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A View North The greening of Northern Ireland

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jack Holland

With apologies to Karl Marx: a specter is stalking Unionism. You can see it by going to the banks of the River Bann and looking west toward Donegal. What you will behold is one orange island in a sea of green. The island goes by the name of Gregory Campbell, DUP MP for East Derry, and he has the dubious distinction of being the last surviving Unionist MP west of the Bann.

There was a time, not long ago, when it was regarded as sensational if a Nationalist candidate took a seat there. Bernadette Devlin did it in 1969, winning Mid-Ulster. Independent Nationalist Frank Maguire did it in 1979, when he became MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone. Even more of a shock to the Unionist body politick was hunger-strike leader Bobby Sands’s success in 1981, replacing Maguire upon the latter’s sudden death. Still, by 1983, an observer perched on the West bank of the Bann would have seen only a solitary green eminence in the shape of John Hume, the SDLP leader and MP for Foyle. The other four constituencies occupying that region, Fermanagh-South Tyrone, Mid-Ulster, Newry-Armagh, and East Derry were all in the hands of Unionists.

However, the tranquil sea of Orange covered an uncomfortable reality, at least for Unionism. Unionists’ hold on Fermanagh-South Tyrone and Mid-Ulster was threatened if Nationalists ran a single candidate. In Newry-Armagh, the SDLP’s deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, was close at the heels of the Ulster Unionists, in 1983 coming to within 1,500 votes of the UUP’s Jim Nicholson, notwithstanding the fact that the Nationalist vote was split. (Sinn Fein also ran a candidate who received more than 9,000 votes.)

The green tide began to rise in 1986. The Unionists forced by-elections to protest the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Mallon took Newry-Armagh. He held it the following year with a vastly increased majority during the general election. But Unionists won in both Fermanagh-South Tyrone and Mid-Ulster, thanks again to a split Nationalist vote.

The rising green tide was of the SDLP’s shade. Sinn Fein’s vote declined in the elections of 1987 and 1992. Between 1992 and 1997, however, politics began to change in Northern Ireland, most markedly in the western region. The Provisional IRA’s cease-fire had helped kick-start the peace process, and Sinn Fein was seen as playing an increasingly prominent role in it. A new constituency was added to the mix — West Tyrone. In the general election of 1997, Martin McGuinness, who had played a leading role in the negotiations, won back Mid-Ulster, ousting the DUP’s guitar-strumming reverend, Willie McCrea. A split vote in the new constituency allowed the UUP’s Willie Thompson to claim it. But it was clear that, like Fermanagh-South Tyrone, West Tyrone had a built-in Nationalist majority.

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The proof came, dramatically, last week, with the victory of Pat Doherty, who easily outpaced both his Unionist opponent, Willie Thompson, and his SDLP rival for the Nationalist vote, Brid Rodgers. At the same time, Michelle Gildernew managed to edge ahead of the UUP’s James Cooper to win Fermanagh-South Tyrone with a margin of just over 50 votes. For the first time in almost two decades, Sinn Fein had won the seat. The Sinn Fein victories in the west this time round were as historic as was Bobby Sands’s in 1981 when he showed that there was a Sinn Fein constituency out there to be tapped. In 2001 the result proved that the Sinn Fein constituency was now that of the majority within the Nationalist community.

There has been a considerable amount of what one can only call gloating at the transformation.

"The border has just moved up 60 miles," was the reported comment of one Sinn Fein activist in New York when the West Tyrone result was announced. The greening of the west is indeed seen as de facto repartitioning. Certainly, if Lloyd George and James Craig were faced with the problem of where to draw the border, based on a sectarian head count, then they probably would draw it down the East bank of the Bann, with a Unionist redoubt around Coleraine. West of that, they could no longer secure an overall Unionist majority. Gregory Campbell would have to be sacrificed, as were the Unionists of Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan when Craig took the painful decision to jettison those counties in 1920-21, turning Ulster into Northern Ireland. A three-county "Ulster" would now be the result of any repartitioning.

However, even that would not provide Unionists with a secure "homeland." Its capital, Belfast, may well have a Sinn Fein lord mayor. There, the party is now the biggest in the city, with 14 council seats. The transformation of West Belfast in particular into a republican stronghold is as spectacular as anything that has taken place west of the Bann.

In the days before it was known as West Belfast, the Falls-Shankill constituency was at times represented by a Unionist — including one of the only women Unionist MPs, Patricia McLoughlin, who held the seat from 1955 until the mid-1960s. She retired, and in 1966 Gerry Fitt defeated her replacement, Jim Kilfedder. West Belfastt would never again go to a Unionist. In the 1970 general election Fitt received more 30,000 votes when he stood as Republican Labor. But what is remarkable is the Unionist vote. The party’s candidate in 1970 took 27,451 votes. That is, he had more votes than Gerry Adams got two weeks ago, and Adams topped the poll throughout the North. Throughout the 1970s, the Unionist vote in the constituency was around 16,000. In 2001 it had declined drastically, the combined DUP-UUP total just passing 5,000.

Where did all those Unionist votes disappear to? As in the west, a general rise in the Catholic population pushed many Protestants out. In 1972, there was a mass exodus of Protestants from the Lenadoon and Suffolk areas, many leaving under pressure. The West Belfast constituency boundaries were redrawn, and it lost Sandy Row and the Village, both heavily Protestant districts.

There is another factor.

"Protestants don’t vote," said Chris McGimpsey, who should know. He ran as the UUP candidate in West Belfast and received 2,500 votes. He pointed out that in the 1997 election only 59 percent of Protestants voted, compared to 74 percent of Catholics. According to McGimpsey, their lethargy is due to the fact that they are "demoralized."

As they gaze west, that demoralization is fated to increase.

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