Making Sense of the NI Subvention and the Economics of Reunification…

5 pieces of banknotes on yellow and white textile

An excellent podcast on the NI subvention and the economics of reunification has just been made available by RIA/ARINS (Royal Irish Academy / Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South). The participants are: Host Rory Montgomery (former Irish Ambassador to the EU and member of the Irish negotiating team for the BGFA). Dr. Esmond Birnie (senior economist, UU, and former UUP MLA for South Belfast 1998-2007), who argues that the subvention does matter. Professor John Doyle (VP for research at …

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The DUP and Sinn Féin need to be saved from themselves if we are to secure the return of the Assembly and they are to secure either Union or Unity

man in black jacket walking on street

Politics in Northern Ireland will only work when voters are more important than parties.                                        *** The past seven years have demonstrated that, to mis-quote King Lear, “as flies to wanton parties are we to the Gods, they ungovern us for their sport’. The two major parties should not, at will, be able to topple the architecture of administration to further their monochrome and mutually-exclusive aims. Neither unionist nor nationalist is the majority identity in NI. If the DUP wish the …

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The South needs to be Creative in how it might Recognise the Twelfth…

The Green Party TD, Patrick Costello – a member of the Oireachtas Good Friday Agreement Committee – recently suggested that the 12th of July should become a public holiday in the South as a way of uniting “all the peoples of this island”. There is no significant political or civil society grouping in the Irish Republic who disagree with uniting all the peoples of this island. But there are significant implications for such a proposal given the nature of the …

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Analysing the 2023 Local Elections: Part 4: Last Effective Count (LEC); non-transferable votes; who won the last seat and who will be challenging for it in 2027; Bloc votes by council; correlating SF, DUP and Alliance votes; where ‘Middle-NI’ is…

two men walking on road

(Part 1 {evolution of the three bloc votes since 1918, bloc/party plurality, unionist decline problem, Alliance plateauing and perhaps decreasing, } can be found here.) (Part 2 {the myth of unionist vote shredding, turnout, party performance } can be found here.) (Part 3 {identity bloc performance, estimated six-county vote, SDLP and UUP decline, spoiled votes } can be found here.) Last Effective Count (LEC): The LEC involves analysing the votes in the last count that were not eliminated. This includes …

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Analysing the 2023 Local Elections: Part 3: identity bloc performance, estimated six-county vote, SDLP and UUP decline, spoiled votes.

a group of colorful balloons

(Part 1 can be found here.) (Part 2 can be found here.) Identity bloc performance The nationalist bloc is the largest in 13 of the 15 border EAs (excepting Erne North and Cusher), having overtaken the unionist bloc in Faughan and Clogher Valley. Eight of the 11 EAs that touch Lough Neagh are now N-bloc plurality or majority, including four east of the Bann. East/west of the Bann has limited relevance as geographical shorthand to describe relative political dominance in …

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Local Election 2023 Analysis, Part 2: the myth of unionist vote shredding, turnout, party performance:

(Part 1 can be found here.) Was the unionist vote shredded, and did it lose seats as a result? On Saturday, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson stated “when you dilute the unionist vote sometimes that means unionist candidates don’t get elected”. It is a common refrain from many unionist politicians down the decades that the existence of so many unionist parties shreds the vote and loses seats: this is untrue for the 2023 local election. The DUP gained 23.3% of the vote …

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Why was the 2023 Local Election the Most Seismic NI Election Ever, and How Might Identity Politics Evolve?

black and white wall mounted paper

Why is this the most seismic NI election ever? Northern Ireland, and its eventual six-county shape, remained part of the UK in 1920 to secure unionist rule in north-east Ireland. Unionist communities in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan were sacrificed by James Craig and Edward Carson to ensure the greatest possible areal extent of secure unionist rule. For the first time since the franchise was widened in the 1880s, the unionist vote is less than the nationalist vote. The nationalist bloc …

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What to watch for in the Local Elections…

white and yellow plastic blocks

For those of us who love elections, the next few days are like childhood anticipation of Christmas. So here’s my list of things to watch for. I am not focusing on council seats gained or lost: Michael Hehir has done so comprehensively in his wonderful set of Slugger articles. Rather, I am looking at how party and bloc vote share might change compared to the 2019 local elections. A quick note on terminology: majority means over 50% of the vote; plurality means a larger share …

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What might the Assembly look like in 2030 and 2040?

person holding clear glass glass

Unionism is facing a huge electoral challenge. Unionist political ineptitude since 2016 has been honed to a fine art: RHI, crocodiles, rejection of Teresa May’s backstop, and cosying up to Boris have all got them nowhere fast. The result has been to convert many pro-union voters to anti-unionist-party voters, as witnessed by the rise of Alliance. And DUP politicians have essentially ignored Peter Robinson’s 2012 exhortation that unionism must reach out to Catholic voters. Demographic decline makes such a genuine …

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A PM (Prime Mediator), not FM-DFM, for NI

woman wearing gray jacket

Stormont is dysfunctional. The Belfast Good Friday Agreement (BGFA) was supposed to bring people together in a new era of tolerance and power-sharing. Instead, party elites have sporadically cobbled together a stuttering non-war dispensation that has rolled out mediocre governance, leaving health, RHI, education and other services as beacon exemplars of how not to run a polity. Peace dividend it is not. Good governmental efficiency it is not. There must be a better way. The BGFA is predicated upon the …

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Recognising Ulster-British Identity in a United Ireland: a Federation of Ulster-British Communities (FUBC).

