Disasters elsewhere drive the eye now for rest, if not light relief, back to this narrow ground.
Another excuse for a tour of the horizon is polling; Sinn Féin nine per cent ahead of the DUP, who are tied at an unnerving (for them) 16 per cent with Alliance. (While the SF mothership is still ahead of Fine Gael and well ahead of Fianna Fáil.) Ulster Unionists are ahead of the SDLP, Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice a mere percentage point behind them, and recently ‘surging’ Alliance has slipped a mite.
All this from Lucid Talk commissioned by the Belfast Telegraph. You will recall it was their poll in January that appeared to put the skids under Arlene Foster.
Now DUP voters say that if they could have decided rather than the tiny ‘electoral college’, they would have chosen Jeffrey Donaldson instead of Edwin Poots by a whopping 64 per cent to 21 per cent. Some welcome for a new leader. The Tele’s sharp political editor Suzanne Breen observes that if the next assembly election is as bad for the DUP as this poll suggests Sir Jeff might make it yet.
For all that polls have limitations, with an election clearing its throat on the doorstep nerves already taut are likely to twang some more. SF’s clearout in Derry and removal of a South Down MLA have tempted speculation that Michelle O’Neill could be next on the shuffle list; sauce for goose etc, continued absence of spark. But the Martina Anderson clan purge took its time to emerge. Changing their front-woman this close to a real poll would not be like today’s long-headed republicans. If they heed Lucid Talk the collective leadership have encouragement to stick with O’Neill.
Viewed as a leader, true, she just beat the departing Foster (though well ahead of disastrous Poots) but the party kept up a modest climb. Who has SF got who would lead with more verve? Who would they allow to do that, when John O’Dowd took a vow of silence after the one rash pitch? Are they ready to be the biggest Stormont party? Are new voters going to come to them? There were we outsiders thinking the Storey funeral brazen - and also a demonstration of strength. Turns out Gerry Kelly told the PSNI they thought the turnout could be 10,000. But this poll not only has them ahead of the DUP by a wide margin, and on 25 per cent to the SDLP’s 12 per cent.
What are the SDLP’s plans? It still has an air of disconnect; that hook-up with a failing Fianna Fáil leader best forgotten, two individualists in Westminster, Matthew O’Toole commanding a dozy assembly floor, Nichola Mallon trudging on. Maybe their version of Ireland’s Future will keep Colum Eastwood focused.
While Alliance perhaps stalls, celebrating likeable young female representatives, perhaps drawing breath to face an Alliance-type figure at the top of the Ulster Unionists. For all that Naomi Long is second most popular politician to Robin Swann, the notion of unionists filtering off to Alliance almost as heavily as to the TUV took a wallop from this poll. As against Alliance’s haul of four per cent, one-man band Allister got 29 per cent of former DUP voters.
And another new-look UUP? Except on Irish and ‘legacy’ Doug Beattie talks a warm game. But did he consult his MLAs before blithely envisaging ‘shrinking’ to grow a more liberal party? Will he remain stern on loyalist paramilitaries as Boris Johnson’s Brexit minister chats them up, with the coy suggestion that the protocol the same minister negotiated could be ditched before the Twelfth?
The old Orange Card, as ever for the benefit of Tories rather than their unionist ‘allies.’ So paramilitaries of even less impressive history sent a 19-year-old tweeter to scarify Westminster about renewed loyalist violence. Why not. Victorious Poots throughout his career has chosen sudden lunges over strategy, and Johnson on Northern Ireland has no centre of gravity. The new DUP leader is a political vacuum.
