Tag Archives: world: northern ireland

The Bellwether constituencies of Northern Ireland (or, why there aren’t any)

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Back in the summer, Lewis Baston wrote a fascinating geeky piece about which Westminster constituencies in the UK have voted for the winning party in the most elections. Both Dartford and South Derbyshire / Belper voted Labour in 1964 and 1966, Tory in 1970, Labour in both 1974 elections, Tory in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour in 1997, 2001 and 2005, Tory in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 and Labour in 2024. However, both of them voted Labour in 1959 when the Conservatives won, so the chain stops in 1964. If you allow a couple of lapses from an otherwise perfect record, Buckingham (now Buckingham and Bletchley) has voted for the winning party every time since 1868, except in 1929 and the two 1974 elections.

He then goes on to consider Scotland and Wales separately, and to define the bellwethers in each case as those where the winner in a particular seat matched the party which won the most seats in Scotland or Wales. Labour has always won in Wales since 1922, and there are six constituencies which have consistently voted Labour since then (three of which voted for the Coalition in 1918). In Scotland, if you allow both Labour and Conservative seats in 1951 when the two parties tied, Central Ayrshire has voted for the Scottish winner since it was created in 1950.

Baston leaves out Northern Ireland, because there is no seat that elected both a Sinn Fein MP in 2024 and a DUP MP in 2019. But if we apply a bit more generosity (a la Buckingham and Bletchley), we can get a bit more texture.

For Northern Ireland, we have to start in 1922, both because that’s when it became a separate entity and because the six counties had had a lot more MPs before then, so it’s more difficult to assess what the successor constituencies are. From 1922 there were six single-seat territorial constituencies (plus the Queen’s University of Belfast), and also three two-seat constituencies, which after 1950 were split into six single seats (and the QUB seat was abolished). Five new seats were added to the map in 1987 for a total of seventeen, and an eighteenth was added in 1997.

The Ulster Unionist Party won the most seats in Northern Ireland at every Westminster election from Partition to 2001 (we can be generous and count in all the other MPs elected on the UUUC ticket in the two 1974 elections, but it doesn’t make much difference in the end). The DUP then won the most seats in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019, and Sinn Fein won the most in 2024, so we are looking for seats that voted most often for the winners in recent elections.

Up until 2019, three of the seats created in 1983 had an unblemished record of going with the biggest party in Northern Ireland: East Antrim, Lagan Valley and Upper Bann, which all switched from UUP to DUP in 2005. If you allow Lagan Valley and East Antrim as partial successors to the old South Antrim seat (and to the previous County Antrim two-seater), and Upper Bann as a partial successor to the old Armagh seat, the record goes for almost a century from 1922 to 2019.

East Londonderry (considered as a successor to the old County Londonderry) and South Antrim itself (considered as a successor to the old South Antrim and the previous County Antrim) missed only one election in those 97 years (East Londonderry won by Gregory Campbell of the DUP in 2001, South Antrim by Danny Kinahan of the UUP in 2015). Strangford also missed only 2001 since its creation in 1983, but its predecessor seats were a bit more variable.

However, that’s no good for the present day, because none of those seats were won by Sinn Fein in 2024. Most of the current Sinn Fein seats have been held by Sinn Fein or the SDLP for decades, so none of them are potential bellwethers either. Of today’s SF seats, the one that is closest to a bellwether constituency is North Belfast, which has gone with the largest party at each Westminster election since 1922 with three exceptions: 1979 when Johnny McQuade won it for the DUP, 2001 when Nigel Dodds took it also for the DUP, ahead of the 2005 surge, and 2019 when John Finucane of Sinn Fein defeated Nigel Dodds. It looks pretty safely in the Sinn Fein group for the time being.

There is also an anti-bellwether seat, which has never voted for the Northern Ireland-wide largest party since its creation. That seat is Foyle, which has been held by the SDLP from 1983 to the present day, with the exception of the 2017 election when it was taken by Sinn Fein. North Down has only once voted for the province-wide winner since 1983, and that was in 2001 when Lady Sylvia Hermon first won it for the UUP. She was still UUP in 2005, but all the other UUP seats were lost.

(I wonder if there are also similar anti-bellwether seats for the UK as a whole, or for England, Scotland and Wales?)

I had a quick look to see if one could make the same calculation for Assembly constituencies, to identify which has a representation which is proportionally the most similar to the Assembly as a whole. It’s very difficult to assess that. Right now, the answer would probably be North Belfast again. In 2022 it elected two members from the two biggest parties (the DUP and Sinn Fein) and one from the third biggest (Alliance), and similarly in 2019 (when the third largest party overall, and the fifth North Belfast MLA, were SDLP). In 2017, when there were six seats per constituency, North Belfast again came closest to the make-up of the Assembly but did not quite match it, with three DUP MLAs, two SF and one SDLP (whereas the UUP had the third largest number of seats at that election). This probably demonstrates that the concept of a bellwether seat cannot really be adapted to a proportional multi-party election.

And I’m not going to attempt to apply the concept to the Dáil. That’s for stronger-minded psephologists than me.

The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ironically it was one of the most prominent younger radicals, David Lloyd George, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer indirectly recharged the home rule project. The rejection of his 1909 ‘people’s budget’ by the House of Lords – breaking the unwritten convention that the upper house did not interfere with money matters – triggered a constitutional crisis which ended, after two narrow Liberal general election victories in 1910, in legislation to abolish the Lords’ veto power. The 1911 Parliament Act made possible not only death duties, but also Irish home rule. As the Act passed, the prime minister H. H Asquith announced that a third home rule bill would be brought forward. Enraged Tories denounced this as the result of a ‘corrupt bargain’ to keep the Liberals in power with Irish support – the budget was disliked by the influential Irish liquor trade, and home rule was the price of pushing it through. There was probably no deal as such, and the Liberals had in any case, thanks to Labour support, a comfortable majority. ‘A general understanding’ that home rule would follow, it has been reasonably suggested, was ‘surely the natural result of the long history of Liberal commitment’ to it.³
³ P. Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 29.

I very much enjoyed Townshend’s Ewart-Biggs-Prize-winning The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, so had pretty high expectations here, combined with fairly fresh memories of Ronan Fanning’s Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922. I don’t think you could read The Partition without also having read The Republic, or something similar – the story of how Northern Ireland came to be created is really a sidenote to the much bigger story of Irish independence, and Townshend has sensibly not repeated much from the previous book, which means that some important context is skimmed here.

But it doesn’t matter all that much, because this is a deep dive into archival sources and also (often neglected) contemporary newspaper accounts of the process of the partition of Ireland, which Townshend rightly puts as beginning in 1885 when the election results revealed that Nationalism was dominant everywhere in Ireland except in the north-east, and the question of how, or indeed if, Ulster could be incorporated into a future self-governing Ireland became a real one.

Map of 1885 election results from Wikipedia

One part of the book was completely new to me: the confused and violent situation in Northern Ireland, especially Belfast, as the new government under James Craig was being set up and at the same time under ineffective but visible attack by Michael Collins from the south. There was a real intermixture of Loyalist militias of varying degrees of effectiveness and state support that would hold its own with many of today’s conflicts, including the bloody ethnic cleansing. Nobody comes out of this episode well, including the British government which was wilfully ignorant of events in Belfast, Derry and the border counties.

The last chapter, not surprisingly, looks at the history of the Boundary Commission, which started late and badly. The chairman was a South African judge, but from the imperialist side; the Northern Ireland government refused to appoint its commissioner, so London imposed a journalist who of course leaked proceedings to Craig; and the Irish Free State nominated Eoin MacNeill, the confused academic who had unsuccessfully countermanded the Easter Rising in 1916, by now Minister for Education.

Townshend spends some time wondering why Cosgrave did not instead appoint Kevin O’Shiel, who was an expert on boundaries and constitutions, but I think the answer is clear: MacNeill had the political heft and was actually an elected member of the Northern Ireland Parliament (though he never took his seat), whereas O’Shiel (despite his best efforts) was a mere political adviser. MacNeill, however, was thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the other Commissioners and secretariat, and only managed to exert some control of the process by resigning just before the report was due to be published, thus torpedoing the entire exercise. (I believe another book published this year is even more critical of him.)

Nationalists like to find villains for the crime of partition, but the fact is that Nationalist leaders failed to grasp the fact that the Ulster situation was a very serious impediment for their political project. Townshend doesn’t go into it, but much Nationalist rhetoric and indeed behaviour was intentionally offensive to those who they claimed as fellow citizens. Parnell, as a Protestant landlord himself, rather adopted the zeal of the convert, and no Nationalist leadership figure had credibility among Unionists. In the later stages, I think that Redmond missed a trick here, and in other respects, by refusing to accept a Cabinet position – it would have been tough going, but he would have had the threat of resignation in his dwindling armory. I very much agree with Townshend’s conclusion:

Almost nobody wanted it; but any implication that a better arrangement was possible, and somehow squandered through haste and carelessness, would be misleading. The intensity of Unionist hostility to home rule presented a political challenge of exceptional difficulty. Once Joseph Chamberlain had talked of a separate parliament for Ulster, it would have needed a major reconstruction of nationalist ideas to make a unitary home rule arrangement viable. That adaptation was not made, or even attempted, mainly because nationalists were doomed to believe that any resistance within Ireland to home rule was illusory. Even amongst others, partition was never embraced with enthusiasm. It was a negative concept, connoting at best failure, at worst abuse of statesmanship.

Townshend also looks briefly at why neither power-sharing nor UK-wide federalism could have flown. My own reflection on those points is that nobody ever suggested guaranteed positions in Irish government for the Unionists, at least not until the creation of the Free State in 1922 (when Collins basically gave them what they asked for, most importantly short-term over-representation in the new Senate). And the notion of ‘Home Rule all round’ failed to recognised the asymmetry between Irish demands on the one hand and Scottish and Welsh aspirations on the other. (And indeed between Scotland and Wales. Bear in mind that devolution was rejected by a 4 to 1 majority in Wales in 1979, and scraped through by just under 7,000 votes out of over a million cast in 1997.)

I don’t think this is a book for beginners, but those who already know a bit – even a lot – about the period will find some very interesting new information. You can get The Partition here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates, and Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer.

Irish Conflict in Comics: Rebellion, Nazi Spies and the Troubles, by James Bacon

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Second paragraph of third chapter, with illustration:

The Congregation of Christian Brothers, who published Éire – Sean is Nua [Ireland – Old and New], were a Catholic celibate community who founded several Catholic education schools and who, with this publication, portrayed themselves as supporters of Irish Republicanism. Our Boys, another Christian Brothers publication, was a reaction to The Boy’s Own Paper and other British boys’ papers, viewed as imperialist propaganda. Our Boys was first published in 1914 and sought to present a Catholic and nationalist alternative to Irish children.

This is a totally comprehensive listing of how Ireland is portrayed in comics. The start of the story is actually told in a very intertesting appendix, looking at revolutionary era cartoonists – Grace Gifford, Ernest Kavanagh, Joe Stanley (Padraig Pearse’s press office during the Easter Rising, who published Ireland’s first comic, Greann, in 1934) and Constance de Markievicz.

Most of the book looks at the mainstream comics industry as it has developed since 1940, usually featuring American writers trying to get to grips with local complexity. There are some cringeworthy moments, for instance the heroic Gay Ghost who comes from the castle of Connaught in County Ulster. There are a number of stories featuring Nazi meddling in Ireland, usually with the involvement of the IRA, though the latter are not consistently portrayed as being on either side.

In the post-war decades, Irish creators start to get in on the act, with the Christian Brothers publishing Eire – Sean is Nua [Ireland – Old and New]; and there’s also a flattering biography of Eamon de Valera from the early 1970s, at a time before the events of his life after 1921 were taught in school history classes.

The Troubles offered plenty of narrative opportunities for long-running comics series to visit Ireland’s shores, some of them more effectively than others. Sometimes the comics publishers found that they had bitten off more than they could chew; a 1986 story with Spiderman visiting Northern Ireland was aborted by Marvel after the publishers received a bomb threat. Was it credible? I guess it doesn’t matter.

The main narrative (before the appendix) look particularly at the work of Garth Ennis and Malachy Coney, mainstream comics writers who are from Northern Ireland. Ennis doesn’t always do it for me, but I remember his early Troubled Souls and Coney’s Holy Cross stories with great affection.

Those of you who know the author will not surprised to learn that it reads like he speaks; this isn’t polished academic writing, it’s a rush of enthusiastic information, crammed onto the 259 A4 pages with wafer-thin headers and footers. But the information is cool, and important. I’ll try and get hold of the French-language comics mentioned (including Partitions irlandaises) and will report back. Meanwhile you can get Irish Conflict in Comics here.

Black Mountain and other stories, by Gerry Adams

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Second paragraph of third story (“Bluebells”):

She unpacked her clothes, but was drawn back to the wall-paper. She looked closely at it, ran her hand over the circular bouquets of bluebells on the pale-pink background. It was like seeing a face in a crowd she couldn’t quite place. But then it came to her. The street in West Belfast from her childhood. The room she shared with her little sister, Sarah. Not much money in the house. Bare wooden floorboards before that became fashionable. No oilcloth or carpet in their room, but that same lovely pink wallpaper covered with bluebells just beside their bed.

Gerry Adams will need no introduction to anyone familiar with Irish politics; as well as his public career, he has published a number of books, and my brother got me this short story collection as a joke, a few years back.

It’s not very good. Adams’ command of language in his public speeches has always been somewhat clunky, and that’s true here as well. Abrupt shifts of tone and setting make it difficult to focus on whatever it is each story is about. I read the first four and put it in the charity pile. The author is retired now, but was wise to stick to his day job. You can get Black Mountain here.

This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks.

Hugh Carswell: Belfast’s first science fiction fan

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I’m browsing Then, Rob Hansen’s comprehensive analysis of the early history of UK science fiction, and came across the interesting fact that in 1935, one Hugh C. Carswell was appointed as Director of the Belfast chapter of the Science Fiction League, created by Hugo Gernsback for readers of his magazine Wonder Stories. Hansen then reports that this chapter ‘collapsed’ in around May 1937, when Hugh Carswell joined the RAF. Quite possibly there were no other actual members. In any case, Hugh Carswell is the first identifiable participant in science fiction fandom from Northern Ireland (I originally thought he might be the first from the whole of Ireland, but Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan (1913-1993) was writing to Astounding in 1931) and in the UK, the Belfast chapter of the SFL was preceded only by Leeds.

I wondered what else might be traceable about Carswell. From the genealogy sites, it was fairly straightforward to find his vital statistics: Hugh Crawford Carswell, born in Belfast in 1919, died in Waterford in 1985, married to Alice Kervick of Waterford (1916-1990) in Weston-super-Mare in 1946. His address in Belfast was 6 Selina Street, one of the tangle of streets at the bottom of the Grosvenor Road which was demolished to build the Westlink. His appointment as Director of the Belfast chapter of the SFL would have been shortly before his 16th birthday, and his gafiation around the time of his 18th.

