OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Sinn Fein is denied mayor’s seat in Belfast

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — The decision by Ulster Unionists to vote for a Democratic Ulster Party candidate as the lord mayor of Belfast has combined with the defection of an Alliance Party councilor and the illness of a SDLP woman to deprive Sinn Fein of the influential local seat.

Sinn Fein’s Alex Maskey was in line to win the seat last Thursday but failed by 24 votes to 16. Last year, Sinn Fein held the post of deputy lord mayor, which usually paves the way for the same party to hold the top job.

Sinn Fein was kept out as DUP councilor Sammy Wilson was narrowly elected to take the seat.

But in Derry, Sinn Fein’s Cathal Crumley was elected as mayor with the support of the SDLP against the votes of the combined unionist block.

Crumley — sentenced to nine life prison terms for conspiracy to murder before they were overturned on appeal — is the first Sinn Fein mayor in the North.

Never miss an issue of The Irish Echo

Subscribe to one of our great value packages.

In his acceptance speech, he said he extended the hand of friendship to all who felt at this time they could not vote for him.

But the Sinn Fein loss in Belfast was a particularly hard blow for the party.

Two UUP ministers rushed from an executive meeting, where they had been around a table with Sinn Fein, to support the DUP.

Sinn Fein wins more votes in Belfast city than any other political party, nationalist or unionist, but in the past all the other parties have combined to block one of its councilors becoming lord mayor.

This year the SDLP and Alliance Party abided by agreements with Sinn Fein, but one of the five Alliance Party’s councilors broke ranks and an SDLP councilor did not attend the vote because of illness, depriving Maskey of the job.

There was fury that the two UUP ministers, Michael McGimpsey and Sir Reg Empey, had sided with the DUP, who are pledged to wreck the Good Friday agreement and refuse to speak to Sinn Fein.

Wilson, now the lord mayor designate, is an outspoken loyalist with extreme views which he expresses publicly.

After the UDA murder of a Sinn Fein councilor, Eddie Fullerton, in Buncrana, nine years ago this week, around the time the SAS killed an IRA man in County Tyrone, Wilson proposed a resolution that City Hall congratulate those who had "done good work on both sides of the border."

When a Sinn Fein member was elected to City Hall in 1991, Wilson called the 5,000 republican voters who elected him "sub-human animals." He also said once claimed that "Taigs aren’t rate-payers."

And when Wilson was lord mayor in 1986, he wore his official chain of office to the founding meeting of Ulster Resistance in the Ulster Hall. In November 1987, he said Irish was a "leprechaun language" and in September 1989 he said the GAA was "the sporting wing of the IRA."

After his election, Wilson told councilors it would have been "intolerable" to have a Sinn Fein member represent Belfast as lord mayor.

Maskey blasted the hypocrisy of the UUP.

"This vote tonight shows it was a very clear sectarian vote," he said. "Sinn Fein for lord mayor is a very close thing and it will happen soon. We will be back next year with an even increased mandate."

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese