February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Anne Cadwallader
BELFAST — Gains for Sinn Fein and the DUP in the Westminster elections were repeated in the local elections across Northern Ireland with the Ulster Unionists losing 31 seats and the Rev. Ian Paisley’s DUP gaining nearly 40.
The UUP took the highest number of seats, with 154 councilors elected, 23 more than its rival, the DUP. Sinn Fein has 108 councilors, up 34 since the last election.
The SDLP lost three seats, securing 177, the Alliance Party has secured 28 seats, with other parties taking 44. In terms of percentage of first preferences, the results were: UUP 23 percent, Sinn Fein 22, DUP 21, SDLP 18, Alliance 6.
In the wake of the results, the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, had his first post-election meeting with the newly returned British prime minister, Tony Blair.
After the meeting, Trimble said if he had to provoke a full-scale crisis by resigning, in order to get IRA arms decommissioning, he would do so.
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"As so often, it’s come to a further consideration of matters to do with decommissioning and policing," he said. "It was a serious discussion, because we are faced with a serious situation on this.
"I underlined fairly firmly with the prime minister my determination that, if we come to the end of this month (which the government had set as the period for full implementation of the Agreement) and we find that the agreement with regard to decommissioning has not been implemented, then I am absolutely determined to follow through in terms of drawing a line and causing a crisis in the institutions by resigning."
Among the UUP delegation to Downing Street was the newly elected, the hard-line MP for South Antrim David Burnside. Burnside said that highly placed sources had informed him the IRA was about to announce it had permanently sealed one of its arms dumps.
He claimed that the IRA would then set out a "shopping list" of demands on policing and demilitarization. Calling the IRA’s alleged move a "copout", Burnside said his party would not stand for the RUC’s name being changed and the British symbols of policing being dropped, as recommended in the Patten Report and subsequent British government legislation.
Trimble said the British government must avoid being drawn into another "bogus" negotiation with republicans attempting to "sell the same horse for the fifth, sixth or even seventh time."
He said that Blair’s message must be unambiguous — that republicans would not benefit from a fresh crisis. The delegation had made it clear that the community they represented felt that the government had gone "too far" on the the issue of policing, he said.