People Before Profit select Joe Daly as general election candidate for Mayo

PEOPLE Before Profit have selected Joe Daly to run in the five-seat Mayo constituency in the general election.

The Castlebar secondary school teacher has stood in the two previous local elections and the 2020 general election and will do so again in the upcoming general election - which has been slated to take place before the end of the year.

Mr Daly is a long-time People Before Profit member and ASTI union representative and has campaigned on various issues.

He received 721 first preference votes in the 2020 general election before being eliminated on the third count. In June, he received 246 first preference votes when he unsuccessfully stood for Mayo County Council alongside eighteen other candidates.

“I have played a leading role in building grassroots campaigns for housing, health, anti-water privatisation, Repeal of the 8th, anti-fascism, against corruption and in solidarity with Palestine,” the father-of-four stated.

Mr Daly has called on young voters to register to vote to ‘to finally end 100 years of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil rule’. Fianna Fáil are running two candidates in Mayo while Fine Gael are running four.

This includes Senator Lisa Chambers (Fianna Fáil) and Minister Alan Dillon, who are both based in Castlebar.

Mr Daly said that the public maintained a ‘deep scepticism’ towards the two Civil War parties, despite their recent poll performances. A recent Sunday Times opinion poll of 1,005 adults put Fine Gael at 24 percent and Fianna Fáil at 19 percent respectively.

“They [Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael] leave a legacy of the worst housing crisis in the State’s history, cruel hospital waiting lists, a chronic lack of additional needs’ resources and supports for children, a recruitment & retention crisis in education, huge levels of inequality and poverty, corporate greed-flation and sickening complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people,” Mr Daly added.

His party is calling for using the ‘vast wealth being hoarded by a minority’ to be invested into public service and for the establishment of an ‘Irish NHS’, free public childcare and a ‘truly free and inclusive education’. People Before Profit are also advocating for the abolition of the USC, rent controls, free public transport, wealth taxed on millionaires and retrofitting all housing in the state to a BER of B2 or above

Mr Daly concluded by saying that his party would never go into government with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.

“We fight to end 100 years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and for an Ireland for the many not the few.”