Student: ‘Website matched me to Independent candidate Brendan Young’

Meet the Voters: ‘The whole set up of the campaign really isn’t aimed at young people’

Maedbh Donaldson is a second year media studies student from Maynooth, Co Kildare. She is interested in housing issues and abortion rights. Maedbh's full profile can be read hereA lot of the media coverage of the campaign is not aimed at students. They could make it a little bit more accessible. Young people have probably lost interest in politics since the same sex marriage referendum.

I don’t think a lot of students watched the televised debates.

I found a website called smartvote.ie and that's actually quite good. It asks you questions and then matches you to candidates in your constituency.

My number one on that is Independent Brendan Young and second is a People Before Profit - AAA candidate and then it's Fine Gael.

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Issues such as third level funding, student accommodation, housing developments, rent caps affect me as a young person thinking of maybe moving out of home in the next few years. I’m also definitely pro-choice.

Nothing has really caught my attention in this campaign. Even the language they use-it’s very formal.

The whole set up of the campaign really isn’t aimed at young people. It’s not really something me and my friends talk about.

I haven’t met the candidates but their posters are obviously everywhere. I’ve seen one guy’s posters in really inappropriate places.

There’s a shopping centre in Maynooth and right across the road from it there’s this big field beside the church and he’s just planted this ginormous truck of a poster right there. It would almost sway me to not vote for him.

Constituency: Kildare North

Maedbh Donaldson was in conversation with Dan Griffin as part of The Irish Times Meet the Voters series, profiling 10 sample voters in a bid to track the impact of the 2016 General Election campaign on their voting intentions. . Follow them at irishtimes.com/election-2016/meet-the-voters