Selina Street marked in red, between Elizabeth Street and Dickson Street.
The same area on a modern map. Selina Street is mostly under the Westlink, just north of the Grosvenor Road exit.

Hugh’s father John Carswell (1890-1944) was born in 12 North Queen Place, another vanished street which was just around the corner from Selina Street. (It seems to have been between Stanley Street and Willow Street.) The family are recorded as Church of Ireland in the 1900 census. John’s father, Hugh’s grandfather, Henry Carswell (1858-1906) was born in England; his profession is given as “labourer” in the census. John’s mother, Hugh’s grandmother Sarah nee Veighey (1857-1945) was born in Co Armagh.

Hugh’s mother Elizabeth / Lizzy nee Crawford (1891-1967) was born in Hutchinson Street, between Selina Street and North Queen Place. The family are recorded as Presbyterians. Her father Thomas Crawford (1864-1931) was born in County Down; his profession is given as “brass fitter”. Lizzy’s mother, Hugh’s grandmother Jane nee Moore (1866-1917) was born in County Antrim, which could mean Lisburn or Ballycastle or anywhere in between.

John and Lizzy married at St John’s Church (Church of Ireland) on the Malone Road in Belfast on 5 September 1911; he was 21 and she was 20. It’s an interesting choice of venue; St John’s is a good hour’s walk from central Belfast, and even in these benighted days I count a dozen Church of Ireland churches closer to their birth places than St John’s. His profession is given as Lance Corporal in the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, based in Dover, so he had a nice shiny uniform. They seem to have had six sons between 1912 and 1924, Hugh being the third, and then a daughter in 1927.

John Carswell is recorded as living in Selina Street in the various online street directories for 1924, where he is described as a labourer, and for 1932, 1939 and 1943, where he is described as a grocer. After his death, Mrs E. Carswell (ie Lizzie) is also described as a grocer in 1951 and 1960. Initially they lived at 8 Selina Street, but later acquired number 6 as well; my guess would be that number 8 was the grocery shop and number 6 the residence.

Hugh made the newspapers in January 1936 when he passed the examination for Aircraft Apprentice with the RAF, though it looks like this didn’t impede his fannish activity for another year. A Facebook comment by Des Carswell, one of his five sons, says, “He was later transferred to South Africa where he trained as a pilot with the RAF and was responsible for flight testing of aircraft that his Squadron assembled in South Africa for operation duties in that theatre.”

He goes on, “Hugh returned to the U.K. in 1946 initially stationed at St. Eval before be transferred to 202 Squadron in Aldergrove outside Belfast where he undertook flying duties carrying out weather flight testing in Handley Page Halifax aircraft as a Sargent Pilot. On retirement from the RAF Hugh continued to work with the services until his retirement in 1979.”

There’s a bit more to say about the end of the story, but I’ll get to that later. Worth noting here that the new tech Air Force is exactly the branch of the services that you might expect a teenage science fiction reader to be drawn to in the 1930s.

(One minor discrepant detail: Hugh’s grandson says that he was based in north Africa, not South Africa, during the war, and indeed northern Africa seems more likely, given that the RAF was very active in that campaign and that South Africa had its own air force. He may of course have done both.)

I had had better luck at a distance of two seas and ninety years than James White, who in 1952 found Hugh Carswell’s own copy of Wonder Stories in a Belfast bookshop, and, as recounted by Walt Willis, decided to track him down at his Selina Street address. (See Fantastic Worlds v.1 no. 1, 1952, reprinted in The Willis Papers (1959) pages 8-10).

The address was one of a long row of identical houses in a working-class street. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman with a truculent expression.
“Mr. Carswell?” asked James, politely.
She gave him a suspicious look and would probably have slammed the door in his face if it hadn’t been for the fact that James is roughly a mile high and wears heavy round glasses which make him look like an electronic brain in its walking-out clothes. She contented herself with gradually reducing the width of the aperture until she was in danger of cutting her head off.
“Which Mr. Carswell?” she asked warily.
“Hugh,” said James.
She reddened, insulted. “What do you mean, me?” she enquired angrily. She was hurt.
”Not you,” said James hastily. He gave her an aspirate to remove the pain. “Hhhhugh. Hugh Carswell.”
Malevolently she seized her opportunity for further obstruction. “Which Hugh Carswell?”
Now, I have the type of mind that mentally falls off every bridge before I come to it. If I had been going to make this call of James’s, I would have cased the joint first. I would have looked up the house in the street directory to make sure the Carswells were still there after 17 years. Then I would have looked up the Register of Electors to see the names of all the people in the house who were of voting age. Finally I would have walked past the house a few times and then had a pint in the nearest pub and seen what dirt I could dig up. Such intelligent preparation and brilliant detective work wouldn’t have made the slightest difference, of course, but it would have been fun.
“Er…..the one who’s interested in science fiction,”, said James at last.
The woman looked at him blankly. It seemed to come naturally to her. Obviously, she was waiting for him to say something intelligible. She didn’t seem to think there was much hope.
“Signs fixin’?” she asked. “What signs?”

Hoffman’s cartoon of James White in Selina Street.

I don’t find any other Hughs in the immediate Carswell family, so either the lady was being even more annoying to James White than he realised, or he was making that detail up for entertainment. Personally I suspect the latter. I can also believe that as a relatively recent widow, she could get snappish when a stranger asked where Mr Carswell was. At least, I assume that White met Lizzie, who would have been 63 in 1952; Hugh’s sister Pauline does not appear to have ever married, so was probably still living with her widowed mother, but she was only 24 in 1952, which doesn’t really fit White’s description.

By his own account, White then became alarmed by the presence of sinister men who appeared to be monitoring his presence, so he left the scene rapidly, having first established that all of Hugh’s old magazines had been thrown away the previous summer by his mother.

To bring the story brutally forward by another twenty years, Hugh’s grandson, the Irish Times journalist Simon Carswell, gives some more context to the later part of his grandpartents’ lives in a moving (but graphically illustrated) piece on the 1972 bombing of the Abercorn bar in central Belfast:

One night in September 1973, a loyalist gunman fired six shots through the front window of the home of my grandparents – my Waterford Catholic grandmother Alice Carswell (nee Kervick) and my Protestant-born Catholic convert grandfather Hugh Carswell, better known as Paddy.

Their Catholic house on the predominantly Protestant Cregagh estate had been attacked several times before because of the family’s religion, but the gun attack was the final straw. Nobody was hurt, but the message was clear: it was time to get out.

My uncle Hilary remembers seeing the flashes of the gunshots from an upstairs bedroom and pulling his brother Dick to the ground. The family has photographs of the bullet-holes, including one snap of my cousin Jaimie, then a toddler, with his finger in one of the holes.

The day after the attack, the Irish News newspaper carried a brief, two-paragraph article about the shooting at the bottom of its front page. Within weeks, the Carswells had packed up and relocated to Catholic west Belfast.

“At that stage, there were 12 Catholic families living in the Cregagh estate. That was all that was left. And then there were 11,” says Hilary Carswell.

The fact that Hugh had converted to Catholicism is a new and interesting detail. The Catholic Church, especially in Ireland, perhaps even more so in Northern Ireland, was very demanding of couples in mixed marriages in those days. As it happens, both of my own grandmothers, brought up as Protestants, converted to Catholicism to marry my grandfathers.

By 1973, Selina Street, North Queen Place and Hutchinson Street had all disappeared under the developers’ bulldozers, but Hugh still took his family back to West Belfast when crisis struck, before heading permanently to the Republic where he and Alice lived out their days. His RAF service record, which had not helped him in Cregagh, won’t have helped much in West Belfast either.

I checked in with Simon Carswell, who was only vaguely aware of his grandfather’s interest in science fiction. He wrote to me:

I remember him as a really clever and fascinating man. He repaired and flew Hurricane fighter planes for the RAF in north Africa during the Second World War and I recall him being interested in technology and innovation, and taking an interest in US television programmes about the future so this fits with his interest as a boy in science fiction.

He was a brilliant Grandad who took a great interest in his grandchildren. He died far too young at the age of 65. He had been in poor health from malaria that he contracted in north Africa, which was not helped by a hardened smoking habit. He was much loved and is much missed by his family, even 40 years after his death. Our memories of Grandad remain as vivid today. I hope he is up there reading science fiction novels, comics and books, and pondering what the future might bring to us down here.

Coming full circle, I am tremendously grateful to Hugh’s son Paul Carswell for sharing this photograph of Hugh with his mother Lizzie and their dogs, one of whom was named Rex, at the door of their Selina Street house. From Hugh’s apparent age, it was taken just a couple of years before he became Northern Ireland’s first known science fiction fan.

Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by Freeman Wills Crofts

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

At his next visit, to the motor agency for which Victor Magill acted as representative, he drew almost as complete a blank. It was true that he did not expect to learn much. But as a matter of routine, it was necessary to see everyone who might in any way throw light on the case.

One of the very few novels with a Northern Ireland setting between 1921 and 1968 (see also: Odd Man Out, and er I think that’s it from my own reading in the last twenty-five years or so), this is a murder mystery published and set in 1930, in which an Ulster industrialist disappears on his way home after a long absence, and is soon found murdered. The Norn Iron bits are pretty much restricted to the East Antrim coast, though there are some nice bits of local colour, and there is also much exploration of the Scottish train line to Stranraer and the northwest English and southwest Scottish coasts.

The solution depends rather on an improbable set of motivations for the killing, and also an equally improbably carefully calculated set of timings for journeys by train, car and boat, to the point that the suspension of my disbelief became a bit eroded. But this was the high period of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and I guess it was what the market expected of a detective story. (There is even a reference to Hercule Poirot in the novel.)

I had read elsewhere that this book rather whitewashed the new-ish devolved Northern Ireland government, given the author’s Ulster Protestant background. (Stormont itself was still being built in 1930.) I did not find this charge firmly substantiated. True, there’s no reflection at all about the sectarian basis of the statelet; but as I said earlier, the Norn Iron settings are mostly along the coast Carrickfergus and Ballygalley Head, with a couple of excursions to Cave Hill and into central Belfast, and one to Bangor, which doesn’t really take you into contested territory. (The victim is reportedly seen on Sandy Row, which is described as ‘more or less working class’.)

On the other hand, I got a sense that the author felt the smallness of the interlocking circles of government and industry in the province could be a problem rather than a solution. And as for Dublin,

He [Inspector French] had not been over since the troubles [ie 1920-22] and he was impressed by the air of smartness and prosperity which the city wore. It seemed cleaner than before and the new buildings made O’Connell Street a really imposing thoroughfare.

Not exactly the sentiments of a raving Unionist!

The plot of the book has a couple of eerie similarities with the real-life murder of Patricia Curran twenty-two years later, the victim being from a prominent local family, the body found in the grounds of their East Antrim home, and a close relative suspected of the crime. The differences are fairly significant too of course, and I suspect it’s unlikely that the 1952 murderer, whoever that was, took any inspiration from Crofts.

Anyway, as I said, the book is of interest for the period colour, if not completely satisfactory as a murder mystery. You can get Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey here.

Apostate, by Forrest Reid

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A brother and a sister shared to some extent the day nursery with me, but they were my seniors by several years, and hardly counted in my scheme of things. Of far more immediate interest was the personality of a sagacious old tabby, who would stroll into the nursery and lie on the floor in the sun, and was good-natured enough to purr when I used her as a pillow. I was aware that she timed these visits, and that if she did not find me alone (by which I mean alone with Emma) she would not stay. Not that she was, so far as I recall, a particularly affectionate animal. Cats are never sentimental; they treat you exactly as you treat them; and it was simply that she had marked me down, with unerring instinct, as ” safe “—a person who could be trusted to amuse the kittens while one dozed and dreamed.

I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.

As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.

What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)

Modern map from the PRONI Historical Maps viewer.

Chapter VI is a detailed description of 1880s Belfast which I reproduce here (apart from the references to popular literature of the day):

My waking world, also, was gradually expanding, though it still remained the very small world of a provincial town—a rather hard, unromantic town too—devoted exclusively to money-making; yet a town, for all that, somehow likeable, and surrounded by as beautiful a country as one could desire. The Belfast of my childhood [the 1880s] differed considerably from the Belfast of today [1926]. It was, I think, spiritually closer to that surrounding country. Then, as now, perhaps, it was not particularly well educated, it possessed no cultured and no leisured class (the sons of even the wealthiest families leaving school at fifteen or sixteen to enter their fathers’ offices); but it did not, as I remember it at any rate, bear nearly so marked a resemblance to the larger English manufacturing towns. 

The change I seem to see has, of course, brought it closer to its own ideal. For some not very intelligible reason, a hankering after things English—even what is believed to be an English accent—and a distrust of things Irish, have always characterised the more well-to-do citizens of Belfast. But in the days of my childhood this was not so apparent, while the whole town was more homely, more unpretentious. A breath of rusticity still sweetened its air; the few horse trams, their destinations indicated by the colour of their curtains, did little to disturb the quiet of the streets; the Malone Road was still an almost rural walk; Molly Ward’s cottage, not a vulcanite factory, guarded the approach to the river; and there were no brick works, no mill chimneys, no King’s Bridge to make ugly blots on the green landscape of the Lagan Valley. The town itself, as I have said, was more attractive, with plenty of open spaces, to which the names of certain districts—the Plains, the Bog Meadows—bear witness. Queen’s University was not a mere mass of unrelated, shapeless buildings; the Technical Institute did not sprawl in unsightly fashion across half the grounds of my old school. Gone is the Linen Hall, that was once the very heart of the town in its hours of ease. A brand new City Hall, all marble staircases and inlaid floors, garnished with statues and portraits of Lord Mayors and town councillors, and fronted with wooden benches on which rows of our less successful citizens doze and scratch the languid hours away, flaunts its expensive dullness where that old mellow ivy-creepered building once stood, with its low, arched entrance, its line of trees that shut out the town bustle and dust. The Linen Hall Library, transported to another building, still exists, but, as with the city, expansion has robbed it of its individuality. The old Linen Hall Library, with the sparrows flying in and out of the ivy all day long, fluttering and squabbling, was a charming place. It was very like a club. Its membership was comparatively small; its tone was old-fashioned; it belonged to the era of the two-and three-volume novel; it had about it an atmosphere of quiet and leisure. […]

In the Linen Hall Library, curled up in a low deep window seat, I would sit gazing out between the trees and right up Donegall Place, which on summer afternoons was a fashionable promenade, where one was almost sure to meet everybody one knew. […] And here, one summer afternoon, just outside the tall iron gates, I beheld my first celebrity. Not that I knew him to be celebrated, but I could see for myself his appearance was remarkable. I had been taught that it was rude to stare, but on this occasion, though I was with my mother, I could not help staring, and even feeling I was intended to do so. He was, my mother told me, a Mr. Oscar Wilde; and she added, by way of explanation I suppose, that he was aesthetic, like Bunthorne, in Patience.

