Mark Dearey

Mark Dearey (born 19 March 1963) is an Irish Green Party politician. He is a former member of Seanad Éireann who was nominated by the Taoiseach on 23 February 2010 following the resignation of Déirdre de Búrca.^[1]

Political career

Dearey is a member of Louth County Council for the Green Party. He was elected to the Dundalk Town Council in 2004 and re-elected in 2009 and also elected to the County Council for the first time.^[2] He was re-elected to the County Council in 2014.

He was the Green Party candidate at the 2007 general election in the Louth constituency and received 7.6% of first preference votes but was not elected. In the 2011 general election his vote declined to 4.7% of first preference votes. In 2012, he was selected as the Green Party's non-parliamentary spokesperson for Finance.

He ran unsuccessfully as the Green Party candidate in the Midlands–North-West constituency for the 2014 European Parliament election and received 1.5% of the first preference votes.

Background

He first came to public attention in County Louth in 1994 when he and three others from the county took a court action against British Nuclear Fuels Limited, to seek an end to reprocessing at Sellafield.^[3]

In the early 1990s he worked as a secondary schoolteacher in Coláiste Éanna in Dublin before embarking on a career in organic horticulture where he worked for nine years. He then acquired the music venue and bar, The Spirit Store in Dundalk which he still owns and manages.

He is a Director of Turas, a Dundalk based, addiction counselling service. He is a founding member of the Newry Dundalk Farmers Market, Chairman of the Dundalk St. Patrick's Day Committee, and a former board member of Friends of the Earth, Ireland.

References