Opinion

The election was a good day for unionism

Irish News column—May 15, 2015

By: Alex Kane

WITH all the hoopla about how well the Ulster Unionists had done and how ungracious Gavin Robinson had been in his victory speech, the fact that the DUP had a pretty good election seems to have been overlooked.

Yes they lost South Antrim, but that was offset by East Belfast. Anyway, they had known for months that William McCrea was vulnerable to the right sort of UUP candidate.

They couldn’t be sure if the Jim Wells' stuff had done them any damage because they had never before faced anything like that in the middle of an election campaign.

My own instinct - and I wrote about it for this newspaper a couple of days after he had resigned - was that it wouldn’t harm them. And it didn’t. With 184,260 votes they got more than all of the other unionist parties combined, an important improvement on the Euro and council results last year.

The UUP had a very good election. There is no sweeter victory than one in which you prove the pundits wrong and surprise your political opponents. But once their understandable excitement has worn off they need to spend some time drilling into the results.

Their vote was down in South Belfast, Strangford and Lagan Valley, yet a sustained comeback is going to require winning second Assembly seats there.

On these figures they are still sitting on one. But the difference between now and the day before the election is that more people now believe that the UUP can win seats again.

Alliance did well, but I’m not sure what it means. In one of the most important elections in their forty-five year history they weren’t able to push their support into double figures in terms of overall percentage.

An extraordinarily good result in East Belfast and a modest increase in a few other places is probably not going to translate into extra Assembly seats.

Sinn Féin don’t like losing, so the loss of Fermanagh/South Tyrone - even though Gildernew added to her 2010 tally - will have come as a body blow.

A year away from the 1916 centenary the last thing they want is seats being lost and indications that their vote rise is slowing down. Sinn Féin understands the importance of perception in politics and the perception is that it wasn’t the sort of election result they had anticipated.

The SDLP held their three seats, giving them a rare moment in which they could give a collective two fingers to Sinn Féin.

But their vote was down again. McDonnell remains a problem for them and it’s beginning to look as though it will require the services of an exorcist to shift him from both the leadership and the Assembly.

But there doesn’t seem to be anyone strong enough to wield the knife because so weak is the party that a coup against the leadership looks like a fight over dentures in an old peoples home.

Jim Allister will be disappointed. The results prove, if proof was actually necessary, that the TUV is a one-man-band. The only place they pushed the vote to the level required for winning Assembly seats was in his own constituency.

UKIP, on the other hand, did reasonably well and have a reasonable chance of picking up two or three seats. The local Conservatives ran 16 candidates, lost most of their deposits and ended up with 1.3%. So no change there, then.

It’s worth noting that this was a very good election for unionism. Their total vote—including the pro-Union Lady Hermon—was 360,807, while nationalism/republicanism could only muster 276,221.

Even when you factor in the ‘agnostic’ Alliance by splitting their vote in half (even though my suspicion that a considerable majority of Alliance voters would support the Union in a border poll) it still leaves the split at 390,807 to 306,221 in unionism’s favour.

There are a lot of shy unionists and pro-union supporters out there. They don’t make a fuss about it. They don’t draw attention to their views in their workplace or clubs.

They’re maybe a bit embarrassed by some aspects and manifestations of unionism and loyalism. But I suspect they would vote to stay in the UK if there was a border poll.

There are some in Sinn Féin who like to draw comparisons between their crusade and that of the SNP. But they are not the same thing.

The link between Sinn Féin and the IRA did huge damage to the cause of Irish unification and that legacy of suspicion will continue to affect the UK versus Irish unity debate for decades.

I reckon, too, that neither the Scottish nor Welsh nationalists will want to make common cause with Sinn Féin anytime soon. If their day is coming they may need to talk to Mystic Meg about the timescale.