Oscar Wilde famously visited Belfast in January 1884. It is interesting that Reid’s mother contextualised him for eight-year-old Forrest by referencing the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan opera which satirised him.

The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.

I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.

Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

If we look at political Unionism since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, it has been dominated by negativity. There was either defensiveness about the need to sign it, or outright hostility. Never at any point did we see a wholehearted endorsement of it. There has also been a maudlin fascination with death and defeat. To celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Ulster Unionist Council in 190s, the then-leader of the Ulster Unionist Party laid wreaths at the gravestones of each of his predecessors. This form of commemoration does not point to a brighter future, but a trapped mindset focused on the past, with memories of loss. As James Baldwin said, ‘People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them’.⁶⁹
⁶⁹ Baldwin J, ‘Stranger in the Village’, Harpers Magazine, October 1953 Issue, 1953

Interesting polemic by a former Unionist from East Belfast, taking the view that the Union between Great Britain and Northern has passed its sell-by date and that there is therefore a moral imperative on Nationalists to prepare for the coming referendum on a united Ireland, and an equal imperative on Unionists to prepare for that fate. Much description of the advantages of a unitary island state within the European Union (Collins does not think that Stormont should be preserved in a united Ireland). Not quite as much analysis of the errors of Unionism, though there are many. Some parts of the book are a little dated now that the appalling Johnson government is three prime ministers ago, but other parts remain valid.

My own views were expressed in the Irish Times in July 2019, and have not shifted much. I agree that the direction of travel is towards a majority vote for a united Ireland in a referendum, but I think we are further away from it than Nationalists hope and Unionists fear, and I can foresee a nervous equilibrium holding for some time – as Gerry Lynch once put it, “Welcome to the Northern Ireland that won’t vote itself out of the Union but won’t give Unionism majority support.”

I wrote in my 2019 piece that for a unification vote to succeed, three conditions needed to be met:

  1. Brexit works out badly;
  2. Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and not to the centre ground;
  3. Nationalists come up with a better offer than the union, especially on health services.

I stand by that analysis; however I think the situation on the ground has changed.

Back in 2019, my first condition, that Brexit works out badly, looked like a slam dunk. But the various deals concluded by prime ministers Sunak and Starmer (but not Liz Truss) with the EU have brought some certainty. The new post-Brexit arrangements are not brilliant for anyone, but they are least worst for Northern Ireland which continues to be able to trade with both Great Britain and the EU. Brexit is still a disaster, but it’s not hitting Northern Ireland as badly as I expected / feared.

The challenge for Nationalists therefore is to explain to Northern Irish voters why their current situation, with trade access to both the EU and the UK, would be improved by erecting barriers with the UK that don’t currently exist, but would be inevitable if Northern Ireland’s status changes. It’s not a fatal problem – in the end this will be decided on sentiment as much as economics – but it’s one that Nationalists need to be able to answer.

Likewise the second condition is a little weaker than it looked in 2019. The DUP have gone back into government with Sinn Fein, accepting the position of Deputy First Minister – and I’ll admit that I wrongly predicted that this could never happen. The DUP’s leader, Gavin Robinson, put out a sympathetic statement on the death of the Pope. Unionism’s instinct is still to reach for the flags and drums, which have less than zero appeal to the crucial centre ground voters, but Unionism’s smarter side has been a little more visible of late.

This could go either way in future. In particular, if hardliners are able to eat further into the DUP vote, the effect paradoxically will be to weaken the Union, as the basis for the DUP’s continued participation in the Stormont executive erodes, and centre voters will become inclined to see Unionism as a blockage to stable government, as it was in the most recent suspension of the Stormont institutions.

On the third point, there has been no progress from Nationalism in spelling out a vision to attract centre ground voters, let alone Unionists. What I see instead is Nationalists blaming each other for the lack of such progress, which is rather a telling sign of blocked thinking. In particular I don’t see any creative ideas around the large share of public sector jobs in Northern Ireland’s economy; will Nationalists propose that the Republic continue subsidising it as the UK does now? Or does a united Ireland mean cutting the public sector too? Some Nationalist commentators think that the UK will provide bridging funding even after the transfer of sovereignty; that seems optimistic to me.

Though curiously enough, as regards healthcare, a doctor friend in County Down tells me that patients are increasingly seeking treatment south of the Border, voting with their feet as it were. But will they vote with actual, er, votes?

Don’t get me wrong – I still think that the direction of travel is clear. But the speed of that travel is another matter, and while it’s probably not irreversible, it could reach an equilibrium point which is short of a majority for a united Ireland, and that could endure for decades. After all, thirty years of violence failed to shift the opinion polls much between Richard Rose’s 1968 survey and the pre-Brexit numbers. Brexit has clearly boosted the case for reunification in a way that the “armed struggle” totally failed to do, but it’s not clear to me that it has reached critical mass.

Anyway, thoughts provoked by the book which you can get here.

29 years ago

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(revised from a 2006 post)

29 years ago today I was preparing to stand in my last election. (My last election to date, that is – who knows what the future will bring.)

The election was in the middle of the Northern Ireland peace process, for 110 members of a consultative forum who would also be potential delegates to the all-party peace talks chaired by George Mitchell.

Those were wild days. I had moved back to Belfast in 1991 to do the project that eventually became my PhD, and through various channels – in particular, through my existing friendship with the Liberal Democrats’ then deputy director of policy, and through my past involvement with the British Irish Association’s annual conferences – I am surprised in retrospect that it took me as long as a year and a half to get sucked back into politics.

By the end of 1993 I was the Alliance Party’s Director of Elections, later renamed Party Organiser. I was a PhD student with not a lot of motivation for the actual topic of my thesis, and basically loved hanging around party headquarters to do whatever jobs needed to be done – not just number-crunching for the proposed new parliamentary boundaries, but also bringing in new canvassing software, and plentiful knocking on doors during local council by-elections – which, quite fortuitously, happened in a number of good areas for Alliance during my period of involvement.

I won’t go into huge detail of the mishandling by all sides of the first years of the peace process from the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. I was both too close to it and also not involved in the key decisions. It still stuns me that politicians as thick as Sir Patrick Mayhew, and his sidekick the even more dismal Sir John Wheeler, were put in charge of such delicate negotiations at a key stage of Northern Ireland’s history; though I guess since then, Brexit has exposed the flaws of the UK’s political system even more brutally.

The particular detail that involved me most, from pretty early on, was the possibility of elections taking place as a part of the peace process, and the likelihood that rather than using either of the off-the-shelf electoral systems available, the British government (in order to get the Unionists to buy into the process) might decide to go for some sort of closed list system across the whole of Northern Ireland from which talks delegates might be selected.

I (and the Alliance Party) very much opposed this, partly for the principled reason that the Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies is simply the best system possible, and partly for the selfish reason that Alliance suspected the party would do less well in a Northern Ireland-wide vote, rather than a vote using the 18 new electoral districts (elections for the European Parliament had always been very bad for Alliance) especially if there were no transferable element to the voting system (which does help the party punch a little above its weight, though less than conventional wisdom would have it).

The government, of course, were faced with several competing priorities – to get buy-in from the Ulster Unionist Party, and also to try and get the two small Loyalist parties, the UDP and PUP, inserted into the talks somehow. After experimenting with various models including, at one point, an “indexation” system – you would get two seats if you scored between 1% and 5%, three from 5% to 15% and four from 15% up, or something like that – they eventually came up with a proposal for electing five representatives from each of the 18 parliamentary constituencies, plus giving the top ten parties an extra two seats each, all chosen from closed lists.

This was the apogee of my Northern Irish political career, such as it was. I remember flying to London one day to meet with Sir Patrick Mayhew, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and on the way back pausing at Heathrow Airport to contact Prionsias de Rossa, then one of the leaders of the coalition parties in the Irish government. I had to get him to call me back at the payphone in the airport terminal building. (That government had an unnervingly informal approach to phone calls – I remember sitting in the party headquarters one evening, and answering the phone as it rang: the caller asked for John Alderdice, explaining that he was John Bruton, the Taoiseach. “Yes, I know who you are…” I replied.)

It was all for nothing, though, and this very peculiar system went ahead. At the start of the campaign my optimistic predictions were that Alliance should get six constituency seats, plus two top-up seats as the party should be comfortably among the top ten, and stood a decent chance of another two constituency seats (hoping especially for second seats in East Belfast and East Antrim). I myself was the lead candidate in North Belfast, where Alliance had won one of five seats starting from only 7% in the 1982 Assembly election; I was not foolish enough to expect to come anywhere close to winning, but did hope to at least equal the 6% scored by the party’s candidate in the 1992 Westminster election (on slightly different boundaries). We had a good, dedicated team – my election agent was only 17, and most of the rest of the North Belfast branch were pretty elderly, but we covered the territory we needed to cover, the intention being not to actually win but to lay the foundations for winning a seat on Belfast City Council in the 1997 elections (which duly happened, and indeed Alliance won one of the five Assembly seats in 2022).

Most of my time during the campaign was spent either at headquarters or knocking doors. I did two public meetings. The first was a mild-mannered affair in an upper-middle-class area, after which Dr John Dunlop, the former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, dropped me home. The other, on the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne interface was rather more dramatic. The panellists included Gerry Kelly of Sinn Fein, me, and a bunch of minor parties (I suppose I should say other minor parties). The press were all there for Kelly, but I got my soundbite broadcast anyway thanks to the requirements of fairness from broadcasters. One of the audience accused me of having absolutely no sense of reality because I suggested that the police might not be utterly and irredeemably evil. The audience as a whole were really deciding whether to vote for Kelly or not to vote at all; I don’t think I won many for the cause that evening. I departed so rapidly that I forgot my coat, and had to go back for it the next day.

In the event the Alliance vote dropped, and the party won only five of the six seats I had thought were safe (suffering a double squeeze in Lagan Valley, as Catholic voters who had previously voted Alliance, faute de mieux, opted for the SDLP for the first time, and Protestants voted for the nice “reformed” Loyalists to encourage them to keep up the ceasefire). I scored 4% in North Belfast (along with my two co-candidates). In my PhD thesis, and in the book based on it, I note:

Thanks to the electorate of North Belfast not supporting me in sufficient numbers in May 1996, I did not become their elected representative to the Northern Ireland Forum and multi-party talks and so had enough time to complete this thesis. For some reason I feel more kindly towards the 1,670 who did vote for me.

Election counts are always slightly odd in Northern Ireland – for once, political foes of every stripe are united in their fear of their common enemy – the voter! Once it became clear (as it did pretty rapidly) that I had no chance of winning, I managed to get hacked into RTE’s live radio coverage of the event and stayed in their Belfast studio for the rest of the day, my jaw dropping at the surprisingly high vote for Sinn Fein – they had predicted it almost precisely, and I had pooh-poohed their predictions, an experience that left me with a profound respect for their electoral forecasts which lasted for several electoral cycles (until they started to let hubris rather than calculation inform their forecasts). And so to a rather subdued, but relieved, celebration in the party leader’s constituency office in East Belfast.

Of course, just because I wasn’t elected didn’t mean that I was not involved with the talks once they started. I got a paid political position as one of the researchers to the Alliance delegation, and though I missed the dramatic first night of the talks – where British officials physically restrained the Unionists from occupying the chairs set aside for George Mitchell and his co-chairs – I sat in on a number of the set-pieces for the first six months, including a memorably brutal session at the end of July 1996 following the vicious marching season of that year. Mitchell has written in his own book of his despair after that particular meeting; he was the consummate professional and sounded entirely sincere when he thanked everyone for their heartfelt and vigorous contributions to the discussion, without a hint of irony.

Anyway, at the end of the year I got a job in Bosnia, and my career basically took off in a completely unexpected, and personally much more rewarding, direction. I don’t say “never again”, but I do say that the next time I stand for election, I want to have a much stronger chance of winning. But today, 29 years on from 1996, I just want to remember the election campaign that I fought when I was 29 years old in 1996. As you have probably worked out, 29+29 = 58, and today is my 58th birthday.

Good Vibrations, and Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations, by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan

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I don’t think I have written here before about my love of the 2013 film Good Vibrations, starring Richard Dormer as Terri Hooley, and pre-Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker as his first wife Ruth Carr (in reality a significant cultural figure in her own right, who is only in the film as the protagonist’s love interest). The film is the story of how one idealistic man kept music, especially punk, alive in the worst years of the Troubles, and finally made it big with The Undertones’ classic Teenage Kicks. In case you need to get a taste of it, here’s the trailer:

I confess part of the sentimental attachment for me is that I went to see a special showing of the film in mid-2014 at the Northern Ireland representation in Brussels, with Andy Carling, a good friend who sadly died a few years later. We both cried at the crucial scene where The Undertones turn up in the studio to record their hit, and my eyes well up every time I think of it.

Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations is the ghost-written autobiography of Terri Hooley on which the film is very loosely based. The second paragraph of the third chapter:

One by one, all the weird and wonderful clubs that I had loved when I was a teenager began to disappear. As people retreated into their own areas there was little need for the Fiesta Ballroom, the Plaza or Betty Staff’s and they soon closed. Belfast became a ghost town.

As a Belfast kid in the 1970s and 1980s, I was not into the contemporary music scene at all; the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra was more my gig. But I do remember the cut-out of Elvis outside the Good Vibrations music shop on Great Victoria Street, and the cool kids at school were into Stiff Little Fingers. Otherwise I was surprised by the lack of crossover between my own lived Belfast experience and Terri Hooley’s world of gigs, girls, business and bankruptcy. I was well aware that I was not one of the cool kids, and this book confirms it.

The book is gorgeously illustrated, with many black-and-white photos, posters, ticket stubs, record sleeves and other souvenirs from the era. It’s an important reminder that history is not just words on paper, but images and sounds as well, if you can gather them for your archive. And it’s also a reminder that while the grim politics and violence were playing out in front of the world’s cameras, there was something much more joyous happening behind the scenes.

As for the text… well, it’s obviously been organised by Richard Sullivan as co-writer, but you do get the sense of a man sitting down in the bar next to you and spilling his life story, good, bad and ugly. Hooley’s passion for music is admirable and the driving force of his life; he has been unlucky in business and not always lucky in love. Some of his life decisions have been, er, wiser than others. The book gives a raw picture of him and his time and place. You can get it here (at a price).

Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.

This is a tremendous expose of the colossal scandal that brought down the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive government in early 2017, taking another three years before it was restored (and then it was gone again in two years, being restored only a year ago). The guts of the story are that a subsidy for using renewable heat sources for commercial purposes was perversely structured so that the state effectively paid users to burn biomass; “cash for ash” as it was dubbed.

