News

New council will have many a familiar face

THE TUV was the story of the Mid and East Antrim election, with the anti-agreement unionists taking five seats and almost doubling their vote at the expense of the DUP.

Sinn Fein fared well too, returning all three sitting councillors, while the UUP must surely be celebrating after dropping only one of its 10 seats and increasing its haul of first-preference votes to 18.8 per cent.

A third of all votes cast were for the DUP but as the count played out it soon became clear the party would have to revise its vision of claiming half the vacant seats.

In the end 16 Democratic Unionist councillors were elected, ensuring it would still be the largest party.

The make-up of the new 40-seat council, which is an amalgamation of Ballymena, Carrickfergus and Larne, will have a familiar look after as many as 25 sitting councillors held on to their seats including stalwarts Tommy Nicholl and May Beattie of the DUP and Independent Jim Brown.

A number of long-serving councillors did lose out, however, among them Alliance's Jayne Dunlop and Martin Wilson of the SDLP.

The nationalist party scored 4.4 per cent of the vote and dropped two seats, leaving Declan O'Loan as its sole representative.

In contrast Sinn Fein held steady and returned sitting councillors James McKeown and Paul Maguire who will be joined by new face Patrice Hardy.

One of the north's three Ukip councillors emerged from Mid and East Antrim, with 13 per cent of the vote in Carrick Castle giving Noel Jordan their vote.

Much has been written about NI21's disastrous election and its performance in this council area was no different with the two candidates polling 783 votes.

Counting votes, transferring votes, working out percentages, eliminating candidates and electing others creates a pressurised environment and it was no surprise that at one point the returning officer asking for silence to allow her announcement to be heard.

What she did not realise was that the person inadvertently making the noise was TUV leader Jim Allister who was doing a live interview with the BBC and castigating "roll-over unionism".

The confusion did not stop there as two UUP councillors called Andrew Wilson will also be taking seats on the new council - just not side by side, their colleagues hope.