General Election '24: Northern Ireland (3)
New analysis of the potential voting in each constituency suggests there may be enormous and profound change in Northern Ireland's Westminster representation
I will make this relatively brief, but I wanted to set out and analyse the latest predictions from the excellent Peter Donaghy, a Belfast data analyst whose Substack is Salmon of Data. Peter delves into the hard numbers of electoral contests in Northern Ireland and I like his straightforward and data-driven approach, so it caught my eye last night that he’d produced a set of predictions for Northern Ireland’s 18 constituencies at next month’s general election.
I’ve already written two essays on the election in Northern Ireland here and here. It’s going to be a particularly important contest for a number of reasons: it’s the first set of parliamentary elections since Catholics overtook Protestants in the results of the 2021 census; there is a functioning Northern Ireland Executive at Stormont, led for the first time by a Sinn Féin first minister, Michelle O’Neill; the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has just seen its leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, resign in a particularly unpleasant sex scandal, and he is due to appear in court on the day before the election; perhaps as many as five constituencies are extremely close contests; and if several poor results come together the DUP could see its tally of eight MPs fall substantially; and Unionist representation at Westminster could fall to its lowest level in the 103-year history of Northern Ireland.
Peter’s predictions can be found here and he provides plenty of detail, but I will lay out the potential results in a simple form. I emphasise that these are predictions, and in five seats he has declared the results too close to call so I have hedged my bets.
Belfast East: Naomi Long (Alliance)/Gavin Robinson (DUP)
Belfast North: John Finucane (SF)
Belfast South and Mid Down: Claire Hanna (SDLP)
Belfast West: Paul Maskey (SF)
East Antrim: Sammy Wilson (DUP)
East Londonderry: Gregory Campbell (DUP)
Fermanagh and South Tyrone: Pat Cullen (SF)
Foyle: Sandra Duffy (SF)/Colum Eastwood (SDLP)
Lagan Valley: Jonathan Buckley (DUP)/Sorcha Eastwood (Alliance)
Mid Ulster: Cathal Mallaghan (SF)
Newry and Armagh: Dáire Hughes (SF)
North Antrim: Ian Paisley Jr (DUP)
North Down: Alex Easton (Ind)
South Antrim: Paul Girvan (DUP)/Robin Swann (UUP)
South Down: Chris Hazzard (SF)
Strangford: Jim Shannon (DUP)/Michelle Guy (Alliance)
Upper Bann: Carla Lockhart (DUP)
West Tyrone: Órfhlaith Begley (SF)
This translates into nine Republican or Nationalist seats, and the other nine numbering anywhere from nine Unionists to six Unionists and three Alliance. Within that, the DUP could win eight seats or as few as four.
In the worst case scenario, if the DUP’s Westminster slate was limited to Wilson, Campbell, Paisley and Lockhart, with party leader Gavin Robinson losing his seat, there would be some tough questions about the leadership of the party. From 1971 to 2010 and since 2021 it has been led by a Member of Parliament, while the leaders between 2010 and 2021 were MLAs at Stormont, and usually first minister in the executive. To be blunt, of the four MPs would could be left, only Paisley is a plausible party leader, and even then only really on the grounds of his name and heritage. Emma Little-Pengelly, the deputy first minister and MLA for Lagan Valley, is a more impressive figure. That said, the DUP’s leadership would not be decided on ability alone, and Little-Pengelly was close to the disgraced Donaldson, which could be a liability.
Sinn Féin held seven seats in the last Parliament. Although they are abstentionists and refuse to swear the Oath of Allegiance to take their seats at Westminster, their numbers still count. Maintaining seven MPs would have a mild air of disappointment, given their possession of the role of first minister and the fact they are currently jostling with Fine Gael for the opinion poll lead ahead of the elections for the Dáil in Dublin at some point before next March. Taking eight seats would no doubt be more satisfactory, though it would still leave them just shy of half the total number.
The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland could be looking at a breakthrough. There have only ever been three Alliance MPs since the party was founded in 1970: Stratton Mills, MP for Belfast North who left the UUP in 1972 to sit as a Conservative then joined the Alliance in 1973 before retiring the following year; Naomi Long, who represented Belfast East from 2010 to 2015 and is challenging to regain the seat from the DUP; and Dr Stephen Farry, who beat the DUP to take North Down in 2019 after long-serving independent, formerly UUP, MP Lady Hermon retired. If Long joins Farry and Sorcha Eastwood can snatch Lagan Valley, it will transform the Alliance’s profile.