McBride was at the forefront of breaking this story through the News Letter, and the BBC was also particularly strong on the case (to the point that when I bumped into Arlene Foster in 2019, with a BBC journalist by my side, she chatted pleasantly with me while totally cutting my companion). It still doesn’t get to the bottom of the question – did anyone consciously legislate for this bottomless subsidy to arise? – but there is one obvious key beneficiary.

Once it became clear that far from subsidising the vast cash giveaway, the UK government was going to claw it back from the Northern Ireland budget, the shit hit the fan and politicians and ministers began manoeuvring not just to avoid blame but also to extract the maximum amount of money from the system before it was closed. As a BBC journalist put it:

‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh Hospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses [between Ballymena and Ballymoney], the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’

McBride despairs over the incompetence of the Civil Service in allowing the system to have arisen in the first place, and the incompetence of ministerial oversight. Jonathan Bell, the DUP minister who actually exposed the scandal in the first place, is himself exposed as bad-tempered and over-indulging in alcohol, under-briefed and displacing responsibility. Arlene Foster, on whose watch the scheme was set up and who then became First Minister, seems to have been curiously indifferent to the potential problems.

If Arlene Foster had followed the example of Peter Robinson, and stepped aside for a few weeks for a preliminary investigation to clear her of personal misconduct, devolution would have continued and the DUP would likely still be the largest party in Northern Ireland. As it was, she let ego override strategy, not for the first or last time. Sinn Fein also come in for criticism for their management of the financial side, and for the fact that ministerial decisions are still apparently being signed off by non-elected individuals.

I won’t embarrass them, but I am glad that the two people who I know best out of the whole disappointing story, a senior DUP special advisor and a senior civil servant (now retired), come out rather well; my DUP friend was only peripherally involved by all accounts, and my civil servant friend was one of the first to realise how badly things had gone wrong and, crucially, to accept responsibility.

I felt at the time that it was actually quite healthy for a Stormont government to fall over an actual issue of governance, rather than something related to the Norn Iron Problem – the only precedent is the deposition of John Miller Andrews in 1943. McBride however shows that the Norn Iron Problem includes the problem of a very small pool of political and administrative talent in a territory with such a small population, and this was one of the factors in the RHI scandal.

This is something that I have observed in my dealings with other small states. The issue isn’t whether the polity is economically viable, it’s whether there are enough smart people around to run it properly. I think the critical mass is probably around 2 million, the size of Slovenia, unless you have positive immigration boosting the numbers (eg Luxembourg). Northern Ireland, at 1.7 million, isn’t quite there yet.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; you can get it here. Next on that pile is A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell.

Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She had been in Madden’s Bar in Belfast and had turned to a man she thought was me and said hello.

I was lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on the day that this book was launched, attended, bought it and got it signed. I know the author if not very well; I guess we have been on each other’s radar for a long time.

It’s about the fifty years in Northern Ireland, more specifically Belfast, from 1969 to 2019, of which the first thirty were consumed with the Troubles and the next twenty with the new post-peace process society as it develops. It’s a big book – almost 400 pages – and covers not only the politics of violence, and the constitutional question, but also the more fundamental shifts to what was a very conservative society in the 1960s: women’s rights, gay rights, language rights.

It’s a very personal tale, explaining better than I’ve seen from anywhere else how very much the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s was a bolt from the blue, unanticipated by anyone including the perpetrators, and how the prelapsarian geography of Belfast got reshaped by sectarian brutality. As well as recounting his own memories, O’Doherty interviews a lot of current players with different views than his own, including on the diehard Loyalist side, and gives them space to articulate their perspective.

I was inwardly amused that the people in the book who I do know personally are concentrated in the feminism / gay rights chapters rather than the more political chapters. Though on reflection perhaps this does point to a gap in the perspectives presented; I miss any mention of integrated education, mixed marriages, or the growth of the vote for non-aligned political parties. Less exciting perhaps, but not unimportant.

I see some reviewers complaining that if you don’t already know much about Northern Ireland, the wealth of information and number of personalities make it difficult to follow. I’m not in the at-risk category of not knowing enough about Northern Ireland, and I very much enjoyed it, and even learned a few things from it. You can get it here.

This was (shamefully) the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread pile. Next up there is Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis.

The Combined Election (Northern Ireland, 2001)

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Second paragraph of Chapter 3:

A total of 926 respondents completed and returned the presiding officer questionnaire in the pre-paid envelope provided. This represented a response rate of 77%.

I picked this up remaindered in a Belfast bookshop, with hopes from the title: The Combined Election: an analysis of the combined Parliamentary and District Council elections in Northern Ireland on 7th June 2001, by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. I had expected some statistical and in depth analysis of the actual election results – the Westminster and local government elections were held simultaneously that year, with two different electoral systems, Westminster using the primitive first-past-the-post system and the Northern Irish local councils elected by Single Transferable Vote.

In fact the book is not an analysis of the election results, but of a survey carried out among the general public, polling staff and polling station presiding officers, basically asking what went right, what went wrong and how things could be done better in future. The conclusions are that there are things that could be done better and things that don’t need to be changed. I have to say it was not as exciting as I had hoped! It’s well out of print, so you can’t get it unless you look very hard.

This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2018 on my shelves. Next on that pile is How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush.

The 2024 Westminster election in Northern Ireland

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Scores on the doors

SF 210,891 (27.0%, +4.2%) 7 seats
DUP 172,058 (22.1%, -8.5%) 5 seats (-3)
Alliance 117,191 (15.0%, -1.8%) 1 seat
UUP 94,779 (12.2%, +0.5%) 1 seat
SDLP 86,861 (11.1%, -3.8%) 2 seats
TUV 48,685 (8.2%) 1 seat
Ind U 20,913 (2.7%) 1 seat
Green 8,692 (1.1%, +0.9%)
PBP 8,438 (1.1%, -0.1%)
Aontu 7,466 (1.0%, -0.2%)
CCLA 624 (0.1%)
Cons 553 (0.1%, -0.6%)
Inds 2,789 (0.4%)

This was a very good election for Sinn Fein, if without the breakthrough successes of previous years. They were comfortably the largest party, held all their seats with increased votes, and came close to pulling off an upset in East Londonderry.

This was a terrible election for the DUP, coming after the accusations against former leader Jeffrey Donaldson, but also after a confused approach to post-Brexit governance. They lost seats to Alliance, the UUP and the TUV.

This was not as good an election for Alliance as some had expected. They picked up Lagan Valley from the DUP, but lost North Down to independent Unionist Alex Easton, and also failed to make headway in East Belfast. Their vote share was slightly down.

This was a reassuring election for the UUP. Their vote share increased slightly but most importantly they regained South Antrim. There is a big difference between having no MPs, and having even just one.

This was not as good as it looks for the SDLP. They held their two seats with reduced majorities, but fell back badly elsewhere.

This was a good election for the TUV, who claimed the scalp of Ian Paisley in North Antrim. Their vote was solid in most constituencies, though usually not quite at the level to challenge for an Assembly seat.

This was a good election for Alex Easton, who having topped the poll in North Down at the last five Assembly elections now gets to represent the constituency at Westminster.

This was not much good for any of the others.

I list the seats below in order of marginality, and it’s extraordinary that East Londonderry is at the top of that list.

East Londonderry

Gregory Campbell (DUP) 11,506 (27.9%, -12.2%)
Kathleen McGurk (SF) 11,327 (27.4%, +12.0%)
Cara Hunter (SDLP) 5,260 (12.7%, -3.7%)
Allister Kyle (TUV) 4,363 (10.6%)
Richard Stewart (Alliance) 3,734 (9.1%, -5.5%)
Glen Miller (UUP) 3,412 (8.3%, -0.9%)
Gemma Brolly (Aontú) 1,043 (2.5%)
Jen McCahon (Green) 445 (1.1%)
Claire Scull (Con) 187 (0.5%)

DUP majority 179

Electorate 75,707; total vote 41,430 (54.7%); valid vote 41,277; invalid 153 (0.3%)

An unexpected squeaker for the DUP, who held their seat by 179 votes, the tightest majority in Northern Ireland. 

If cast in a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would get the DUP two seats and probably SF two and the SDLP one, though there might be a third Unionist seat in there somewhere.

North Antrim

Jim Allister (TUV) 11,642 (28.3%)
Ian Paisley (DUP) 11,192 (27.2%, -23.7%)
Philip McGuigan (SF) 7,714 (18.7%, +7.4%)
Sian Mulholland (Alliance) 4,488 (10.9%, -3.4%)
Jackson Minford (UUP) 3,901 (9.5%, -7.5%)
Helen Maher (SDLP) 1,661 (4.0%, -1.9%)
Ráichéal Mhic Niocaill (Aontú) 451 (1.1%)
Tristan Morrow (Ind) 136 (0.3%)

Electorate 74,697; total vote 41,361 (55.4%); valid vote 41,185; invalid 176 (0.4%)

In a five-seat STV election, these votes would deliver a seat each to the TUV, DUP, Sinn Fein and probably Alliance, with the last seat likely to go to whichever of the TUV and DUP managed their voters more effectively.

East Antrim

Sammy Wilson (DUP) 11,462 (28.9%, -13.0%)
Danny Donnelly (Alliance) 10,156 (25.6%, -0.4%)
John Stewart (UUP) 9,476 (23.9%, +7.3%)
Matthew Warwick (TUV) 4,135 (10.4%)
Oliver McMullan (SF) 2,986 (7.5%, -0.2%)
Margaret McKillop (SDLP) 892 (2.3%, -1.3%)
Mark Bailey (Green) 568 (1.4%, -0.3%)

Electorate 72,917; total vote 42,890 (58.8%); valid vote 42,706; invalid 184 (0.4%)

A narrow squeak for the DUP, one of several in previously safe seats. The top three candidates were within 2,000 votes of each other.

In a five seat STV election, these votes would probably give the DUP and Alliance two seats each, and the UUP one, which was in fact the result of the 2022 Assembly election.

East Belfast

Gavin Robinson (DUP) 19,894 (46.6%, -1.3%)
Naomi Long (Alliance) 17,218 (40.3%, -1.8%)
John Ross (TUV) 1,918 (4.5%)
Ryan Warren (UUP) 1,818 (4.3%, -1.5%)
Brian Smyth (Green) 1,077 (2.5%)
Séamas de Faoite (SDLP) 619 (1.5%, -2.8%)
Ryan North (Ind) 162 (0.4%)

Electorate: 72,917; total vote 42,890 (58.8%); valid vote 42,706; invalid 184 (0.4%)

After much speculation, in the end the result was similar to 2019 with both leading candidates slipping a bit.

In a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would give the DUP three seats and Alliance two.

Lagan Valley

Sorcha-Lucy Eastwood (Alliance) 18,618 (37.9%, +10.9%)
Jonathan Buckley (DUP) 15,659 (31.9% -11.5%)
Robbie Butler (UUP) 11,157 (22.7%, +4.2%)
Lorna Smyth (TUV) 2,186 (4.5%)
Simon Lee (SDLP) 1,028 (2.1%, -2%)
Patricia Denvir (Green) 433 (0.9%)

Total vote 49,243 (59.9%); total valid vote 49,081; invalid 162 (0.3%)

An exceptional result for the Alliance Party, in the wake of Jeffrey Donaldson and his wife facing criminal charges of historical sex abuse. In a five-seat STV election, these votes would give Alliance and the DUP two seats each, and the UUP one.

Foyle

Colum Eastwood (SDLP) 15,647 (40.8%, -17.5%)
Sandra Duffy (SF) 11,481 (29.9%, +8.8%)
Gary Middleton (DUP) 3,915 (10.2%, +1.5%)
Shaun Harkin (PBP) 2,444 (6.4%)
Anne McCloskey (Ind) 1,519 (4.0%)
Janice Montgomery (UUP) 1,422 (3.7%, +1.7%)
Rachael Ferguson (Alliance) 1,268 (3.3%, +0.6%)
John Boyle (Aontú) 662 (1.7%)

Electorate: 73,496; total vote 38,765 (52.7%); valid vote 38,358; invalid 407 (1%)

The SDLP slipped back significantly from their impressive 2019 result, but are still safe. Incidentally this had the highest proportion of spoiled votes in Northern Ireland.

If cast in an Assembly election, these votes would probably get the SDLP and SF two seats each, and the DUP one, which was also the result of the 2022 Assembly election.

Fermanagh and South Tyrone

Pat Cullen (SF) 24,844 (48.6%, +6.1%)
Diana Armstrong (UUP) 20,273 (39.7%, -1.9%)
Eddie Roofe (Alliance) 2,420 (4.7%, -0.6%)
Paul Blake (SDLP) 2,386 (4.7%, -2.5%)
Gerry Cullen (CCLA) 624 (1.2%)
Carl Duffy (Aontú) 529 (1.0%)

Electorate 77,828; total vote 51,340 (66.0%), valid vote 51,076; invalid 264 (0.5%)

Much excited chatter on election night suggested that SF might be in trouble, but in the end (as with all of their seats) they consolidated their position.

If cast in a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would give SF three seats and the UUP two.

Strangford

Jim Shannon (DUP) 15,559 (40.0%, -0.5%)
Michelle Guy (Alliance) 10,428 (26.8%, +0.6%)
Richard Smart (UUP) 3,941 (10.1%, +0.9%)
Ron McDowell (TUV) 3,143 (8.1%)
Noel Sands (SF) 2,793 (7.2%, -0.4%)
Will Polland (SDLP) 1,783 (4.6%, -5.5%)
Alexandra Braidner (Green) 703 (1.8%)
Garreth Falls (Ind) 256 (0.7%)
Gareth Burns (Ind) 157 (0.4%)
Barry Hetherington (Con) 146 (0.4%, -3%)

Electorate 74,525; total vote 39,046 (52.4%); valid vote 38,909; invalid 137 (0.4%)

Early excited reports on election night were that the DUP might be in trouble here, but in fact the vote shares for the leading parties barely changed. But contra my expectations, it was the Unionist vote overall that increased here rather than the Nationalists.

In a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would give the DUP and Alliance two seats each, and the UUP one, which was also the result of the 2022 Assembly election.

North Belfast

John Finucane (SF) 17,674 (43.7%, -4.4%)
Phillip Brett (DUP) 12,062 (29.8%, -10.5%)
Nuala McAllister (Alliance) 4,274 (10.6%, nc)
David Clarke (TUV) 2,877 (7.1%)
Carl Whyte (SDLP) 1,413 (3.5%)
Mal O’Hara (Green) 1,206 (3.0%)
Fiona Ferguson (PBP) 946 (2.3%)

With more candidates in the mix, both of the leading parties lost vote share, but the DUP lost more.

In a five-seat Assembly election, this would give SF and the DUP two seats each and Alliance one, which was in fact the result of the 2022 Assembly election.

