Meet The Locals – the new film capturing Dublin’s election trail

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Luke McManus (North Circular) introduces his latest TV documentary The Locals, a fly-on-the-wall look at the recent local elections in Dublin’s North Inner City, which premieres on RTÉ One on Monday, July 15th.

Like most Irish people I’m fascinated by elections as a spectator sport as well as a social and cultural phenomenon .

It’s a combination of a couple of things, our unusual and brilliant electoral system for starters. The nature of PR-STV is so well suited to endless analysis, speculation and cliffhangers as well our multi-seat model which creates intra-party rivalries that can be the most bitter and attritional of all.

The intimate scale of our politics, where almost everyone knows their local politicians personally, also makes it compelling for us. It probably helped that both my parents and my brother were local councillors in Bray over the years, so I grew up in this world.

Observational documentaries take time and patience: on this job both were very much in short supply.

Some of my favourite films and TV are about elections and politics – from Alexander Payne’s black high school comedy Election with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick to HBO’s Game Change about the Sarah Palin debacle to the brilliant RTÉ documentaries made by Loosehorse, The Naked Election, that followed the 2007 general and 2011 presidential elections .

But it struck me that local elections have a specific quality that hadn’t been interrogated before in an Irish documentary, and that the cosy milieu of a local election might make for an engaging story. But the time never really seemed right. Until this year.

My electoral ward, the North Inner City, suddenly seemed like a microcosm of a debate that was engulfing the nation. As well as a range of well-established interesting characters from former Mountjoy inmate the redoubtable Christy Burke to Bertie Ahern’s erstwhile ward boss Nial Ring, the north inner city had
become a place with a national profile following the riots that erupted in the wake of the terrible
assault on children and their carer on Parnell Square last November.
With an intractable housing crisis gripping the area and the aftershock of the East Wall Says No
movement still echoing through the community, the scene was set for one of the most contentious,
polarised local elections ever.

The documentary has a somewhat ragged, breathless quality as a result of the nature of election campaigning…

I live in the constituency and had met many of the local councillors along the way so myself and producer Nuala Carr weren’t starting entirely from scratch. But with the project greenlit on May 13th, with the election happening on June 7th and the documentary due to air on July 15th, it was a punishing schedule. Observational documentaries take time and patience: on this job both were very much in short supply.

But with our candidates enthusiastically behind the project we hit the ground running in an attempt to catch up with our workaholic protagonists.

The documentary has a somewhat ragged, breathless quality as a result of the nature of election campaigning – you don’t have much time to carefully frame a shot when the candidate has already moved on to the next doorstep.

But it became clear that we had to lean into this style as it perfectly reflected the hectic life of a local election candidate. With all documentaries you need a bit of luck and we got it in spades with interesting events and locations as well our mixture of fascinating people. It ranges from the silly to the sinister, but since the North Inner City itself is a place where horror, hilarity and heart are part of the everyday existence, it felt appropriate that our film had the same tone and values.

The hardest thing without a doubt was realising we only had room for seven characters, so myself, and editor Liam Kelly made the drastic but entirely necessary call to leave five of our subjects on the cutting room floor.

They say you have to ‘kill your darlings’ in filmmaking. All I can say is – watch out for The Locals 2…

The Locals, RTÉ One, Monday 15th July at 9.35pm – catch up via RTÉ Player

Pics: Gregory Dunn