'I’ve never seen that level of destruction': Cork election candidate calls for end to poster vandalism

Labour Party candidate for Cork South West Evie Nevin has called for a more sustainable approach to election campaigning following the recent defacement of campaign posters in West Cork.

In what Ms Nevin described as “a bizarre situation”, the incident saw posters of election candidates defaced from just outside Bandon to just past Clonakilty.

Ms Nevin said it involved “a whole lot of effort” for someone to travel about 25km and use a box cutter to cut the candidates’ faces out of the posters along that route.

“I’ve never seen that level of destruction in the years I’ve been doing this,” she told The Echo. 

“It just seems like a lot of effort to go out and cut out the faces, it seems bizarre.

“It’s one thing for the bigger parties who have a big machine and they have the finances but I ordered the very bare minimum amount of posters and I don’t have the reserves for them to be replaced.”

Ms Nevin said that she does not like to use posters because of their environmental impact but said that until everyone stops using them and an alternative solution is put in place, they have a purpose in informing voters of the upcoming election.

Urging local authorities and fellow candidates to consider alternative methods, she suggested a similar approach to that of France where a large noticeboard is put in town centres containing all candidate information.

“The other alternative would be if a cap was put on the amount of posters,” she said. 

“At the moment, they are important. People don’t even know that an election is coming until they see the election posters go up, it’s a visual cue.

“Not everybody is online or is internet literate or social media literate and they have just as much of a right to be part of the democratic process so you have to make sure it’s inclusive.”

Ms Nevin said the gardaí have been notified of the incident and said a line needs to be drawn under this sort of behaviour.

“This conversation comes up in every election and vandalism happens in every election so I think there needs to be a finality to the conversation in terms of what we can do,” she said.