North Down

Alex Easton (Ind U) 20,913 (48.3%)
Stephen Farry (Alliance) 13,608 (31.4%, -13.4%)
Tim Collins (UUP) 6,754 (15.6%, +3.7%)
Barry McKee (Green) 1,247 (2.9%)
Déirdre Vaughan (SDLP) 657 (1.5%)
Chris Carter (Ind) 117 (0.3%)

Electorate: 73,885; total vote 43,464 (58.8%); valid vote 43,296; invalid 168 (0.4%)

Impressive performance by Alex Easton, who had topped the last five Assembly polls here, but this time running as an independent; he clearly took votes from Alliance as well as from other Unionists.

If these votes were cast in a five-seat Assembly election (which they wouldn’t be), Easton would win three of them and Alliance two.

Upper Bann

Carla Lockhart (DUP) 21,642 (45.7%, +4.9%)
Catherine Nelson (SF) 14,236 (30.1%, +5.4%)
Eoin Tennyson (Alliance) 6,322 (13.4%, +0.7%)
Kate Evans (UUP) 3,662 (7.7%, -4.7%)
Malachy Quinn (SDLP) 1,496 (3.2%, -6.2%)

47,595 total votes (58.6%), 47,358 valid, 237 invalid (0.5%)

Consolidation for the top two candidates doing a tactical squeeze on those lower down.

In a five-seat STV election, the DUP and SF should both win two, and Alliance one.

South Antrim

Robin Swann (UUP) 16,311 (38.0%, +9.0%)
Paul Girvan (DUP) 8,799 (20.5%, -15.7%)
Declan Kearney (SF) 8,034 (18.7%, +7.3%)
John Blair (Alliance) 4,574 (10.7%, -7.7%)
Mel Lucas (TUV) 2,693 (6.3%)
Roisin Lynch (SDLP) 1,589 (3.7%, -1.2%)
Lesley Veronica (Green) 541 (1.3%)
Siobhán McErlean (Aontú) 367 (0.9%)

Electorate 77,058; total vote 43,089 (55.9%); valid vote 42,908; invalid 181 (0.4%)

An impressive victory for the UUP, one of several seats where the DUP suffered unexpected reverses.

If cast in a five-seat Assembly election, the UUP would win two seats and the DUP, SF and Alliance one each.

South Down

Chris Hazzard (SF) 19,698 (43.5%, +12.7%)
Colin McGrath (SDLP) 10,418 (23.0%, -4.2%)
Diane Forsythe (DUP) 7,349 (16.2%, -1.9%)
Andrew McMurray (Alliance) 3,187 (7.0%, -6.8%)
Jim Wells (TUV) 1,893 (4.2%)
Michael O’Loan (UUP) 1,411 (3.1%, -4.6%)
Rosemary McGlone (Aontú) 797 (1.8%)
Declan Walsh (Green) 444 (1.0%)
Hannah Westropp (Con) 46 (0.1%)

Electorate 76,248; total vote 45,472 (59.6%); valid votes 45,243; invalid 229 (0.5%)

Some SDLP optimists thought that they had a chance here, but in fact SF increased their majority, as in all of the seats that they held.

In a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would probably get SF three seats and the SDLP and DUP one each.

South Belfast

Claire Hanna (SDLP) 21,345 (49.1%, -4.2%)
Kate Nicholl (Alliance) 8,839 (20.3%, +4.9%)
Tracy Kelly (DUP) 6,859 (15.8%, -9.6%)
Michael Henderson (UUP) 2,653 (6.1%, +2.5%)
Dan Boucher (TUV) 2,218 (5.1%)
Áine Groogan (Green) 1,577 (3.6%, +3.5%)

Electorate 74,749; turnout 43,757 (58.5%); valid votes 43,491; invalid 266 (0.6%)

SDLP vote down slightly but still a solid result.

In a five-seat Assembly election, this would give the SDLP three seats, and Alliance and the DUP one each.

Mid Ulster

Cathal Mallaghan (SF) 24,085 (53.0%, +7.3%)
Keith Buchanan (DUP) 9,162 (20.2%, -3.6%)
Denise Johnston (SDLP) 3,722 (8.2%, -5.7%)
Glenn Moore (TUV) 2,978 (6.6%)
Jay Basra (UUP) 2,269 (5.0%, -2.5%)
Padraic Farrell (Alliance) 2,001 (4.4%, -3.2%)
Alixandra Halliday (Aontú) 1,047 (2.3%)
John Kelly (Ind) 181 (0.4%)

Electorate 74,000; turnout 45,691 (61.7%)    45,445    246

Consolidation from SF (which was the story of the night in their seats generally).

In a five-seat Assembly election these votes would give SF three seats, the DUP one and probably the TUV one – Unionists are closer to a second quota than Nationalists.

Newry and Armagh

Dáire Hughes (SF) 22,299 (48.5%, +7.5%)
Pete Byrne (SDLP) 6,806 (14.8%, -4.6%)
Gareth Wilson (DUP) 5,900 (12.8%, -7.4%)
Keith Ratcliffe (TUV) 4,099 (8.9%)
Sam Nicholson (UUP) 3,175 (6.9%, -0.8%)
Helena Young (Alliance) 2,692 (5.9%, -2.5%)
Liam Reichenberg (Aontú) 888 (1.9%)
Samantha Rayner (Con) 83 (0.2%)

Electorate 78,244; total vote 46,236 (59.1%); valid vote 45,942; invalid 294 (0.6%)

A strong defence by SF, as in all of the seats that they held.

If cast in a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would give SF three seats and the SDLP and DUP one each; which was also the result of the 2022 Assembly election.

West Tyrone

Orfhlaith Begley (SF) 22,711 (52.0%, +11.9%)
Tom Buchanan (DUP) 6,794 (15.6%, -6.2%)
Daniel McCrossan (SDLP) 5,821 (13.3%, -5.1%)
Matthew Bell (UUP) 2,683  (6.1%, -0.4%)
Stevan Patterson (TUV) 2,530 (5.8%)
Stephen Donnelly (Alliance) 2,287 (5.2%, -4.3%)
Leza Houston (Aontú) 778 (1.8%)
Stephen Lynch (Con) 91 (0.2%)

Electorate 74,269; total vote 43,935 (59.2%); valid vote 43,695; invalid 240 (0.5%)

As usual in this election, a consolidation for SF in a strong area for them.

In a five-seat election, these votes would get SF three seats and the SDLP and DUP one each, which was also the result of the 2022 election.

West Belfast

Paul Maskey (SF) 21,009 (52.9%, +4.4%)
Gerry Carroll (PBP) 5,048 (12.7%, -1.4%)
Paul Doherty (SDLP) 4,318 (10.9%, +3.4%)
Frank McCoubrey (DUP) 4,304 (10.8%, -7.3%)
Ann McClure (TUV) 2,010 (5.1%)
Eoin Millar (Alliance) 1,077 (2.7%, -4.4%)
Gerard Herdman (Aontú) 904 (2.3%)
Ben Sharkey (UUP) 461 (1.2%, +0.3%)
Ash Jones (Green) 451 (1.1%)
Tony Mallon (Ind) 161 (0.4%)

Electorate 75,346; total vote 40,003 (53.1%); valid vote 39,743; invalid 260 (0.6%)

As with all of SF’s constituencies, a consolidation of an already strong position.

In a five-seat Assembly election, these votes would probably give SF three and PBP and the DUP one each.

Northern Ireland: The Forgotten Election

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As pundits speculate wildly about the scale of the coming Labour landslide and Conservative collapse in England, Scotland and Wales next Thursday, let’s remember that 18 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons are elected by voters in Northern Ireland.

This became briefly important in 2017, when the Democratic Unionist Party’s MPs propped up Theresa May’s government for the two agonising years before its collapse. There were also utterly rumours that Sinn Féin might take its seats in order to thwart or ameliorate Brexit. (This was never going to happen.)

In the 2019 election, the DUP got the most votes, but slipped back badly and lost two seats, finishing with eight MPs. This was one more than Sinn Féin, whose vote also slipped but who compensated one lost seat with a gain from the DUP. The SDLP, previously the dominant Nationalist party, came back from a wipeout in 2017 by regaining two seats from both the DUP and Sinn Fein. And the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland won the seat left vacant by a veteran independent Unionist.

Five years on, in 2024, the DUP face further losses, with half of their seats potentially at risk from other parties. Sinn Féin’s seven look safer, though a couple are wobbly. So do the SDLP’s two. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland could end up with anything from zero to three seats (some optimists even see a fourth potential gain). The Ulster Unionist Party, which ran Northern Ireland as a one-party state from 1921 to 1972, but has been locked out of Westminster for the last few years, see two potential gains. And there is an independent Unionist in the running as well. Unionism as a whole could win anything between six and ten seats of the eighteen. 

Nine of the eighteen seats can be regarded as pretty safe for the incumbent parties. East Antrim, North Antrim, East Londonderry and Upper Bann are solidly DUP these days, and West Belfast, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh and West Tyrone are even more solidly strongholds of Sinn Féin. Foyle was lost by the SDLP in particular circumstances in 2017, but regained with a massive majority in 2019, and can be safely tallied in their column again.

Three, or possibly four, of the DUP’s eight seats are vulnerable. South Antrim sees a strong challenge from the Ulster Unionist Party. In two other seats, the DUP faces fierce opposition from the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. The exit from politics of the DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, after he was arrested on historic sex crime charges, has left his Lagan Valley seat more open than it has been since its creation in 1987; and his successor as party leader, Gavin Robinson, faces a tough challenge from Alliance’s leader, Naomi Long, in East Belfast – a rather rare case where the leaders of two significant political parties are candidates in the same constituency. Alliance optimists add neighbouring Strangford to the list of potential gains, but it is a longer shot.

Three of Sinn Féin’s seven seats are at risk on paper, though my gut feeling is that they will keep all three. In 2019 North Belfast was gained from the DUP after 130 years of Unionist dominance, and while in theory the margin is not irreversible, in practice the DUP will be putting their resources into defending East Belfast. Fermanagh and South Tyrone, normally a knife-edge seat, was regained by SF from the UUP in 2019, but I hear grumblings from local Unionists that they are further behind this time. And some SDLP optimists see grounds for hope in South Down, which SF have held since 2010; again, it is a long shot.

I noted Foyle as safe for the SDLP above; their other seat, South Belfast and Mid Down (formerly just South Belfast), is probably also pretty safe, given that SF are not standing against them and the incumbent MP, Claire Hanna has positioned herself well. (Her father was my landlord when I moved back to Belfast in 1992; it’s a small world.) The weird thing about South Belfast is that the Alliance Party got more votes than anyone else in two of the last three elections, including the SDLP. But South Belfast voters are volatile.

The most fascinating seat, and the least typical, is the Alliance Party’s current patch of yellow on the map, North Down. Here, Stephen Farry, Alliance’s deputy leader, faces a challenge from local independent Unionist Alex Easton, who has the support of the DUP despite having parted company with them acrimoniously in 2021, and also from the colourful retired British army officer Tim Collins, selected as the UUP’s candidate. To do justice to this very odd campaign would take more space than is reasonable, so I’ll leave it there.

One last point to make is that the Boundary Commission’s changes to the Northern Ireland seats were pretty minimal. They were also difficult to calculate because of the lack of co-terminosity between the different electoral units involved. I myself supplied the projections of the 2019 results onto the 2024 boundaries in Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher’s Guide to the New Parliamentary Constituencies. On the Northern Ireland politics blog Slugger O’Toole, Michael Hehir has been providing his own projections, which I am glad to say differ little from mine. We come to the same conclusion: that in this election, it will be voters, not boundary changes, that determine the results.

Flying from Malone: Belfast’s First Civil Aerodrome, by Guy Warner

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Second paragraph of third section:

This had been the case in June 1921, when Alan Cobham had arrived initially “in a field near Balmoral where an aeroplane had once landed”, off-loaded a quantity of The Times and had then flown to join the other three aircraft at Aldergrove for re-fuelling. Noel Smith was taken to inspect a possible landing ground at Balmoral and had commented that the ground had seemed a bit soft, especially for heavy aeroplanes. He added that the maximum dimensions of an airfield need be no more than 800 yards square and that pilots overflying the city had been instructed by the Air ministry to keep their eyes open for likely sites.

This is a very short book on the brief moment in 1922-23 when Belfast had the first municipal airfield in the UK, on the land that is now the Taughmonagh housing estate at the top of the Malone Road. (Oddly enough, I attended Taughmonagh school for a couple of years when I was very little.) The money to make it operational was invested by the city council (then known as the Corporation) and there were regular flights to Liverpool and then to Glasgow.

It was opened with much fanfare, the Lord Mayor of Belfast making the inaugural flight to Liverpool and back. But this was not the easy “hop into the air, point in the right direction, land safely” routine that we’re used to now. This map gives a sense of how pilots had to navigate by landmarks, which meant of course that they needed to stay below cloud level.

The idea was to cut the Belfast to Liverpool journey to an hour and a half from the all-day or overnight boat journey, shipping mail, newspapers and the occasional brave person to England and then to Scotland. But the market was not strong, and facilities at the Liverpool end notably poor – although the planes took off from Aintree racecourse, they then had to land again at Southport beach for mail and newspapers.

The Malone airfield lasted for just a year. The Taughmonagh ground was soggy and muddy, and the weather was terrible. There were no catastrophic accidents, but the small planes of the day got tossed around by the wind when they landed. Warner does not put it in these terms, but I suspect the pilots hated it and didn’t want to fly there. The Aldergrove airfield, now Belfast International Airport, was much better, and there were already plans to create reclaimed land on the shore of Belfast Lough for the site where what is now Belfast City Airport (aka George Best) was eventually built in the 1930s.

Again, Warner doesn’t put it in these terms, but this was obviously a prestige project set up by the municipal government and in particular by the new Lord Mayor, William Turner, immediately after Partition and the creation of the Irish Free State, to tie Belfast and Northern Ireland more tightly to the UK and to escape Dublin. For most of the twelve months that the airfield operated, the Civil War was raging on the other side of the Border. Turner got a knighthood out of it in 1924.

This is a nice wee book, lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs and newspaper clippings, and not too difficult to get second hand, especially from sellers who have signed up for EU VAT…

The cemetery of the Protestant Cathedral at Belfast – Chesterton’s ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’

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You can read ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’, with the original 1911 illustrations, here.

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR A DETECTIVE STORY PUBLISHED IN 1911

I have been a fan of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories since I was a child, but one point in ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’, a short story first published in 1911, has niggled at me for almost half a century. I was reminded of this last month when I was staying in a hotel on one side of St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, and giving two lectures at the new Ulster University campus on the other side of it, so that I walked past it four times in the space of a few hours. The passage in question comes just after the halfway point in the story when Father Brown reveals to Flambeau, his French ex-criminal friend, the current location of the broken-off part of the titular weapon.

