ANALYSIS: Has Northern Ireland’s politics changed for good?
7 min read
The voices of Northern Irish nationalism and neutrality are finally set to return to the Commons chamber this week. And while the DUP and Sinn Féin may still dominate numbers, both parties have been bruised by an electorate angry at the consequences of political stalemate. Sam McBride reports on Northern Ireland’s changing political landscape
“If we adopt an attitude of stubborn defiance, we will not have a friend left at Westminster.” Those words were uttered half a century ago by the then prime minister of Northern Ireland, Captain Terence O'Neill, but encapsulate the fears of some thinking unionists as they survey the wreckage of this general election.
In his famous 'Ulster stands at the crossroads' televised address to Northern Ireland, the wooden aristocrat O'Neill warned unionists that if they refused to accept reforms necessary in the face of a growing civil rights campaign then their place within the Union could be at stake.
Within five months, O'Neill had been ejected from office. Central to that was the firebrand Protestant preacher Ian Paisley who humiliated the Prime Minister by almost defeating him in the 1969 Stormont election. Paisley would go on to found the DUP and that party would rise to complete dominance of unionism.
In the 2019 election the DUP's mastery of the unionist political landscape was confirmed when the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) failed to win a single seat. The closest it came to victory was in the knife-edge constituency of Fermanagh-South Tyrone where former UUP leader Tom Elliott – who had been backed by the DUP – fell 57 votes short of taking the seat from Sinn Féin's Michelle Gildernew.
Elsewhere the party was obliterated. New UUP leader Steve Aiken, a former Royal Navy nuclear submarine commander, came third behind the centrist Alliance Party when he challenged the DUP's veteran East Antrim MP Sammy Wilson.
That scenario was repeated across many of Northern Ireland's 18 seats. By the end of the count, Alliance had gone, on the basis of votes, from being Northern Ireland's fifth largest party to third behind the DUP and Sinn Féin.
Alliance shocked the DUP in North Down, with deputy leader Stephen Farry winning the seat previously held by the independent unionist Lady Hermon.
Hermon's announcement that she was retiring came just five weeks before polling day, leaving Alliance little time to organise a major campaign. The party was helped by loyalist posters which absurdly attempted to link Dr Farry, a cerebral former Stormont higher education minister, with the IRA because Sinn Féin had stood aside in his favour as part of a wider pro-EU move by Sinn Féin. The posters backfired on the party they were intended to help – the DUP.
The DUP had been banking on winning North Down to offset what it knew would be the loss of Emma Little Pengelly in South Belfast. In Northern Ireland's most diverse constituency, the home of Queen's University and a seat where unionism has for years been a minority, the fact that she won in 2017 with 30% of the vote was due to a quirk of the first past the post system.
It was always going to be difficult for Northern Ireland's arch-Brexiteers to retain the seat in what is a staunchly pro-EU constituency. But that slender hope became entirely forlorn when Sinn Féin and the Greens stood aside in favour of the SDLP candidate, Claire Hanna.
Hanna, an articulate and unusually non-tribal Ulster politician, romped home with a majority of more than 15,000.
Seventy miles north west of Belfast, her party leader, Colum Eastwood, surpassed even that majority. In an exceptional and unexpected result, the young MLA defeated Sinn Féin's sitting MP Elisha McCallion – who in 2017 had ejected SDLP veteran Mark Durkan – with a crushing margin of more than 17,000.
“In contrast to the shrinking vote for Sinn Féin and the DUP, Alliance saw its support explode”
But the biggest blow of the night came back in Northern Ireland's capital. In North Belfast, the DUP's Westminster leader Nigel Dodds knew that he was battling for his career. In a constituency which had once been represented by the father of Ulster unionism, Sir Edward Carson, Dodds knew that a growing Catholic population and a consolidation of the nationalist vote around Sinn Féin was making his position increasingly precarious.
He then faced the unprecedented decision of the SDLP and the Greens to stand aside in favour of Sinn Féin's candidate, the young Belfast Lord Mayor John Finucane, whose solicitor father Pat was murdered by loyalists three decades ago.
In the end, Finucane not only demolished Dodds' lead of 2,000 but built his own majority of 2,000.
It was a stinging blow for a party dependent on Dodds as a strategist and a respected father figure in a party which has been shorn of much experience in recent years. One DUP member said: "We could lose anyone but him."
However, while defeating Dodds – an "architect of Brexit" as Sinn Féin had described him – was deliciously satisfying for republicans, the party had a dreadful night elsewhere across Northern Ireland.
In every other constituency, Sinn Fein's vote fell and its overall vote share was down 6.6 percentage points – more than that of any other party.
Sinn Féin's West Belfast heartland was exemplary of the party's problem. Paul Maskey still retained the seat at a canter, with a majority of more than 14,000.
But his share of the vote (53.8%) is now the lowest Sinn Féin has achieved in Gerry Adams' old seat in any election since 1996. As well as his own vote falling, because of voters not coming out at all, votes leached to the socialist People Before Profit and the new republican anti-abortion party Aontú as well as to Alliance.
In contrast to the shrinking vote for Sinn Féin and the DUP, Alliance saw its support explode.
The non-tribal party, which is neutral on the question of Irish unity, has been consistently gaining support in recent years – fuelled by a new generation which has grown up after the Troubles and is weary of the old sectarian squabbles. This combined further with a desire to punish the big two parties for their inability to get devolution restored for almost three years, plus a strong anti-Brexit sentiment among many voters – especially those who would otherwise be inclined towards the Ulster Unionist Party but are dismayed at its incoherence and confused by its Brexit position.
The surge in support for Alliance is also likely to have been influenced by a story which dominated the final fortnight of campaigning: a health emergency.
Two weeks before polling day, it was confirmed that more than 133,000 patients were waiting more than a year for hospital treatment (across all of England and Wales, a population more than 30 times larger than that of Northern Ireland, the figures is less than 6,000) and more than 300,000 people in total are waiting to see a consultant – about one in five people in Northern Ireland.
The Royal College of Surgeons, not a body known for hyperbole, said that “Northern Ireland’s healthcare system is at the point of collapse” and that mounting crisis then escalated with industrial action by health staff over pay and staffing levels.
With even cancer surgery being cancelled – and the issues unable to be addressed without either a direct rule or devolved minister to take decisions – there was widespread dismay that politics, whoever individual voters chose to blame, was quite literally killing people.
That message was understood by the DUP and Sinn Féin who just four days after the election re-entered talks to restore devolution.
But whatever happens at Stormont, this election means a very different Northern Ireland team of MPs. Not only is there again an Alliance MP but the voices of Irish nationalists will once more be heard in the Commons with the return of the SDLP who, unlike Sinn Féin, will take their seats.
And they will speak with some history on their side: for the first time in the annals of Northern Ireland, this election has seen more nationalists than unionists returned to Westminster.
As Northern Ireland's centenary looms in 2021, its political landscape is changing in ways which its founders would have struggled to comprehend.
Sam McBride is Northern Ireland Political Editor for the i paper
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