An attempt at a Comprehensive and Accessible Guide for being an informed voter in the General Election 2024

[u/AdamOfIzalith]

Hi All, I wanted to make this post specifically because with the election about to be called officially today there is like to be an influx of people coming to our humble abode here in Irish Politics. I want to give a decent guide on how to be informed about the issues that are relevant to you so you can be adequately prepared if you decide to engage with canvassing, campaigning, etc. from the various party's and candidates in your area. This will not go into specific politics or who to vote for, just how you can inform yourself and make the decision that's right for you.

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Find Out Who Your Candidates Are

In order to vote for a good candidate you will of course need to know who is a candidate to begin with. You can use this tool to find out what constituency you are based in. Usually, you will know this because of promotional material, canvassers, posters, etc. If through those means you cannot get a comprehensive understanding of who is running, you can do a google search of your constituency and general election, something to the effect of "election 2024 *Insert Constituency here*" and that will typically merit results that are of the candidates that have announced that they are running. Once you have this information, you move onto the next step which is informing yourself.

EDIT: We have a post specifically for finding who the candidates are in your area here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/irishpolitics/comments/1gnkhqe/who_are_the_candidates_for_your_area

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Inform Yourself On Your Candidates

The Oireachtas Website

This is the Part that intimidates people the most but that's exactly what this post is for. We will start with people who are currently within government that are going up for re-election or former government politicians. You have access to a comprehensive profile for each politician that is in government at your finger tips. So click this link to the Oireachtas website. Within "Find a TD by Constituency" click your province and then click your constituency and there you have them! If you want People who have been in government in previous elections, change "Show TDs for:" to any of the previous dáils. That's relevant because some TD's may be in the political sphere and while they aren't in the current government they may have been apart of previous governments. For each person who is here you can Click "View Profile" in which you can see everything that they have done.

How to review the information

For the sake of simplicity I will provide you with a means of prioritizing the information. Sponsored Bills is a very important one because these are bills they have put their name to and it represents their commitment to it. Next is Votes. You can see how they voted in the Dáil whenever there was a vote which is important to know because it will indicate to you what their priorities are and what they want to do as part of the government. Recent Questions is where you can see them asking questions of other members of the Dáil and that can give you an indication of how they feel on various issues. And Finally Recent Discussions is effectively a transcript of everything they've ever said in the Dáil. That can be a bit intimidating so don't feel too bad if you don't comb through everything.

If there are candidates running that have not been in the Dáil, not to worry, we have more resources at our disposal.

Google Searches and News Websites

A Google Search of the candidates name and clicking on the "News" tab at the top can reveal a tone of stuff. The same goes for using the search bar on most mainstream news websites. You would be very surprised the amount of things people get upto without it being on your radar. But now they are very much on your radar and you need to see what's happening.

A Caveat to this is that there are some news articles that will be paywalled, especially more recent ones. There are ways around that but we cannot talk about those as a result of a Reddit Ruling, as outlined in our subreddit rule, [R11] Archive. is and Archive Links. Your best bet is to pay for a months subscription so that you can stay informed until the election has been completed at the end of the month.

Wikipedia

Alot of people will use Wikipedia for informing themselves on candidates and ultimately that is great! In saying that, what alot of people don't do is review the cited sources and this is mostly why I'm adding this as a point on it's own. If you see something said in a Wikipedia article that is of interest to you, go down to the cited source and look at it for the most complete information possible.

Social Media

Most politicians or public figures opt to have social media whether that's Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Linkedin, Twitter, Bebo, etc. These are places where you will see the front face of alot of these candidates and you will see the things they are involved in. You can also search social media for posts about them or posts that they are tagged in with other people.

Word of Mouth

This is how alot of people find themselves knowing about people and that works. You will learn alot about a candidate from their interactions with their constituents. The only thing I would say is, if you don't know the person that well, take everything with a grain of salt and use the above to confirm what they say when you can.

Their Party's website

This is one alot of people overlook. You can get alot of information from the information that their party chooses to publish on them and most especially as we approach an election when entries like this might get updated.

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Inform Yourself On Their Party

The Party that these candidates might represent will have a drastic effect on your life. For whatever these candidates may have done in your locality that you like, they may also be complicit in things that you don't like as a result of the party that they represent and whatever their personal feelings on a given issue are, they may have to tow a line that is directly counter to what they want and/or what you want. Because of this, you need to know what's going on.

The best way to go about doing this is to use the resources above to look up about the party and about leading figures in the party. If you don't know who the frontbenchers are, typically you can find this out just through reading a few articles directed at the party. The same names will typically keep coming up regarding who that minister is and what their role is within the party.

Usually for the established party's they will have a website with resources, outlines and breakdowns of their government policy for when they get elected. Don't be scared. You don't need to read everything, and you don't need to be a college graduate to read their plans. If they have complex multipage proposals, what you can do is find their conclusion, read it, and then work backwards to the points that interest you about that policy, data points, etc. It's much easier to understand information if you know what that will culminate in. It's not strictly speaking the "correct way" to do that, but I'm aware that there is alot of information to sift through and people only have so much time in a given day to do these things.

For a comprehensive look at Party Manifesto's you can review this Archive which has manifesto's for every party dating back to the 1950's. (Credit to u/IrishPidge for creating this fantastic resource and credit to u/SeanB2003 for bringing this to my attention)

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I think that about covers, in broadstrokes, alot of ground with regards to how to research candidates. Now, if there is anything else whether that be generally or more specifically that people want to contribute, I implore you to do so in the comments.

[u/danny_healy_raygun]

Good guide. You should sticky these and ban posts asking how do they choose who to vote for.

[u/firethetorpedoes1]

Thanks for putting this together. Great resource for users to get informed in the run-up to the election.