Paisley’s political career has been dedicated to outstripping the Ulster Unionists and, in his 78th year, he has now succeeded. The SDLP, meanwhile, is licking its wounds after Sinn Fein gains.
After a marathon two-day count, after 64 percent of registered voters went to the polls, the largest party in the Stormont assembly is the anti-agreement DUP with 30 seats, closely followed by the UUP with 27, Sinn Fein on 24 and the SDLP on 18. Minor parties won a total of nine seats.
One major upset was the election of a single-issue candidate in West Tyrone. Dr. Kiaran Deeney stood as an independent in support of retaining acute hospital services in Omagh, and deprived the SDLP of its second seat in the constituency.
The Women’s Coalition lost both of its Assembly seats and is to consider its future as a party. The Progressive Unionists (linked to the UVF) has seen its representation halved from two to one (Billy Hutchinson lost his seat in North Belfast).
Although, at first sight, it appears the DUP won a stunning victory over the UUP, in reality it just mopped up votes in the smaller unionist parties.
The outgoing assembly had 30 anti-agreement unionist members. The incoming one has precisely the same (unless you count the anti-agreement members in the UUP, thought to number five).
The SDLP had been a first-preference poll-topper, with 22 percent of the vote in the 1998 Assembly election, but it won only 17 percent this time, despite bringing in campaign experts from London and Dublin.
The party ran a sharp, focused campaign, concentrating on defeating the DUP, but the voters seem to have decided that Sinn Fein was the best way of frustrating Paisley’s ambitions.
A surprise victory for the DUP came in West Belfast, Gerry Adams’s constituency, where Nigel Dodds’s wife, Diane, won a seat for the DUP for the first time and will be difficult to shift, possibly ending Sinn Fein ambitions to win five out of six seats. And Sinn Fein won a seat in Paisley’s heartland, North Antrim.
One of Sinn Fein’s weaknesses was its relative inability to pick up transfers. Although, for example, Martin Meehan of Sinn Fein finished third in first-preference votes in South Antrim, he didn’t pick up many lower transfer votes and failed to become one of the six elected.
Among the casualties of the election was former West Belfast MP Dr. Joe Hendron of the SDLP. Two days before the election, his party decided its chairman, Alex Attwood, was in danger and sacrificed Hendron to save him.
The four big-hitters of the SDLP, John Hume, Seamus Mallon, Eddie McGrady and Brid Rodgers, all decided against running this time around.
Also eliminated was former UUP rebel Pauline Armitage, a former Ulster Defense Regiment soldier, who gained prominence when she voted against the reelection of David Trimble as first minister in November 2001.
Another hardline unionist casualty was Fraser Agnew in North Belfast, as was Roger Hutchinson from East Antrim. Denis Haughey, a founding member of the SDLP, became another of its high-profile casualties as he lost his seat to runningmate Patsy McGlone.
New faces for Sinn Fein include Caitriona Ruane, who ran the “Bring Them Home” campaign to repatriate the Columbia Three.
Not for the first time, there’s speculation that some members of the SDLP are considering joining Fianna Fail to form Ireland’s second 32-county political party.
The London Observer newspaper claimed that five leading SDLP members in Belfast are writing to Fianna Fail urging the taoiseach’s party to allow the SDLP to evolve into Fianna Fail in Northern Ireland.
None of the five was prepared to be publicly named, but all insisted they wanted full merger, an idea first put about by Tom Kelly, a former SDLP director of elections, 11 months ago.
Other SDLP figures rubbished the claims and said they had a distinctly Northern ethos and ideology and did not want to join a “populist, center/right-wing” party such as Fianna Fail with its roots in the civil war.