FORMER JUSTICE MINISTER Alan Shatter has announced that he is to run as an Independent candidate in the general election.

The longtime Fine Gael politician, who parted ways with the party in recent years, will contest a seat in Dublin Rathdown. 

In a statement to The Journal, Shatter said: “I will be asking the electorate in Dublin Rathdown to support me with their no 1 votes to illustrate the level of support for the abolition of inheritance tax.”

Leaflets distributed by Shatter in the constituency say he’s running on a platform of “truth, integrity and wisdom”.

Shatter served as a Fine Gael TD for the then-Dublin South constituency from 1981 to 2002 and from 2007 to 2016.

He resigned in the wake of the findings of the Guerin report, which saw senior counsel Sean Guerin investigate how the former minister handled complaints made by Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe.

He maintained that he had not acted wrongly in dealing with McCabe and was later cleared of wrongdoing by the O’Higgins Commission in 2016.

He won an appeal to challenge the Guerin report in November 2016 and the Court of Appeal found in his favour, before the Supreme Court upheld that decision following an appeal by Guerin.

Most recently, Shatter has campaigned against the State’s inheritance tax policy, comparing it to “randomly stealing money from bereaved families”.

He occasionally writes columns for newspapers such as the Irish Times, and has authored several books, including, in recent years, Frenzy and Betrayal: The Anatomy of a Political Assassination (2019) and a 2023 novel Cyril’s Lottery of Life.