not a utopian concept,” says O’Cadhla. “Once you see some of us elected, and I believe this will happen in this election, you will see other councillors who are not People Candidate’s start to operate in the same way as the electorate will see the value of what we are doing, they will see that people are being empowered.”

* For the latest election news and analysis visit our special Election 2014 section.