Glenealy Source: Wikimedia Commons

A CO WICKLOW village has declared that its telephone poles will be a poster-free zone during the coming election.

The Tidy Towns committee of Glenealy, a small village to the west of Wicklow Town, has managed to get the agreement of all 15 candidates to keep their posters out of the area during the coming campaign.

The election is expected to be announced in the coming days as months of anticipation finally draws to a close, while Wicklow’s current roster of TDs includes such household names as Simon Harris, Stephen Donnelly and Anne Ferris.

An election poster for Renua candidate Terence Flanagan which got posted ahead of time in Kilbarrack, Dublin Source: Anonymous

By law election posters can not be erected until after the election is announced, although as can be seen from an incident in Dublin earlier, politicians are eager to get them up as soon as possible.

“It’s something we’ve been working on for about two weeks,” Ronan Mullen, of Glenealy Tidy Towns, told TheJournal.ie regarding the poster-ban.

We knew the election was coming and we figured it would be a good time to get in touch with the candidates and see what we could do.

Some of the hopefuls were a little worried that it would be hard to make sure everyone stays faithful to the pact according to Mullen, although he feels certain that everyone will keep their side of the bargain now.

“Everyone is happy that their competitors will keep their posters down also,” he says.

We’d love to see more people do this. It shows that the Tidy Towns is a good starting point towards make this kind of thing  happen. We tried it via the council in the past and it didn’t work out at all.

But what if one of Wicklow’s political hopefuls should break their side of the bargain? Would it be a case of naming and shaming the culprit.

“I don’t think it would come to that,” says Mullen.

We’d give them a chance to take it down first.

Read: Renua TD’s premature poster erection in north Dublin

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