Housing, Climate Action and Free Public Transport the focus of PBP local election campaigns

“people power campaigns is what really makes history” — Ruairí Fahy

This week People Before Profit launched their local election manifesto with candidates outlining local issues and campaigns to fight for public housing, against evictions, for better maintenance, real climate action that improves people’s lives, including state led retrofits and free public transport as well as new position of directly elected Mayor.

Criticising the lack of powers that have been given to the position of Mayor and the “History will be made” marketing campaign People Before Profit candidate for Limerick Mayor Ruairí Fahy said “people power campaigns is what really makes history. People getting organised, people fighting together, people uniting for real change because, in reality, there was a promise made that a lot of powers be devolved to the council in Limerick to make decisions locally; to decide how spending happened locally [but] the power remains in the executive, very little has been transferred over to a new directly elected mayor position.”

Highlighting the limitations of council spending being decided centrally by national policy Mr. Fahy outlined the need for communities to be involved in the creation of the budget and development plan, “to ensure that it’s not just sports, it’s arts, it’s cultural facilities, community centres, all of these things, people are crying out for them and since COVID social isolation has gone through the roof and people need places to meet, people need community centres, they need public spaces that are free for them to go to.”

Calling out the rise in “in-work poverty” where “so many people are working more than 40 hours a week just to keep food on the table. You have parents who are cutting back on their own food intake to ensure that their children are fed. They're embarrassed that they can't bring their children out for the weekend, to go to the cinema or just to go swimming, anything like that, they have to pay out of pocket for everything, and they just can't get by.”

To solve this problem Mr. Fahy called for a revival of “Limerick's radical history, of radical trade union action—from the general strike in 1919 through to workers taking over the mills and the creameries throughout the war of independence, they managed to nearly double their wages while also cutting the prices for people who were buying the milk and buying the bread. So that's what we need to be fighting for.

“We need to go and use council contracts, put terms into those contracts to ensure that unionised companies get a preference, that a living wage is mandated by all council contracts, and then fight to get all of those contracts brought back in under the council directly, because all of this outsourcing has just been increasing the wealth for a few individuals while reducing the quality of services delivered to everybody.”

Whether elected as a councillor or as Mayor Mr. Fahy declared his desire to see fare-free public transport using funds from the new mayoral budget “to challenge that Ernest Young report that said, if we make free public transport only 1% of people will get out of their cars, We can see what happened in Montpellier. When they brought in the same They had a 30% increase in ridership, 1% versus 30%. Where do we fall on that?”

Mr. Fahy finished by calling for more funding at local level saying “we need to start increasing our public spending in councils in general, bring it under democratic control, and try to ensure that people have a say over their communities and over development.”