As I have suggested before, however, if the Alliance grows in prominence and influence, it may need to do some self-reflection. It began as a moderate, non-sectarian but Unionist party, growing out of the New Ulster Movement which was created to support Terence O’Neill, prime minister of Northern Ireland 1963-69. For many years it suffered from having modest support widely spread across the province, never able to concentrate votes in one place sufficiently to make an electoral breakthrough. Since the mid-1990s, while it remains resolutely non-sectarian, the Alliance has moved from a Unionist position to one of agnosticism on the Union. It has framed Unionist and Nationalism as political positions rather than fundamental community identities, and it focuses instead on a shared Northern Irish identity which it hopes can embrace both constitutional positions. It supports the Belfast Agreement and the institutions that created, but in the Northern Ireland Assembly its 17 MLAs are registered not as Unionists or Nationalists but “Other” or “United Community”.
That essential ducking of the constitutional question—they would dispute that characterisation but I don’t think it is completely unfair—has been reasonable enough when the party has been on the fringes of power. From 2010 to 2016, 2020 to 2022 and since 2024 the Alliance has supplied the Northern Ireland Executive’s minister of justice, primarily because Unionists and Republicans were implacably opposed to each other holding the post (which, uniquely in the executive, is directly elected by the assembly on a cross-community basis rather than allocated under the d’Hondt method). The Alliance has not held any other portfolios.
If, however, the party grows in influence, both at the general election next month and at subsequent assembly elections, where it increased from eight MLAs in 2017 to 17 in 2022, then the constitutional question will return insistently. Is there a large enough element of the electorate which feels sufficiently relaxed about or indifferent to the Union that the Alliance can capitalise on it? A 2020 study showed that the Alliance had the youngest electoral base in Northern Ireland, with half of its voters aged 45 or under, and evenly divided by sex. Nearly a third of Alliance voters were graduates, double the proportion of the DUP or Sinn Féin, it drew more or less equally from both religious traditions but more from those who professed no religion, and its leader, Naomi Long, was seen as the least divisive party leader in Northern Ireland.
There is a curious fact, however, that, based on the 2019 general election results, 51 per cent of Alliance voters claim neutrality on the Union, but 23 per cent identify as Unionist and 17 per cent as Nationalist. There is, then, a sense that the Alliance is, certainly, a positive choice for those in Northern Ireland who do not identify primarily on community or sectarian grounds, but that it is also a second choice for members of both traditions who are dissatisfied with the traditional parties. Whether the Alliance can successfully fuse those two streams of support and develop a powerful, socially liberal, constitutionally uncommitted political force is uncertain.
You could have said this at any point over the last 10 or 15 years, but Unionism is in a crisis of its own. For a lot of the life of Northern Ireland, support for the Union could safely be identified with Protestantism and social conservatism, and had an appeal which transcended age and socio-economic class. That is no longer the case. At the 2019 general election, the DUP secured 30.6 per cent of the vote, and at the assembly elections of 2017 and 2022 it registered 28.1 per cent and 21.3 per cent. That suggests that there is a natural ceiling for a Unionist, religious, socially conservative constituency of certainly less than a third of the electorate, more like 25-30 per cent.
I don’t see Traditional Unionist Voice ever being more than a very minor fringe movement. It is essentially a vehicle for Jim Allister, who has maintained his seat in the assembly since 2011 but has never come close to winning a Westminster constituency. At the last assembly elections in 2022, TUV won 7.63 per cent of the vote, and only 3.9 per cent in the local elections in 2023. Unless the party’s alliance with Reform UK in this year’s general election proves transformative—and there is no evidence that it will—then it really does look like TUV will be the Jim Allister party until Allister, who recently turned 71, either retires or is gathered unto God.
All of this leaves the Ulster Unionist Party. It is sometimes easy to forget just how far the party has fallen. It formed the government of Northern Ireland for the whole 51 years of its first devolved existence, from 1921 to 1972, never facing a major electoral threat, and for that time its MPs took the Conservative whip at Westminster. A major setback came, in Westminster terms, in February 1974: facing Ian Paisley’s new DUP for the first time, and with the Northern Ireland Parliament having been suspended two years before, the UUP only won a third of the vote, 32.3 per cent, having secured over half in 1970. But it would hold on to that level of support until 2001, and it soon translated into a strong position among Northern Ireland MPs: 11 of 17 in 1983, 9 of 17 in 1987 and 1992, 10 of 18 in 1997. Mainstream politics was dominated by the UUP on the Unionist side and the SDLP on the Nationalist side, with the DUP and Sinn Féin raging on the sidelines.
Everything changed after the Belfast Agreement of 1998, despite the UUP leader, David Trimble, being one of its principal authors (and, jointly with SDLP leader John Hume, winning the Nobel Peace Prize that year for bringing it about). Trimble became first minister of Northern Ireland in the new devolved government, with first Seamus Mallon and then Mark Durkan, both SDLP, as deputy first minister. But the assembly was suspended in 2002 because of UUP fears that the Provisional IRA had not decommissioned their weapons as promised, and when government was restored nearly five years later, in 2007, it was the DUP’s Ian Paisley as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness as deputy, surely one of British politics’ most unlikely pairings.
