The fastest growing party on the island? Why, it’s the DUP of course

THE onward march of Sinn Féin has slowed to a stroll. That is a clear conclusion which can be drawn from the results of the Westminster elections held in Northern Ireland this day last week.

The cumulative data just thrown up by the local elections points to the same trend. SF is still on the advance, but its continuing electoral growth is not inevitable.

SF had one gain in the Westminster election with Conor Murphy winning Seamus Mallon’s former seat in Newry and Armagh, and it was an impressive win. The growth of Murphy’s vote since the Good Friday Agreement has been dramatic.

In the 1998 Assembly elections SF had 26%; in the 2001 Westminster elections Murphy polled 31%. On the same day Sinn Féin candidates in the local elections polled 35%. Then, in the 2003 Assembly elections, SF polled almost 40% of the vote. Last Thursday, Murphy upped that slightly, improving on his 2001 Westminster performance by nearly 11%, and ending up with a majority of more than 8,000.

There is much truth in what Seamus Mallon had to say last week about how the policy of the two governments has contributed to a polarisation of politics in Northern Ireland and has thereby contributed to the growth of SF and the Democratic Unionist Party.

However, the SDLP has to take some responsibility for its own failings. For example, it should have selected an understudy for Mallon earlier and given him or her five years to build a profile.

However, apart from Murphy’s gain Sinn Féin had much to be mute about. The performance of its four outgoing Westminster MPs was mixed. The best was that of Gerry Adams who increased his vote by 4% in West Belfast where the party is now almost dominant.

Interestingly, Martin McGuinness’s vote was actually down compared to his last Westminster run, while the SDLP vote in his constituency was up slightly. One of the most striking moments of the election count coverage was McGuinness on RTÉ radio late on Friday night treating listeners to a detailed breakdown of the meteorological conditions prevailing across Mid-Ulster on polling day. The legendary SF machine, with its supposed near mythical capacity to get the vote out, was left in the same position as other parties endeavouring to explain a falling vote in a constituency by blaming it on the weather. It represented a normalisation of the language about SF’s electoral performance.

Michelle Gildernew increased her vote in Fermanagh/South Tyrone by 4% on the last Westminster poll. However, the strong performance of the DUP’s Arlene Foster means that if the two unionist parties can agree to run just one candidate next time (and perhaps even if they don’t), then Foster is well placed to take Gildernew’s seat.

Pat Doherty’s vote in West Tyrone was also down, by almost 2%. This can be attributed to the distorting impact of the candidature of the independent MLA Kieran Deeney. Doherty had a comfortable 5,000 majority. However, if Deeney had been given a free run against Doherty he would likely have won the seat, and if Deeney bucks the trend of one-issue candidates and is still prominent at the time of the next Westminster election, then this is another SF seat that could be very vulnerable.

In South Down, the Eddie McGrady vote was more than 9,000 ahead of Catriona Ruane. Ruane is a Mayo native and a former West Belfast activist who, after the profile she gained on the Columbia Three campaign, was strategically planted into South Down in advance of the 2003 Assembly.

Since then she has been talked up as a real challenger for McGrady’s seat, not least because she was prominent as a supposed part of peace negotiation teams seen with Adams and McGuinness on their way into Government Buildings and Downing Street. Last week the party’s vote stagnated in this constituency. It was up only 1% on the 2001 Westminster election and, in fact, was down on the 2003 result.

SF’s real setback was in Foyle. Early last week the party was privately telling political journalists that Mitchel McLaughlin had John Hume’s seat in the bag. They said their confidence was grounded in canvass returns which, they claimed, were infallible.

HOWEVER, although the SF vote was up when the votes were actually counted, it was nothing close to beating Durkan who comfortably held the seat with 6,000 votes to spare.

In the 2003 Assembly elections SF came within 1,500 votes of beating the SDLP in Derry. This time, in part by mobilising the middle ground to register and then to vote, Durkan put considerable distance between himself and McLaughlin in the Westminster contest. It was an incredible SDLP vote in all the circumstances. I suspect even John Hume would have struggled to match it.

South Belfast, as expected, proved to be the most interesting constituency. Because the unionist vote was closely divided between two candidates, Dr Alasdair McDonnell became the SDLP icing on the cake, taking a new seat in Westminster. He actually increased the SDLP vote marginally on 2001. SF here again ran former lord mayor Alex Maskey, another West Belfast activist supplanted and groomed for a Westminster seat. Maskey also increased his vote share slightly on 2001 in this increasingly nationalist and affluent constituency, but his vote was still less than a third of McDonnell’s.

That good but patchy SF performance can be contrasted starkly with the wholesale advance of the DUP whose vote was up dramatically everywhere. In the local elections the DUP gained an extra 51 seats in the local councils, while the SF gain was more modest at 18.

In North Antrim Ian Paisley increased his vote by a relatively modest 5% as did Nigel Dodds in North Belfast. In Upper Bann David Simpson took David Trimble’s seat with an 8% increase in the DUP’s vote. In East Belfast the vote of the party’s deputy leader, Peter Robinson, was up almost 7% while in neighbouring Strangford his wife Iris’s vote increased by 14%.

In East Londonderry, Gregory Campbell’s vote was up nearly 11% and Sammy Wilson won a new seat with his vote up 14%. The story in Lagan Valley is more confused because Jeffrey Donaldson has switched parties since the last Westminster poll, but he brought almost 17,000 extra voters with him to the DUP.

Much of the talk in some media about the rise of SF over the last decade has been overstated. At its most bizarre there has been breathless commentary about how SF was on course to wipe out the SDLP in the North and then seek to displace FF in the South.

Even SF’s own spokespersons, although usually careful about managing expectations, lose the run of themselves sometimes talking about how they are the fastest growing party on the island and openly speculated two weeks ago that they might be the largest party of any ilk in Northern Ireland after these elections.

If SF were ever the fastest growing party on the island, they are not now. They are being dramatically outpaced by the DUP. Meanwhile, the SDLP, although it still has much to do, has withstood the SF tide.