Clare Daly

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Clare Daly

Councillor, activist
In office 2004 – present
Constituency	Swords

Nationality	Irish
Political party	Socialist Party

Clare Daly is an Irish socialist politician and trade union activist. She is a Socialist Party councillor for Swords.

Clare Daly was born in Kildare and educated in NIHE, Dublin (the forerunner of Dublin City University). She was twice elected president of the Students' Union and was prominent in the students' movement campaign for abortion rights and information. Clare Daly was elected to Labour's Administrative Committee as a youth representative. She was expelled from the Labour Party in 1989 alongside Joe Higgins and other supporters of the Militant Tendency.

Clare Daly was an organiser of the Anti-Water charges campaign in Swords in the mid 1990s. She received 7.2% in the 1997 general election and 8.15% in the by-election later in the year. She was elected as a Councillor on Fingal County Council for the Swords ward in 1999 with 14% (1287 first preference votes). In the 2002 general election she received 5,501 votes, 12.5%, narrowly missing a seat. In the 2007 general election Daly received 9% of the vote, the reduction in her first preference vote was largely due to a national squeeze of smaller parties in that election.

She was jailed alongside 21 others from the Anti-Bin Tax Campaign in Autumn 2003 for breaching a High Court order preventing protests leading to obstruction of the council's non-collection policy for those not paying bin charges. In the 2004 local election she was re-elected with 2,763 first preference votes (16.5%). She is a SIPTU Shop Steward in Aer Lingus and has been to the fore in opposing the privatisation of that airline.