  “I cannot prove it, even after hunting through the tombs. But I am sure of it. Let me add just one more tiny fact that tops the whole thing over. The colonel, by a strange chance, was one of the first struck by a bullet. He was struck long before the troops came to close quarters. But he saw St. Clare’s sword broken. Why was it broken? How was it broken? My friend, it was broken before the battle.”
“Oh!” said his friend with a sort of forlorn jocularity. “And pray where is the other piece?”
“I can tell you,” said the priest promptly. “In the cemetery of the Protestant Cathedral at Belfast.”
“Indeed?” inquired the other. “Did you look for it?”
“I couldn’t,” said the priest with regret. “There’s a great marble monument on top of it; a monument to the heroic Major Murray who fell fighting gloriously at the battle of the Black River.”

The reason this passage has always niggled at me is very simple. There is no cemetery at St Anne’s Cathedral, the Protestant (ie Church of Ireland) Cathedral in Belfast. In fact, only one person is buried on the cathedral’s premises at all: Edward Carson, the Unionist leader and founder of Northern Ireland. In 1911, when the story was published, he was alive and sinnin’ (he lived to 1935). St Anne’s Cathedral was devoid of tombs, inside and out, at the time when Chesterton was writing.

This is very unusual for cathedrals in Britain or Ireland, either Protestant or Catholic. Most Church of Ireland cathedrals are in ancient ecclesiastical centres which have seen better days. I did a quick check and all of the other Protestant cathedrals in Northern Ireland do have graveyards. Many big cathedrals also have many interments inside the building – St Paul’s in London has Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington; St Patrick’s in Dublin has Jonathan Swift. St Anne’s, as noted, has just the one.

But St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast is very new as cathedrals go. It serves two dioceses, Connor (which is roughly equivalent to County Antrim) and Down (which is not equivalent to County Down), each of which also has a cathedral of its own (in Lisburn and Downpatrick respectively). The foundation stone for St Anne’s was laid in 1899 and the cathedral was consecrated in 1904; this is long after the fictional battle of the Black River, which we are told was at least twenty years before 1911. It is located in a city centre site with commercial and residential buildings pressing around it. The south transept was not completed until 1974 and the north transept was not completed until 1981, when I was already a teenager.

St Anne’s Cathedral in the early 20th century. The block immediately north was cleared for the Art College in the 1960s, and the area to the southwest for Writer’s Square more recently.

Chesterton’s Major Murray, if buried in Belfast, would have been interred at the Clifton Street Cemetery if his family had a concession there, or up the Falls Road in the Belfast City Cemetery if not. Though thinking about it, it would be really unusual for even a very senior officer who had been killed in action abroad at that period to be brought back home. Looking at the 1899-1902 Boer War, the two British generals who lost their lives in the conflict, Penn Symons and Andrew Wauchope, are both still buried in South Africa.

We are told that Murray was a Protestant, which is unusual but not impossible. In the 1901 census, according to Barry Griffin’s data, although 88.65% of people in Ireland with the surname Murray were Catholics (including my own great-grandfather and his family), 5.24% were Anglicans (as the fictional Murray must have been to be buried in the fictional cathedral graveyard), concentrated especially around the shores of Lough Neagh with outposts that seem to be around what is now Newtownbreda and also Carrickfergus.

G.K. Chesterton had never been to any part of Ireland in 1911; he wrote a book called Irish Impressions after his first visit in 1918. (You can read it here.) He was instinctively sympathetic to Home Rule and unsympathetic to colonial wars such as the Boer War, which is clearly the basis for the fictional Brazilian war in the story – the popularity of Chesterton’s Brazilian leader Olivier with the British, years after the war had ended, must be a reference to the shift in the British attitude to the South African leader Jan Smuts at the same time.

I don’t really blame Chesterton for getting Belfast’s ecclesiastical geography wrong. The fictional British invasion of Brazil is a much bigger invention than a graveyard in Belfast. (There was historically a dispute between Brazil and the UK about the border with what was then British Guyana, but there does not seem to have been any armed conflict and the issue was resolved by Italian arbitration in 1904.) Anyway, neither the graveyard nor the war is what the story is really about.

SPOILER FOR A STORY PUBLISHED IN 1911

In Chesterton’s story, the bodies of both General Sir Arthur St. Clare and the Ulsterman Major Murray were retrieved after the battle of Black River – Murray found on the field, and St. Clare hanged from a tree. But the punchline is that St. Clare was a traitor, he killed Murray (who had found out his secret) with his own sword which broke in the process, and attacked the Brazilians, despite it being certain that he would lose with many casualties, so that Murray’s body would be unnoticed in the carnage. He was then strung up by his own men after the battle when they realised what he had done. The secret was kept by the British soldiers, who allowed it to be assumed that St. Clare was lynched by the Brazilians, and the fallen general was honoured as a tragic hero.

The narrative thrust of the story is that Father Brown works out what really happened from scraps of information and his knowledge of human nature. But the point of the story is that we should be wary of spoonfed narratives by the authorities about war heroes, or indeed about anything at all. One wonders if Chesterton had any particular person in mind – Baden-Powell? But he lived. Gordon? But his body was never recovered. In any case, the point is well made.

In the 2015 TV adaptation starring Mark Williams as Father Brown, the main action takes place in the 1950s with flashbacks to Dunkirk. The tableau is shrunk from national delusion to internal (and deadly) barracks politics. It’s nicely done, but it’s longer and less interesting than the original story.

Two very different books about Belfast

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Belfast: Approach to Crisis, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary
Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane

I got hold of these two books in preparation for the lecture I gave in Belfast last month about the electoral history of the city, which you can watch here:

These are two very different books from very different times. The second paragraph of the third chapter of Belfast: Approach to Crisis is:

The cause of this increasing prosperity, the greatest that any Irish city has known, was twofold. First, the expansion of the linen industry which became fully mechanised between 1852 and 1862 with the rapid acceptance of the power loom.3 With the coming of the American Civil War Lancashire mills were starved of raw cotton and the Belfast mills soon found a new market for their high quality finished goods.4 The linen trade continued to expand until the 1870s,5 but while the labour force trebled between 1850 and 1875 (from 16,000 to 50,000), the proportion represented by adult male workers never exceeded one third.
3‘In 1852 there was only one power loom in Belfast. Ten years later there were 6,000.’ (Jones in Belfast, p. 109)
4The number of new buildings constructed annually between 1861 and 1864 ranged from 730 to 1,400 – thereby increasing the total valuation by about 20 per cent. (B.N.L., 2 January 1865.)
5The number of flax spindles in Ireland increased from 300,000 in 1850 to nearly 600,000 in 1860, and nearly one million by the end of the 1870s. This peak figure was never equalled – too much machinery had been installed for normal output, cf W. E. Coe, The Engineering Industry of the North of Ireland, pp. 60-61. In 1870 80 per cent of spindles and 70 per cent of power looms in the whole of Ireland were to be found in Belfast and its environs. D. L. Armstrong, ‘Social and Economic Conditions in the Belfast Linen Industry, 1850-1900’, Irish Historical Studies VII (September 1951), 238.

I don’t know Ian Budge (who is now 87) but I did know Cornelius O’Leary, an eccentric colleague of my father’s at the Queen’s University of Belfast, and this book represents good political analysis combined with very poor timing. It has two parts. The first half, more or less, is a survey of the political history of Belfast, paying special attention to the city council (known as the Corporation for most of the period), from the earliest days to the 1960s, when the book was written. I got a lot out of this (and plundered it extensively for my lecture last month).

Until 1832, Belfast was a pocket borough of the Chichester family, but the Great Reform Act opened up its politics to the mainly Presbyterian merchant classes. The first successful political organiser was a John Bates, who managed to combine the roles of main organiser for the Conservative Party (which won all the elections) with that of Town Clerk once the municipal council was reformed in the 1840s. He fell spectacularly from power in 1855 when he was exposed for diverting public funds by a public inquiry. I’d love to see some more about his story.

The book goes in detail through the next 110 years of political history, including a couple more times when the Corporation was suspended and the city was run by administrators. And the second half of the book gives the outputs of an exhaustive political survey of Belfast, including most of the councillors, and many of their supporters and voters in general, along with some comparative research on the attitudes of councillors in Glasgow. The data set is very rich.

The problem is that the research was largely carried out in 1966, and the city collapsed into chaos over the next couple of years, so that when the book first came out in 1973, it was a deep analysis of a political system that had already ceased to exist. The Belfast of 1973 was very different from the Belfast of 1966. The authors do look in depth into the questions of naming the new bridge and the Sunday swings issue, but compared with what happened over the next few years it all looks rather silly. (In fairness, a lot of people thought the swings issue looked rather silly in 1966.)

Really a book only for the most dedicated of Norn Iron politics nerds (and I am proud to count myself among that number). You can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Belfast: The Story of a City and its People is:

Some years ago a friend of the family who stayed with us for a few days proceeded to tell me all about the cranes as soon as they arrived and saw the painting. ‘Hey, nice painting!’ they exclaimed, breezing into the living room. ‘That’s David and Goliath in Belfast, you know.’ ‘No, it’s actually Samson and Goliath,’ I responded – politely but firmly. ‘No, I’m sure it’s David and Goliath,’ they ploughed on. ‘You should check it out.’ I walked out of the room, my face burning with indignation, muttering through clenched teeth not entirely sotto voce: ‘Well I lived under them for nearly two decades so I think I should know what they’re called!’ My partner, her laugh stifled by the fear of a meltdown at the beginning of a social visit, rapidly changed the subject to a less divisive one as I harrumphed upstairs. ‘So let’s talk about Brexit then…’ she said.

This on the other hand is a much more accessible book, rooted in Cochrane’s personal story of having grown up as a Catholic in a mixed but traditionally Protestant area of the city (as I did), reflecting on the early history of the city, where he is keen on the radical political tradition of the McCrackens, the Assembly Rooms (now dilapidated) and the Linen Hall Library (of which I was a Governor back in the mid-1990s), and also looking at culture – music, theatre, poetry, and other parts of the arts. I found the first part more engaging, the second feeling a bit too structured, but the information is all good, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about how it feels to be in or from Belfast. You can get it here.

If I can be excused a second video, this is the percussion section of the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra performing Scheherazade in 1985. I am the third percussionist in view, holding the tambourine. The CBYO is still going strong.

Male strippers, and the boundaries between South and West Belfast

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I got an interesting call from the Belfast Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. Northern Ireland’s major news last month was that a male stripper group had entertained customers at a Belfast pub by, you’ll never guess this, taking all their clothes off. Many people who felt that their opinions needed to be known took to the airwaves and the newspaper columns to express their views.

Personally I don’t have a problem with sex work, provided that basic lines of consent are protected for both providers and potential customers; it was completely decriminalised here in Belgium during the pandemic, and the country has failed to collapse into moral turpitude. (Or at least, I haven’t noticed if it did.) But the Belfast Telegraph did not seek my advice on that point.

Instead the question was about the location of the incident, the Devenish pub on Finaghy Road North: is it in West Belfast or South Belfast? Denizens of both South and West respectively insisted that the scenes of such depravity were not happening in their part of the city but on the other side of an invisible boundary. As I said to the reporter, “I can see how both South and West Belfast have rather different branding, and also the incident at the Devenish may not fit either branding particularly well.”

To go into the history of it. I grew up around the corner from the Devenish, but I don’t remember it being there when I was a child, and the Ordnance Survey map from around the time I was born marks the site as a “Nursery” – probably for trees rather than children. On the PRONI site you can track the history of the area back before the M1 motorway and even before the raileay.

Today’s Ordnance Survey map of the area north of Finaghy crossroads
Probably from the 1970s, before the Devenish was built; the site is marked as a nursery
Before the motorway was built, and before most of the development north of the railway – the Ardmore estate was built in 1947
Before the railway was built; though the line of today’s Ardmore Avenue is already visible as the lane around Finaghy Cottage

Finaghy Cottage, the house to which the future Ardmore Avenue led, belonged for many years to the confused poet Herbert George Pim, whose bizarre career I cannot possibly do justice to in the space I have here; let’s just say that it’s strangely appropriate that a scandal involving male strippers should break out less than five minutes’ walk from his former home. Edited to add: Disappointingly it seems that Pim’s “Finaghy Cottage” was on the Drumbeg Road near Dunmurry, not all that close to Finaghy in fact.

Anyway, the question is, what part of Belfast was the future site of the Devenish located in? The first part of the answer is that it wasn’t in Belfast at all until quite late in the day.

Map from Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study of Belfast Politics 1613–1970, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary (1973)

In this map from a history of Belfast civic politics, published in 1973, the future site of the Devenish is under the G in “Great Northern [Railway]” on the left, within the shaded area that Belfast Corporation were trying to annex from County Antrim after the second world war. But the city boundary actually ended farther east, at the King’s Hall to be precise; the showgrounds were just inside the city limits, and Finaghy outside. This was the boundary between the Ballyfinaghy and Malone Upper townlands.

Map from the 1917 Boundary Commission for Ireland’s report.

In parliamentary terms, the nine Belfast constituencies of the 1919 election were drawn by a Boundary Commission for Ireland in 1917. In 1920, using those same boundaries, they were merged to make four new parliamentary seats, returning to the old compass model, North, South, East and West. These were also the seats used for the first two elections to the Northern Ireland House of Commons. The boundary between South and West Belfast was the same as the boundary between the St Anne’s and Cromac seats of 1919, and the western half of the boundary was the railway line. And you can see that Finaghy, at the bottom left corner, is outside the city for parliamentary purposes.

The Belfast South and Belfast West constituencies remained unchanged until the early 1970s, when they were expanded outwards, Belfast South taking in the Rural District of Lisburn electoral divisions of Ardmore, Dunmurry, Finaghy, and Upper Malone, and Belfast West taking in the Rural District of Lisburn electoral divisions of Andersonstown, Ballygammon, and Ladybrook. (These Lisburn areas collectively had formed the short-lived Stormont seat of Larkfield.) We are interested in the Ardmore elecrtoral division, which was defined in 1963 as “That portion of the Townland of ‘Ballyfinaghy lying north of the centre line of the main Belfast/Lisburn Road”.

This map from the townlands database shows the townland boundaries of Ballyfinaghy, and the part north of the Upper Lisburn Road is the Ardmore electoral divison of the late 1960s. Immediately to the north again are the townland end electoral division of Ballygammon, in West Belfast from the early 1970s; but Ardmore (and indeed the whole of the Ballyfinaghy townland) is in South Belfast. So I was wrong when I told the Belfast Telegraph that the railway line had once been the boundary at Finaghy; the site of the Devenish has been in South Belfast since the early 1970s, and before that it was not in Belfast at all. It has never been in West Belfast, contra what I told the Belfast Telegraph. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Since 1983, the constituency boundaries have been based on the reformed local government wards, which defined the motorway as the boundary between Finaghy Ward and Ladybrook Ward in 1972 and since. I was correct on that at least, and it has survived several rounds of revision.

But basically, the disgruntled citizens of South Belfast will have to accept that the Devenish is part of the diversity of their quarter of the city, which is anyway the most multicultural area of Northern Ireland. For what that’s worth.

