{"id":461917,"date":"2026-05-22T15:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T15:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/461917\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T15:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T15:18:08","slug":"returning-officer-informs-gardai-of-power-hose-incident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/461917\/","title":{"rendered":"Returning Officer informs garda\u00ed of power hose incident"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Dublin City Returning Officer said he has notified garda\u00ed about the potential breach of the election laws.<\/p>\n<p>The image and name of a bye-election candidate in Dublin Central was marked on pavements outside a number of polling stations in Dublin using a power hose.<\/p>\n<p>Joe Burke said that when the issue was brought to his attention he notified garda\u00ed, Dublin City Council and the candidate themselves.<\/p>\n<p>He said that it was the first time, in his role presiding over elections in the capital, that he had seen something of this nature occur.<\/p>\n<p>Dublin City Council said it will be issuing fines to a bye-election candidate in Dublin Central after their image and name was marked on pavements outside a number of polling stations in Dublin using a power hose.<\/p>\n<p>The technique, which leaves a mark on concrete by using stencils and power washing machinery to bring up words and images that are cleaner than the rest of the pavement, was deployed in several locations around Dublin Central before being reported to the council.<\/p>\n<p>Dublin City Council said the practice is in breach of both litter legislation and electoral legislation which restricts the distance that candidates material can be displayed from a polling station.<\/p>\n<p>The council said it will be issuing fines to the candidate and that it has deployed a number of cleaning crews to try and remove the imagery from the polling stations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dublin City Returning Officer said he has notified garda\u00ed about the potential breach of the election laws.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-461917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}