Paula McCaul of Meath Chambers with European candidates Peter Casey, Brendan Smith, Mairead McGuinness, Dominic Hannigan, Michael O'Dowd and Dilip Mahapatra in Navan last week.

Euro candidates on Primetime tonight

Candidates from the Midlands North West European constituency will feature on RTE's Prime Time tonight.

Insurance and broadband were the hot topics at Meath’s Midlands North-West European Election Husting in the Newgrange Hotel, Navan, last week, were six candidates spoke about business in rural areas.

Meath Chamber  facilitated the elections husting offering business an opportunity to meet and engage directly with the candidates running in the Midlands North West constituency.  
Six candidates were present: Fine Gael’s Mairead McGuinness, Labour’s Dominic Hannigan, Renua’s Michael O’Dowd, Fianna Fáil’s Brendan Smith and independents Dilip Mahapatra and Peter Casey.  A number of candidates who were to attend sent their apologies, but those who were there participated in a lively discussion on the issues facing business people in rural Ireland.  Each candidate took three minutes to set out their stall after which specific questions were raised by business people themselves.  These questions focused on taxation, the circular and digital economy, broadband, insurance, Brexit and infrastructural investment requirements in Meath.  The issues around Insurance and the impact of spiralling costs on tourism and activity based businesses  dominated the latter half of the discussion with inputs from Linda Murray (The Zone) and Martin Skelly (Navan Travel). 
Chief Executive of County Meath Chamber, Paula McCaul said: “Our primary objective today was to connect our business network to their candidate hopefuls on specific topics impacting on business and we certainly achieved that.  County Meath Chamber, along with chambers of commerce across Ireland, is calling on this business community to get engaged and support their ‘Our Time to Vote’ campaign by showing up at polling stations on the 24 May and casting your ballot.