Madden is a business consultant. His priorities are rural Ireland, education, housing and public spending. He is treasurer of the Portumna camogie club in Galway.

I run as an independent candidate because I believe the whip system of Dublin-centric government is slowly suffocating rural Ireland. Corporate interests trump the interests of ordinary people. The best option for many graduates is to flee the country while farmers are being disproportionately blamed for the climate. The prosperity of rural Ireland is being decimated by politicians who simply do not care. The response of recent financial hand-outs to soften reality is callous, cynical and hollow. We need to put power back into the hands of communities and local government and strike a better balance between top-down and grassroots governance. The people must have their say on the issues that affect them.

This is a country of haves and have nots. People are utterly disillusioned by politics because they feel it simply doesn’t serve them - we live in a supposedly affluent country where married couples with two full-time salaries are forced to live at home with their parents and defer parenthood because they cannot afford to buy their own home or raise a family. We have spiralling homeless and housing crises for many years which the government were indifferent to solving yet we found ways to innovate in order to prioritise the welfare of migrants - this is particularly jarring for many people struggling to get by in Ireland today.

As an Independent TD, my first speaking time in the Dáil is likely to focus on constituency issues. It is a fact that the west of Ireland is in economic decline with GDP per capita less than half of that of the affluent East of the country. The region has suffered from systemic under-investment in infrastructure from successive Dublin-centric governments. East Galway, in particular, has become a dumping ground for speculative energy projects that will serve the affluent east of the country and data centres which now command almost one-third of Ireland’s electricity. The “To Hell or To Connaught” sentiment is still very much alive in Ireland and unfortunately, our elected party politicians have done very little to address this.