“I’m not doing it at the moment, but I would never say no,” said Dylan Quinn, founder of the ‘We Deserve Better’ campaign, when asked by this newspaper if he would consider running for council.

He continued: “If I want change, I've got to consider what those actions would be. If I thought it was going to make a difference, if I thought it was an opportunity to make real change, it would be something I would consider in consultation with the people who are interested and obviously with my family.”

As of publication, it has been 654 days since Northern Ireland has had a government at Stormont. With ‘We Deserve Better,’ Dylan and his fellow organisers are still pushing forward with the campaign on social media, as well as trying new ways to engage people locally.

He explained: “We set up a petition for the British government at Westminster to appoint an independent facilitator and that's still going. It’s not picked up as well as we would have liked, and it would be interesting to know why that is."

Dylan continued: "We are trying to see how we can get schools engaged in writing posters to Stormont to ask for MLAs to return to government. We are looking about doing things in local areas, about trying to engage with local MLAs and getting each area to contact their local MLA to arrange a meeting with them to ask them what's going on. We are also looking at a social media campaign which is around small video sharing of people in place which we hope will spread across Northern Ireland.”

“I suppose the main aim is to try and find ways of providing people with an opportunity to express their frustration at the current circumstances and to engage them in political discourse in a way that they have not been engaged before, but it's being done on the back of a very small number of volunteers who are trying to find a way of doing it,” he added.

Returning to the question of running for council, Dylan commented: “I have made no decisions on standing but I have to think about what is going to have the best impact and that's why it would be an option, that's the only reason. If I thought that was going to have the biggest impact, then I think it would be foolish to not consider that but it's not why I got into it.”

He continued: “Sometimes people can think ‘that's what that was all about,’ but actually no, it wasn't at all, I would much prefer to stay being a choreographer and continue to pursue that because that's where my heart lies and that's where I would much rather stay but if they are not going to change, who is going to stand up and start to make that change? You have to have the gumption to do it in some ways.”

“At the moment, for me, it's about engaging people in that debate but we also need to hear much more from the other parties and local councillors."