First Green candidate for Breffni county

Green Party local election candidate, Kevin Murphy, may have the lowest campaign carbon footprint of any election candidate in the country. He has taken a novel approach and is not putting up posters or leafleting letterboxes.

“I’m dead against posters. I hate waste. I’m more of a paper-based candidate,” admits Mr Murphy, a candidate for Cavan-Belturbet, who simply hopes enough like-minded individuals will see merit in his stand, and will at least consider this as the “start of a conversation” in the hope of getting someone else elected in future.

It was former General Election candidate, Tate Donnelly, who encouraged Mr Murphy to put his name forward. The Greens have three candidates running in neighbouring Monaghan but dad-of-four Mr Murphy is first ever to stand in County Cavan.

Mr Murphy intends to host a number of coffee mornings, and has been visiting schools in his community too.

“We have to begin somewhere,” says Mr Murphy, who has been a party member for much of the past decade, and feels strongly about progressing the agenda for combating climate change. But it’s not the only issue about which Mr Murphy is passionate. Housing, community supports, connected rural transport, and other social issues also rank high on his agenda.

“There comes a time when you have to get beyond texting each other and start doing something. We have to step up and be seen. The party is 40 years in Ireland now, is one of the biggest in Europe, so it can have a great influence, not just on environmental issues, but socially as well.”

The Swanlinbar native and environmental engineer, who is from a farming background and still has a small holding himself, thinks that the biggest barrier to people voting Green is the idea of “change”.

He’s planted much of his own farm with native Irish trees. The result, in terms of developing a safe habitat for wildlife, has been dramatic.

“The hardest thing in the world to change is someone else’s mind,” believes Mr Murphy who planted the land, not to make money, but for the “greater good” in the long term.

To the narrative that the Greens are ‘anti-farm’ and their policies won’t work in rural Ireland, Mr Murphy says: “The facts and figures are out there. We’re all custodians on this planet, and if you want to hand it onto your children, and for them to hand it onto their children, we have to do something, so that it’s in a better state than when you got it, and there’s maybe a greater understanding also. I don’t want to be shouting about the environment all the time, but it is important.”

He accepts that some Green Party policies feel more urban-centric but believes that will change as more people get involved or elected at local level. “We all live on the same island, but we don’t all live in Dublin, or Cork, or Galway. We need to have a voice there for the little guys, someone to say that that policy isn’t going to work in west Cavan, or Leitrim, or wherever. You have to have room for growth.”