Since then the UUP has been relegated to a supporting role. At the 2005 general election, it lost all but one of its seats, only Lady Hermon being re-elected in North Down. She left the party before the 2010 election, and, for the first time in history, there were no UUP Members of Parliament. Tom Elliott and Danny Kinahan scrambled into seats in 2015, neither by more than 1,000 votes, and then the party suffered wipeouts in 2017 and 2019. It has floated between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote for nearly 20 years, and, despite several attempts, it has not managed a successful relaunch.
On the face of it, there is an obvious role for the UUP as a Unionist party with more socially moderate policies than the DUP and an inclusive, practical agenda which could focus on making the devolved institutions work, boosting Northern Ireland’s prosperity and potentially appealing to moderate Nationalists. Doug Beattie, who has led the party since 2021, is an affable, vaguely liberal figure who spent 28 years in the British Army, being commissioned from the ranks and retiring as a captain after winning the Military Cross in Afghanistan. He offered himself as a leader “able to reach out to all people in Northern Ireland regardless of what your religion is, sexual orientation or ethnicity”. Yet he has been unable to move the dial for the party. They are effectively irrelevant at Westminster—if they perform exceptionally well, Robin Swann might win in South Antrim—and they are the fourth party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, with only nine seats out of 90 and a single minister in the executive.
To an extent, the space in which the UUP might comfortably see itself is being occupied by the Alliance, and is too small to accommodate both parties to any significant degree. This leads to a wider question: what does the Northern Ireland electorate really look like, looking 10 or 15 years ahead? The last census, in 2021, showed that it is roughly 42 per cent Roman Catholic, 38 per cent Protestant and 20 per cent not identifying as religious (there are Muslim, Jewish, Baháʼí and Hindu communities but they are tiny). In terms of national identity, 36 per cent regard themselves as British, 33 per cent as Irish and 22 per cent primarily as “Northern Irish”.
There is still a comfortable lead in the opinion polls against a united Ireland. A survey in February showed 49 per cent against unification, 39 per cent in favour and 11 per cent undecided. Very rough arithmetic suggests, then, that the population identifying as Northern Irish lean towards Unionism by a margin of three to one. But there is a demographic bulge which may favour Nationalists: among 18-24-year-olds, 48 per cent favour a united Ireland and 43 per cent are opposed, among 25-34-year-olds unifications wins 45/41, and it closes to 44/42 among 35-44-year-olds. Those margins are still small, however, and if the constitutional question is becoming less important for younger voters, then the Union may still be in play. The trick for Unionists will be making it work.
My own instincts, which are far from infallible but based on a lot of data and, I hope, a reasonable understanding of Northern Ireland for someone not from there, tell me the following: a referendum on unification is not on the agenda in the short or medium term, perhaps for 15 or 20 years; Sinn Féin has a strong hold on the Nationalist/Republican vote; the DUP, unless it changes radically, is facing slow but inexorable decline; and Unionism will either fracture into a majority which sees unification as undesirable but inevitable and therefore focus on other things, and a small but passionate community which sees determined adherence to its principles and a rejection of compromise as the only path to salvation, or some broad-based, forward-looking Unionist movement will emerge to show the opportunities of the status quo. I am afraid I think the latter somewhat less likely than the former.
However, as Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence tells Sherif Ali, nothing is written. Sinn Féin faces two major challenges: Michelle O’Neill has now been first minister of Northern Ireland for four months, and there will come a time when the electorate will begin to judge her and her party on their performance in the executive and as a government, a kind of scrutiny they have never really faced before; at the same time, there will be a general election in Ireland in the next nine months at most, and Sinn Féin is expected to do well, in which case they will have to decide whether they seek to participate in government, if they can find coalition partners, or if they prefer the secure impotence of opposition. The party’s hold on Nationalist and Republican support is strong but it is not guaranteed in perpetuity.
Equally, as I explored last month, we will likely have a Labour government at Westminster, with Hilary Benn seemingly a shoo-in, as he approached his 71st birthday, to be secretary of state for Northern Ireland. The UK-EU Trade Cooperation Agreement is scheduled to be reviewed in 2026, which will have obvious implications for Northern Ireland, and Labour has also pledged to repeal and replace the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. These could change the political landscape and the parties in Northern Ireland will have to adapt to changing circumstances.
Incredibly, it is still nearly four weeks until the election. That, however, is a snapshot of Northern Ireland based on Peter Donaghy’s analysis of the 18 constituencies. No doubt I will return to this subject more than once as we approach polling day.
A very fair minded survey, except to mention that Andrew Muir of Alliance is also Minister for Agriculture in the current Executive. From a Unionist point of view, they should probably be pushing for an early referendum to settle the constitutional question, which would force Alliance to choose. They would almost certainly win at this point which would make it difficult to justify holding another one for a considerable period, as in Scotland.