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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— June - July 2010
now, by a short head, the North’s
largest party with .% of the vote. The reduc-
tion in its total vote from , to ,
since the General election can be attrib-
uted to its withdrawing from South Belfast,
where it had taken , five years ago.
Since then, the Sinn Féin leadership has
butchered many of the sacred cows of Irish
Republicanism. The IRA has decommissioned,
and the Party now supports the police.
Republican dissidents claimed massive
defections from Sinn Féin and the IRA. Like
Dublin’s footballers, the Republican dissidents
flattered to deceive and failed to turn up for the
real challenge. When the election came, there
were neither dissident Republican candidates,
nor even proxies. Sinn Féin number-crunchers
accept some Republicans – around , -
consciously boycotted the poll.
Like Kerry footballers, Sinn Féin is resil-
ient and should not be underestimated. There
has been widespread media coverage of allega-
tions about Gerry Adams, most recently con-
cerning involvement in the murder of
Jean McConville. These fascinated commenta-
tors, but had little impact with voters. In West
Belfast, Adams increased his percentage poll by
.%, taking % of the total vote.
SF’s Michelle Gildernew increased her vote
by , to retain Fermanagh and South Tyrone
by four votes. This was despite Sinn Féin having
had very public problems in Fermanagh: four
councillors (one also an Assembly member) have
departed in the past five years, for destinations
as diverse as Fianna Fáil and the Socialist Party:
both the Continuity and Real IRAs are active in
the county.
The DUP were the other big winners. It
crushed the challenge from its right. A party
insider said: “Unionism has resolved that dev-
olution is here to stay - they were happy to let
Allister put a bit of a frightener on - but when
they looked over into the abyss they decided
that it wasn’t worth the risk. The arguments
now aren’t about Sinn Féin in Government -
they’re about how Northern Ireland should be
run and how we relate to the rest of the United
Kingdom”.
The DUP was , votes behind Sinn Féin
because of not contesting Fermanagh-South
Tyrone, instead backing a Unionist unity can-
didate. The DUP had polled over , in the
NI Elections
Sinn Féin and DUP win
(again)
Unionists have accepted devolution –
and Sinn Féin
phOtO: getty iMages
spot the conservatives
phOtO: getty iMages
“Republican
dissidents
flattered to
deceive”
constituency in , and would have at least
held that vote.
The DUP successfully changed from the party
that always said ‘No’ to the party that says ‘Yes’,
while holding its core support. The party insider
said: “I don’t think its without significance that
this was a nearly entirely ‘positive’ campaign
by the DUP - and possibly the first one of that
kind we’ve run. We ran it on a platform very
largely of voting for us and not simply against
opponents”.
Two newly-elected MPs were particularly
successful. Ian ‘Baby Doc’ Paisley in North
Antrim is the Jackie Healy-Rae of Northern pol-
itics. All he lacks is the cap. ‘Baby Doc’ is a figure
of fun in the media, and hams it up shamelessly.
He will never utter a profundity when he can use
a glib soundbite instead.
Like Healy-Rae in South Kerry, the nega-
tive media image wins him support in North
Antrim. He is an energetic constituency worker.
He showed himself a seriously focused politician,
annihilating Traditional Unionist Voice leader
Jim Allister to retain the seat his father held for
years, with a majority of ,. The scale
of this victory stunned the DUP. The insider said:
“We had heard stories from some of our North
Antrim people that Ian was beating Jim incred-
ibly strongly but we were putting that down to a
bit of over-enthusiasm on their part. As it turns
out they were actually correct”.
The other big DUP winner was Jim Shannon
in Strangford. Scandal forced Iris Robinson
to resign the seat. It cost her husband, Peter
Robinson, his seat in neighbouring East Belfast.
But Shannon took Strangford with a majority
of nearly ,. At one time, Shannon was
perceived as a hardliner in the DUP. Now he is
a strong advocate of the current arrangement.
Unlike either of the Swish Family Robinson, he is
a man of the soil. Originally from Sixmilecross in
Tyrone, he now runs a pork-processing business
at Greyabbey on the Ards Peninsula. Shannon’s
reputation is as a hard constituency worker. A
Nationalist voter in the overwhelmingly Catholic
town of Portaferry said: “He’d not be respected
here for his politics, but he’d be respected as a
worker”.
Peter Robinson was a winner as well as a loser.
The Unionist electorate supported his strategy.
Paradoxically, despite losing his Westminster
seat, his position in the DUP has been strength-
ened. The potential rivals to his leadership have
all been exported to Westminster, because of the
DUP’s decision that MPs will no longer sit in the
Assembly.
The Alliance Party was the only mainstream
party to increase its vote in absolute terms, up
to , from , in . Naomi
Long’s victory in East Belfast gives Alliance an
elected MP at Westminster for the first time.
It was also the first time since the s that
Protestant working-class discontent has been
expressed by a political move to the left of the
established party. Loyalist paramilitaries mobi-
lised their members and supporters to vote for
her. Additionally, in South Belfast Anna Lo more
than doubled her vote. Hong-Kong-born Lo is
the first politician born in East Asia elected to
any legislative body in the United Kingdom – the
Assembly and is insinuating herself into posi-
tion to take the seat when the SDLP’s Alasdair
McDonnell retires.
The most ignored advance was that of vet-
eran socialist Eamonn McCann. Standing in
Foyle (Derry City) for the People before Profit
Alliance, McCann received the best vote for
any radical socialist candidate anywhere in the
United Kingdom. His nearly , votes were
an almost doubling of his vote five years ago. It
reflected years of campaigning on local issues.
In next year’s election, McCann has an outside
chance of becoming the first socialist to win an
Assembly seat.
Tradional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim
Allister was the biggest single loser in the
Westminster elecon in the North. Standing
in last year’s European elecons, he had taken
66,197 votes, or 13.7% of the poll. His party
seemed to be gathering momentum as a real
challenger to the DUP, from its right. Allister ran
in North Antrim. In the European elecon, an
Ulster Unionist tally had put him in the lead in
the constuency. Even a narrow defeat in Ian
‘Papa Doc’ Paisley’s old seat would have been a
moral victory, and huge blow to the DUP.
Instead, the TUV vote fell dramacally. Allister
was 12,000 votes behind Ian Paisley Junior. Across
the North, the party only took 26,300 votes, or
3.9%. It was incapable of capitalising on disillusion
with the Swish Family Robinson in East Belfast, the
heartland of working-class Protestansm. That
disillusion went to the Alliance Party. On the evi-
dence of this elecon, the TUV will probably only
take one seat in next year’s Assembly.
The next biggest loser was Reg Empey, leader
of the Ulster Conservaves and Unionists’
New Force (UCUNF). Empey had pushed for a
link-up between the Ulster Unionists and the
Brish Conservave Party. That failed on every
front. In the run up to the elecon, Empey
fell out publicly with his Party’s only MP, Lady
Sylvia Hermon. Empey forgot a golden rule
of polics: get internal rows out of the way
well before an elecon. Thus, for the rst me
since the Ulster Unionist Council was founded
in 1905, the old Unionist Party has no MP at
Westminster. Empey has announced he will
step down in the autumn.
The Swish Family Robinson were big los-
ers. Peter Robinson lost his East Belfast seat.
His share of the vote was down 20%. Wife
Iris didn’t even defend her Strangford seat.
Working-class former DUP voters perceived
the Robinsons as brazenly living a luxurious life-
style, at the public’s expense.
The big group to lose are public sector work-
ers, approximately 31% of the workforce. At
the start of the elecon campaign, David
Cameron said: “In Northern Ireland it is quite
clear – and almost every party accepts this
– that the size of the State has got too big.”
Under Labour in January, it was announced
£367million was to be cut from Northern pub-
lic spending. In mid-May, further cuts of at
least £120million were announced. Cameron
has now told the Assembly it is up to them
how to implement these.