The Belfast Good Friday Agreement recognises that: “… it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish, accepting that this right must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of …

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Unionism Continuing to Slide: the 2022 Assembly Election and Longer Electoral Trends…

A serene gradient from red to smoky blue-gray seems to mask a chaotic scene underneath, expressing a wide range of emotion. Looking like a NASA closeup of Jupiter, this image reveals sediment in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.

After the 1997 Westminster election, unionists held 13/18 Westminster MPs, 61/110 1996 Forum seats, and were about 10% ahead of nationalist bloc votes. Now they have 8/18 Westminster seats, 37/90 Assembly seats and were about 0.5% ahead of the nationalist bloc vote in the 2022 Assembly election. Unionism has become a minority in all election types and looks close to losing its vote-plurality status. There are always variations of turnout and tactical voting depending on the type and significance of …

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How Might Differential Constituency Turnout Affect a NI Referendum?

Recently I speculated on how differential turnout could  impact on any future referendum on a United Ireland. Having done a bit of number-crunching since then on Assembly election results since the seventies, focusing on the post-GFA elections in particular, the answer seems to be: six years. Differential constituency turnout means that the turnout varies between constituencies. Stating the bleedin’ obvious, I know, but there seems to be a political edge to it in NI. Border (mostly nationalist) constituencies have greater …

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What if NI Voted by County? Analysing the 2019 Local Election Results…

It would be interesting to compare current voting patterns with those of 1921 when NI came into being. The exact location of Northern Ireland’s land border – once Thomas Agar-Robartes, MP, let the partition cat out of the Home-Rule bag in 1912 – was always going to be by county, given the Westminster constituency boundaries and census returns at the time. Today’s Westminster, Stormont and local government constituency/electoral area boundaries cross the six county boundaries more often than they did …

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You Are Wanted: A New Preamble for The Irish Constitution…

Reading David McCann’s Slugger article reporting on Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael Ard Fheis speech that sets out his vision of what Irish unity could be, I was saddened to read a comment from the_swerve: “Fundamentally, people here want to feel wanted”. To the_swerve, I would say: you are wanted, all of you. There is a great desire among many southern Irish people to actualise their belief in the essential fraternity of sharing this island together. The vast majority of southern …

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Northern Ireland at 100: Unionism failing; Nationalism stuck; Moderates thriving…

One hundred years after Partition, Northern Ireland is still in existence. It would surely come as a big surprise to many who thronged the streets of Belfast on June 22nd 1921 – the date King George V opened the first NI Parliament in City Hall – that unionism is now a minority in Stormont. It would also surely come as a big surprise to many nationalists in 1972 that the state set up to guarantee unionist rule in north-east Ireland …

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A Song for a Shared Island…

There are many conversations happening across the island about what a shared island might look like. Talking is vitally important but so, too, is singing. What might a shared island sound like? To be emotionally carried along by – and to sing along with – a beautiful song that appeals to the more noble, inclusive and generous parts of our common humanity is one of the greatest creative acts we can experience. Is there a song that encapsulates the desire …

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Time to Reform First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) for Westminster Elections?

In the 2019 Westminster general election in Northern Ireland, the 18 successful candidates gained 359,000 votes out of a valid poll of 799,034. This represents only 44.9% of the electorate. A clear majority of voters are not represented in Westminster. Unionist voters in border areas are not represented; nationalist voters from North Antrim to Upper Bann to Strangford are not represented. Twice as many Alliance voters are unrepresented as are represented.  The DUP garnered 30.6% of the vote and won …

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COVID-19 Spread In Both Irelands, the UK and Selected Countries: Dublin’s success will pose dilemmas for both SF and Unionists:

Number-crunching the past few days’ COVID-19 statistics is bringing clearer evidence by the day that RoI seems to have definitively turned a corner in its struggle against this frightening adversary. If we define ‘peak covid’ as the date when a jurisdiction had its largest 7-day rolling average of new cases, we find that peak covid occurred on April 15th for the UK, April 18th for the RoI, and April 20th for NI. The graph shows the 7-day rolling averages since …

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COVID-19 Spread In Both Irelands, the UK and Selected Countries: Four stories in the Republic:

We are a small island, but the story of the COVID-19 pandemic is being written differently in each county. The four graphs added to COVIDWATCH show these differing narratives. Continuous data for Northern Ireland councils were not available (when this data is available it will be displayed). One of the graphs is shown above. Methodology: New cases can vary hugely within a couple of days. These huge undulations can hide underlying trends. A 7-day rolling average will allow to some …

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