For previous cartographic nostalgia, see my posts on Moreland’s Meadow and the oldest shop at Finaghy Crossroads.

The Fire Starters, by Jan Carson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Commercial aeroplanes leaving and landing at the City Airport continue to pass overhead. They’re unaware of Sammy and the shape he’s spelling out as he walks. He’s too small to be seen from the sky. He’s a grain of sand, a dot, a pin, a misplaced punctuation mark. Even God would have to squint. However, if he could be seen from such a height, if, for example, you were peering through binoculars or some other magnifying lens, your eye would be drawn to him, dragging his heels from one street to the next, kicking an empty Coke bottle as he goes. You would know that Sammy did not belong on these streets, drifting.

East Belfast, marching season, the present day (2019); two fathers concerned about their children. Ex-Loyalist Sammy suspects that his son is the masked social media influencer behind a wave of arson attacks. Trouble GP Jonathan’s daughter was begotten of a Siren who came and stayed in his bath and then disappeared back into the waves.

Most of the novel is gritty reality, so that you can almost smell the tarmac bubbling in the summer sunlight; but the parts with Jonathan and his daughter edge into magical realism with a particular Belfast idiom, where parents of strangely gifted children navigate both intrusive supernatural forces and the banal bureaucracy of health care and social security.

Often this sort of trope can feel bolted onto a conventional narrative, but Carson makes you feel that Belfast (East Belfast, very specifically) is the sort of traumatised place where reality starts to erode at the edges. It’s well-balanced, in the sense that a cyclist going at top speed over uneven terrain remains well balanced. Anyone expecting a standard urban grim novel will be surprised. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail. The book is either first-person from Jonathans point of view, or tight-third from Sammy’s, and they talk to very few women who in turn don’t talk much to each other, and if they do it’s about Jonathan or Sammy.

The new Northern Ireland constituencies

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Since 2007 I’ve been the Northern Ireland arm of the analysis of UK parliamentary constituency changes by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings. The latest version, taking into account the new boundaries that will take effect from the next election (be it Westminster or Assembly) was published a few weeks ago; it’s been a busy period for me, but I have now taken the time to write up the changes to each of the 18 Northern Ireland seats.

Media coverage coverage of the changes focussed on the effects in England, Scotland and Wales, and frankly that was the right call; the changes in Northern Ireland are the least dramatic since the 1970s. The 1983 review added five new constituencies, taking the total from 12 to 17; the 1996 review added another, making a total of 18; and the 2007 review expanded the Belfast seats outwards with knock-on effects all around the map.

There were also two failed reviews, one in 2013 which fell victim to the internal politics of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, and one in 2018-20 which was quashed by the Belfast courts for failing to adequately consider public opinion at the final stage of revision (and the whole thing was then killed off by Boris Johnson).

So this is the first change to the Westminster constituencies for 17 years, the longest gap since the 1950-70 period. In Northern Ireland the Westminster boundaries are also used for Assembly elections, and indeed in 1973 and 1996, regional level elections used the new boundaries first. Personally I think that the Assembly constituencies should be linked to the Local Government Districts rather than the Westminster seats, but that’s for another day.

Every seat is changed this time, but few of the changes are drastic. In the list below, I’m going from the most changed to the least changes constituency, showing my working for each of them. Notional votes are a bit of a mug’s game, but I’m confident that these numbers correspond closely to whatever the reality might have been if the 2019 general election votes had been cast on the 2024 boundaries.

The maps are all screenshotted from the Guardian’s excellent site, which you should consult.

South Belfast and Mid Down (SBMD)

Going from most to least changed, the biggest effect is on the constituency where I grew up, South Belfast, now renamed to South Belfast and Mid Down. It loses 10% of its electorate to East Belfast, but gains a bit more than that from Strangford and Lagan Valley, and a few scrapings from West Belfast. (By the way, I have an idiosyncracy of calling the Belfast constituencies “X Belfast” rather than “Belfast X”. It seems to me that “South Belfast and Mid Down” sounds better than “Belfast South and Mid Down.)

Projecting the 2019 election onto the new boundaries, I see about 850 more Unionist votes, 550 more for Alliance and 1650 fewer for the SDLP, with another 250 Nationalist votes coming in from West Belfast. Claire Hanna won the seat with a majority of over 15,000 in 2019; this would be reduced by 2,000, but the SDLP still win more than half of the votes in the constituency.

RollDUPUUPConAPNIGrPBPSDLPSFAontu
70134 116781259678627079550
FromTo24.7%2.7%14.3%57.2%1.2%
SBSBMD63029 97861055602825136550
SBEB-7096 -1890-204-758-1939
SBWB-9 -1-3-1
StrSBMD 6078 163437213698173207
LVSBMD 2161 611276313203422
WBSBMD 710 5620673222518
Total71978 1208717031677348736725409247568
25.4%3.6%0.3%15.4%0.2%0.1%53.3%0.5%1.2%
Change+0.7%+0.9%+0.3%+1.1%+0.2%+0.1%-3.9%+0.5%–
DUPUUPConAPNIGrPBPSDLPSFAontu

Sinn Fein did not contest the 2019 Westminster election, but they could take almost half of the SDLP vote and Claire Hanna would still win the seat. She bantered with me on social media about looking forward to the challenge.

https://twitter.com/ClaireHanna/status/1747571230847176753

At Assembly level, Unionists combined were just short of 2 quotas in South Belfast in 2022, and these numbers would put them just about in position to regain the second seat lost in 2017.

Strangford

Neighbouring Strangford loses 6,000 voters, mainly in Saintfield, to the new Belfast South and Mid Down, but gains 9,000 around Downpatrick from South Down.

This results in the biggest shift in party support in any constituency.

RollDUPUUPUKIPConsAPNIGrSDLPSFAontu
66990 1770540233081476106347901994555
FromTo47.2%10.7%0.8%3.9%28.4%2.1%5.3%1.5%0.0%
StrStr60899 160683651308134096517171787555
StrSBMD-6078 -1634-372-136-981-73-207
StrND-10 -3-1-2
StrS-3 -1
SDStr 9171 602680022152462193
Total16128367730813401045171740023017193
40.5%9.2%0.8%3.4%26.2%1.8%10.0%7.6%0.5%
-6.7%-1.5%0.0%-0.6%-2.1%-0.3%+4.7%+6.1%+0.5%
DUPUUPUKIPConsAPNIGrSDLPSFAontu

The DUP majority over Alliance here is reduced from 7,000 to 5,700, and if you squint you could just about see a unified non-Unionist candidate defeating a split opposition at a Westminster election; but it’s not very likely. From the Assembly point of view, the Nationalist vote increases by more than 10% and is now over a quota. At every Assembly election since 1998, the SDLP have been runners-up here; whichever of the Nationalist parties can get ahead of the other now has a good chance of gaining a seat here.

South Down

Staying in the neighbourhood, the calculations for South Down were much the most complex. It swaps bits of territory with three of its neighbours, most notably donating the voters around Downpatrick to Strangford, and also makes a gain from Upper Bann (my ancient homeland of Loughbrickland).

Although the shifts are geographically complex, the electoral impact is muted.

RollDUPUUPConsAllianceSDLPSFAontu
79295 76193307691614517161371266
FromTo15.3%6.6%0.0%13.9%29.2%32.4%2.5%
SDSD6864674173219598712032133741049
SDStr-9171-60-26-800-2215-2462-193
SDN&A-1458-140-61-127-267-297-23
SDLV-20-2-1-2-4–4
UBSD 1960 57417415283221
N&ASD 1058 143555512326421
LVSD 105 271211822
StrSD 3 1
Total 71,772 816234601621212240138611070
18.1%7.7%–13.8%27.2%30.8%2.4%
+2.8%+1.0%–-0.1%-2.0%-1.6%-0.2%
DUPUUPConsAPNISDLPSFAontu

SF won this seat with a 1300 majority in 2019, and I don’t see much change to that in my notional result. The overall Nationalist vote share decreases by 3.8% and the overall Unionist share increases by the same amount. This is still not enough to put Unionists in play for a second Assembly seat.

Lagan Valley

Rounding off the middle of County Down, Lagan Valley loses Drumbo to South Belfast and Mid Down, and more significantly Dunmurry to West Belfast, while gaining the eastern fringes of Lurgan from Upper Bann.

Again, it looks bigger on the map than it actually is.

RollDUPUUPUKIPConsAPNISDLPSF
75884 1958686063159551308717581098
FromTo43.1%19.0%0.7%2.1%28.8%3.9%2.4%
LVLV 68948 180207910315878117931441900
LVWB-4330 -840-3700-41-898-272-170
LVSBMD-2161 -611-2760-31-320-34-22
LVSA-340 -88-390-4-59-8-5
LVSD-105 -27-120-1-18-2-2
UBLV 7364 1818550005714101090
SDLV 20 2100244
Total 76,332 1984084603158781236518551994
43.4%18.5%0.7%1.9%27.1%4.1%4.4%
+0.3%-0.4%+0.0%-0.2%-1.8%+0.2%+1.9%

The DUP’s 6,500 majority over Alliance in 2019 increase to 7,500 (what you might call the Dunmurry effect), and the total non-Unionist vote upticks very slightly. At Assembly level, Nationalists were able to win a seat in Lagan Valley in a good year, and these changes make good years more likely, though Alliance would still have a good chance of holding their second seat.

West Belfast

Looking north of Lagan Valley, West Belfast loses a few nibbles around the edges but gains 9,000 voters from Dunmurry at one end and the Shankill at the other.

Neither of the newly added patches of territory is great for SF, but they are pretty far ahead anyway.

RollDUPUUPConsAPNIPBPSDLPSFAontu
65761 5220188261942985208661635
FromTo13.5%4.9%16.0%7.7%53.8%4.2%
WBWB62538 4084181360582919204081599
WBNB-2393-1071-45-57-28-195-16
WBSBMD-710-56-20-67-32-225-18
WBSA-120-10-3-11-5-38-3
NBWB5044 2,863 348 – – 208 –
LVWB4330 840 370 41 898 – 272 170 –
SBWB9 1 1 – 3 – 0
Total71921778937041306060583195207861599
18.2%0.9%0.1%7.1%14.1%7.4%48.5%3.7%
+4.7%+0.9%+0.1%+2.3%-1.8%-0.2%-5.3%-0.5%
DUPUUPConsAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu

This is the second biggest shift of party support in any constituency, but I don’t think SF will be awfully troubled by the prospect of their 14000 majority over PBP at Westminster being reduced to a 12000 majority over the DUP; the seat is safe as houses anyway. Unionist candidates were runners-up here in every assembly election since 1998, with the exception of 2003 when Diane Dodds actually won. There is now a clear prospect of a safe(ish) Unionist seat at the next Assembly election.

Upper Bann

As noted already, Upper Bann loses Loughbrickland to South Down and its eastern fringes to Lagan Valley, but gains parts of the apple country of North Armagh. It was the most bloated constituency on the old boundaries.

The result looks big on the map but has little net electoral impact.

RollDUPUUPAllianceSDLPSFAontu
830282050161976433462312291
FromTo41.0%12.4%12.9%9.2%24.6%
UBUB737041810954745711413010980
UBLV-7364-1818-550-571-410-1090
UBSD-1960-574-174-152-83-221
N&AUB326582231416922147438
Total76969189315788588043511145438
40.8%12.5%12.7%9.4%24.7%0.1%
-0.2%0.1%-0.2%0.1%0.1%0.1%
DUPUUPAllianceSDLPSFAontu

The DUP majority at Westminster drops from just over 8000 to just under 8000. The last Assembly seat here in 2022 was won by Alliance with a 376 vote margin over SF; that would look vulnerable under these changes.

East Belfast

This is very straightforward, with a loss to North Down in one direction and gains from South Belfast in the other.

This does bring in notional South Belfast SDLP votes (the SDLP did not stand in East belfast in 2019).

RollDUPUUPAllianceSDLP
66273 20874251619055
FromTo49.2%5.9%44.9%0.0%
EBEB62980 19726237818232
EBND-3293-1148-138-823
SBEB 7096 18902047581939
Total 70076 216162581189901939
47.9%5.7%42.1%4.3%
-1.3%-0.2%-2.8%4.3%
DUPUUPAllianceSDLP

The DUP’s majority in 2019 was 1800, and the changes expand that to 2600. But those 1939 notional SDLP votes could go a long way to making up the difference in one of the tightest results. I don’t see any direct impact on Assembly representation; there is still nowhere near a Nationalist quota.

North Belfast

Jumping across the river now, we have some tinkering around the margins of North Belfast; the biggest changes are the smallest on the map, to West Belfast on the Shankill and to and from South and East Antrim in Newtownabbey.

These changes basically don’t help the DUP to regain the seat lost in 2019.

DUPUUPConsAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu
21135482423078
FromTo7233243.1%9.8%47.1%
NBNB6671118103443722686
NBWB-5044-2863-348-208
NBSA-577-169-38-184
WBNB2393107145572819516
SANB19261571325631922670
EANB34289295545110
Total713721941916155099572252315816
40.3%0.3%0.0%10.6%0.1%0.5%48.1%0.0%
-2.8%0.3%0.0%0.8%0.1%0.5%1.0%0.0%
DUPUUPConsAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu

SF’s 1900 majority in 2019 expands to 3700. And it’s difficult to see any change in Assembly representation either.

East Antrim

Continuing up the coast, we reach East Antrim which swaps large but sparsely populated territory with North Antrim.

It doesn’t make a lot of difference to the results though.

RollDUPUUPConsAllianceGreenSDLPSF
64907 1687154751043101656859022120
FromTo45.3%14.7%2.8%27.3%1.8%2.4%5.7%
EAEA 62640 162825284100798106858702046
EANA-1045-272-88-17-1640-15-34
EASA-880-229-74-14-1380-12-29
EANB-342-89-29-5-540-5-11
NAEA70364821342058305531057
SAEA26055450300818
Total6993616818667110071042368514323120
41.9%16.6%2.5%26.0%1.7%3.6%7.8%
-3.4%+1.9%-0.3%-1.3%-0.1%+1.1%+2.1%

The DUP’s actual majority of 6700 over Alliance is reduced to a notional 6400, which won’t cause sleepless nights. There are clearly two non-Unionist quotas for the Assembly, and equally clearly Nationalists will struggle to get one of them.

Newry and Armagh

Back to the south of Northern Ireland again, where Newry and Armagh, the second most bloated seat under the old boundaries, loses most of the apple country to Upper Bann and Fermanagh-South Tyrone, and tidies up its eastern boundary.

The territory lost is at the more Unionist end of the constituency.

DUPUUPAllianceSDLPSFAontu
11000420442119449202871628
FromTo 81329 21.7%8.3%8.3%18.6%40.0%3.2%
N&AN&A 73,127 9275354537868753187921508
N&AFST-3879-760-290-201-353-757-61
N&AUB-3265-822-314-169-221-474-38
N&ASD-1058-143-55-55-123-264-21
SDN&A 1458 1406112726729723
Total 74585 9415360539139019190881531
20.2%7.7%8.4%19.4%41.0%3.3%
-1.4%-0.5%0.1%0.8%1.0%0.1%

SF’s 2019 majority increases from almost 9300 to over 9600. For the Assembly, a second Unionist seat slips a little further away.

North Antrim

Back up to the north again as North Antrim swaps territory with East Antrim and comes out a bit smaller.

Changes that look big on the map don’t always have much effect on the ground.

DUPUUPConsAllianceIndSDLPSF
77156 208608139623124629435632
47.4%18.5%0.0%14.1%0.6%6.7%12.8%
NANA70120 203786797564824623904575
NAEA7036 -482-1342-583-553-1057
EANA104527288171641534
Total71165 20650688517581124624044609
50.8%16.9%0.0%14.3%0.6%5.9%11.3%
3.5%-1.5%0.0%0.2%0.0%-0.8%-1.4%
DUPUUPConsAllianceIndSDLPSF

I see the DUP’s notional majority here increasing slightly from 12,000 to 13,000. From three quotas they should notionally get three Assembly seats, but Jim Allister was not a candidate in 2019.

Fermanagh and South Tyrone

Out West now, where the maths is fairly simple but the politics complicated. Fermanagh and South Tyrone was pretty close to the required size, but because of other changes must gain some net territory from Newry and Armagh, and lose a bit to Mid Ulster.

On paper, the differences are not huge.

RollDUPUUPAllianceIndSDLPSFAontu
72945219292650751344621986
0.0%43.2%5.2%1.5%6.8%43.3%0.0%
FSTFST69887227222761751360823017
FSTMU-3058-793-111-162-1031
N&AFST387976029020135375761
MUFST877136324479255
Total7464389621458278475137172196861
1.7%41.6%5.4%1.5%7.2%42.5%0.1%
1.7%-1.6%0.2%0.0%0.4%-0.8%0.1%
DUPUUPAllianceIndSDLPSFAontu

But this was the tightest result in Northern Ireland in 2019, SF beating the UUP by a mere 57 votes. The notional majority is now 510; but there are 896 notional DUP votes in the mix. So Northern Ireland’s closest race may actually have got a bit closer.

Mid Ulster

This was one boundary change that I called completely incorrectly. I had expected that Mid Ulster would stretch north towards Dungiven, as had been the case in the previous quashed proposals. But in fact it takes a chunk of Coalisland from Femanagh and South Tyrone, which losing a large but sparsely populated chunk to West Tyrone.

It doesn’t make a lot of difference.

RollDUPUUPAllianceIndSDLPSF
70501 1093626113526690638420473
24.5%5.9%7.9%1.5%14.3%45.9%
MUMU67036 1056625233284690603119342
MUWT-2588 -234-56-198-273877
MUFST-877 -136-32-44-79255
FSTMU30587931111621031
Total700941056633163395690619320372
23.7%7.4%7.6%1.5%13.9%45.7%
-0.8%1.6%-0.3%0.0%-0.4%-0.1%
DUPUUPAllianceIndSDLPSF

SF’s 9,500 majority extends to a notional 9,800, and the needle is not really moved for the Assembly seats.

Foyle

A little trimming at the edges to East Londonderry and West Tyrone.

The changes are minor, and although more Nationalist than Unionist voters are moved, the Unionist vote share is hit worse.

RollDUPUUPAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu
7443147731088126713322688197712032
FromTo10.1%2.3%2.7%2.8%57.0%20.7%4.3%
FoyleFoyle698903852878118912512578593721949
FoyleELy-2854-691-157-49-51-591-215-45
FoyleWT-1687-230-53-29-30-505-184-38
69890 3,852 878 1,189 1251 25785 9372 1,949
8.7%2.0%2.7%2.8%58.2%21.2%4.4%
-1.4%-0.3%0.0%0.0%1.2%0.4%0.1%
DUPUUPAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu

The SDLP’s 17,100 majority in 2019 is reduced to a mere 16,400 which I don’t think will trouble them unduly. The DUP won the last Assembly seat here by a margin of 95 votes over the UUP, the closest result of the 2022 election, and on the above swing it would be vulnerable, but the picture is very much blurred by tactical voting.

West Tyrone

Simply takes in adjacent chunks from Mid Ulster and Foyle.

These are small territories, sparsely populated, and don’t make a lot of difference.

RollDUPUUPAllianceGreenPBPSDLPSFAontu
66339 9066277439795210733016544972
22.0%6.7%9.7%1.3%0.0%17.8%40.2%2.4%
WTWT66339 9066277439795210733016544972
MUWT2588 23456198002738770
FoyWT1687 230532903050518438
Total70614 953028824206521308108176041010
21.7%6.6%9.6%1.2%0.1%18.5%40.1%2.3%
-0.3%-0.2%-0.1%-0.1%+0.1%+0.7%-0.1%-0.1%
DUPUUPAllianceGreenPBPSDLPSFAontu

The SF notional majority increases from almost 7500 to almost 8100. No impact on the Assembly result.

South Antrim

Getting near the end now, with South Antrim by far the most annoying to calculate: lots of little changes that don’t add up to anything much, the biggest being chunks of Glengormley going to North Belfast.

A real pain to work out these very small notionals!

RollDUPUUPConsAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu
71915 1514912460819022884887
35.3%29.0%19.1%5.3%11.4%
SASA69729 1493712283759720884603
SANB1926 -157-132-563-192-267
SAEA260 -55-45-30-8-18
EASA88022974141381229
NBSA57716938184
LVSA340883945985
WBSA120103115383
Total71646154321239618783611211348583
36.2%29.1%0.0%18.4%0.0%5.0%11.4%0.0%
+0.9%+0.1%–-0.7%–-0.4%––
DUPUUPConsAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu

In a good year, the UUP could overtake the DUP here, and in a much much better year the same is true for Alliance. But the boundary changes have little impact on the Westminster or Assembly outcomes.

North Down

Takes in a small sliver of Strangford and a larger sliver of East Belfast.

The Alliance Party’s strongest seat takes in 3000 voters from the Alliance Party’s second strongest seat.

DUPUUPConsAlliance
153904936195918358
67,109 37.9%12.1%4.8%45.2%
NDND 67,109 153904936195918358
EBND 3,293 11481380823
StrND 10 3102
Total 70,412 165415075195919182
38.7%11.9%4.6%44.9%
0.8%-0.3%-0.2%-0.3%
DUPUUPConsAlliance

Alliance’s Westminster majority is reduced from almost 3000 to just over 2600, so the seat remains competitive but they are starting ahead. The shifts are so small that it’s difficult to see much impact on the Assembly.

East Londonderry

Gains a ward from Foyle.

Small numbers make for small differences.

DUPUUPAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu
693591576535995921615861281731
40.1%9.2%15.1%15.7%15.6%4.4%
ELyELy693591576535995921615861281731
FoyELy2854691157495159121545
Total72213164563756597051674963431776
40.0%9.1%14.5%0.1%16.4%15.4%4.3%
-0.1%-0.5%+0.1%+0.8%-0.2%-0.1%
DUPUUPAlliancePBPSDLPSFAontu

The DUP’s Westminster majority is unchanged. It’s difficult to see much impact on the Assembly election, especially if independent MLA Claire Sugden remains active.

So there you have it. A Westminster election is likely before the end of the year. It may well see some changes of seats, but the new boundaries are unlikely to make the difference.

Seamus Heaney, Free Derry and the Grianan of Aileach

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F expressed the desire to see a bit more of Ireland than he has previously managed, so at the weekend we went on an expedition to the north west, starting with a loop round the southern end of Lough Neagh to go up to the Seamus Heaney HomePlace at Bellaghy.

(I remember once talking to someone from continental Europe about the geography of Northern Ireland. She said, “And there’s that big lake right in the middle! I’m sure it is really beautiful!” I replied, “Er, no, not really…”)

The Seamus Heaney HomePlace is a two-floor building, largely linking Heaney’s poetry to the countryside where he grew up, and to his friends and family. I must say it helped me to appreciate the well of inspiration that he drew on. A small video display allows you to select celebrities reading his poetry out loud, including Bill Clinton, Mary Robinson and King Charles III.

Upstairs there are more direct memorabilia, including a lovely video montage of the furore around his winning the Nobel Prize in 1995, when as you may remember he was on holiday in Greece and his family were unable to contact him with the news. F had barely heard of Heaney before going, and I think I would not recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already know his work, but as a decades-long fan I found it interesting and even a little inspiring.

On then to the Maiden City, where we went to the Museum of Free Derry. F was actually much more impressed by it than he looks in this photo.

I was impressed too. It’s a very well put together narrative of the decades of neglect and misgovernment that led to the Battle of the Bogside and ultimately to Bloody Sunday. And the building itself is right at the core of events – this is the map from the Guardian that I marked up to show the locations of victims of the fatal shootings, with the museum added. The flats across Rossville Street have long since been demolished, but a lot of the rest of the buildings are still there. It’s a surprisingly small space for the drama of the day.

I have written before about the case of Soldier F, who is to be prosecuted for a number of the casualties in Glenfada Park North (ie on the doorstep of the museum). I had missed the welcome news that the Public Prosecution Service’s decision not to pursue the case after all was overturned by the Court of Appeal a year ago, and the case is continuing. It still bothers me that he is not being prosecuted for the crimes that the Savile enquiry found he had certainly committed (the murders of Michael Kelly, Bernard McGuigan and Patrick Doherty, and the attempted murders of Patrick Campbell and Daniel McGowan) but for others for which Savile found only weak evidence that Soldier F was the shooter (the murder of William McKinney, and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel and Joe Mahon) or indeed where Savile thinks that other soldiers fired the shots (the murder of Jim Wray and attempted murders of Michael Quinn and Patrick O’Donnell). Even half a century later, it would be nice to see some justice done here.

We explored the city and paid the obligatory homage to the most recent cultural icons.

Finally, we went across the border to the spectacular Grianan of Aileach, an Iron Age fort (reconstructed in the nineteenth century) overlooking the Inishowen peninsula, with incredible views over Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle. It was very windy, but very much worth seeing.

Neglected megaliths of Loughbrickland

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All of sixteen years ago, I wrote a blog post about visiting three megalithic sites near Loughbrickland: a standing stone (menhir) at Lisnabrague on the Poyntzpass road, the so-called Three Sisters of Greenan on a hill near the lake, and another standing stone beside the northern shore of the lake, in Drumnahare townland.

Stoned

They’re all laid out on this map, though the Three Sisters are mysteriously placed a hundred metres to the east of their actual location.

I returned to visit all three this week, and to be honest I was a bit dismayed. Going west to east, the opposite order to last time, I found that the field containing the Lisnabrague stone is currently planted with maize which is taller than me. The farmer gave me permission to go look for it, commenting that I was the first person he had ever encountered who showed any interest; he added resentfuly that he is not allowed to build within five hundred metres of it, which does seem a bit excessive.

Using GPS I was able to navigate to the stone through the maize, and found that it sits in a sort of glade among the triffid-like crops.

But it feels isolated and neglected, compared to when I visited in 2007.

At least it was accessible. The Three Sisters lie in a hedge beside a lane; the hedge has been allowed to grow thick over them in the last sixteen years, and you can no longer see them from the lane at all. The field in which they lie has been completely fenced off; you can photograph the two upright Sisters through or over the fence, but you cannot reach or even see the third of the three stones, which is completely submerged in the hedge.

A neighbour told me that the owner had had a lot of hassle with treasure-hunters – not metal-detectorists, but people doing organised guided quests, who had failed to observe the usual etiquette of the countryside. It’s a shame. In 2007 you could go right up to them, and see the recumbent Sister as well.

The standing stone by the lake remains easy enough to visit, but the Orange Order who own the field have put up a massive flagpole right beside it, which really impacts your experience of the site. (There’s also a flag flying on the crannóg in the middle of the lake, but I carefully positioned the flagpole to block it out.)

Sixteen years ago I was able to get a lovely shot of the crannóg framed by the cut in the top of the stone, which has mysterious cup-like markings.

I came away feeling that the relationship between the state and the landowner in respect of ancient monuments seems to be deteriorating. It would be nice to see a new partnership established based on dialogue and mutual respect of each other’s interests. But that would probably require a restoration of devolved government.

A historic maximum: ex-prime ministers and iar-taoisigh

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There are more former British prime minsters alive today than at any time since the office was created in 1721.

Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Camero, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major make a total of seven living PMs since Truss’s resignation on 25 October last year. And from the looks of things, that number is likely to increase before it decreases – Rishi Sunak’s government looks to be in worse health than any of his predecessors.

On two previous occasions there have been six living ex-Prime Ministers.

Between the end of Sir Robert Peel’s first term, on 8 April 1835, and the death of Henry Addington on 15 February 1844, there were six living ex-prime ministers: Addington (whose time at the top was decades previously, 1801-1804), Viscount Goderich, the Duke of Wellington, Earl Grey (he of the tea), Lord Melbourne and Robert Peel. Though in fact Melbourne had a second term from 1835 to 1841, and Peel then came back until 1846, so there is an argument that there were only five living men who were former and not current prime minsters for that period.

Similarly, from the end of Ramsay MacDonald’s first term, on 4 November 1924, until the death of H.H. Asquith on 15 February 1928, there were also six living former prime ministers: the rather obscure Lord Rosebery (briefly PM in 1894-95), Arthur Balfour, Asquith, David Lloyd-George, Stanley Baldwin and MacDonald. Again, however, Baldwin was back in for a second term.

The most recent period when there was only one living ex-prime minister was between the death of Baldwin on 14 December 1947 and the end of Attlee’s term on 26 October 1951. The only living ex-PM then was the leader of the opposition, Winston Churchill.

When the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, died on 18 March 1745, there were no living ex-PMs. His successor, the Earl of Wilmington, died in office, as did the next in line, Henry Pelham, and there was no living ex-PM until the end of the first term of Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, on 11 November 1756.

The number of ex-Taoisigh (?iar-taoisigh?) is also at an all-time high, at six (Bruton, Ahern, Cowen, Kenny, Varadkar, Martin) though again we have to enter the caveat that Varadkar is currently enjoying his second run.

That level has been hit twice before. Between the end of John Bruton’s term in 1997 and the death of Jack Lynch in 1999, Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Charles Haughey, Garret Fitzgerald, Albert Reynolds and Bruton himself were all living, and as Bruton’s successor Bertie Ahern had not previously been Taoiseach, there are no ifs nor buts.

And more recently, for the two months in 2011 between the end of Brian Cowen’s term and the death of Garret Fitzgerald, the living ex-Taoisigh included also Liam Cosgrave, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton and Bertie Ahern; and again Enda Kenny was a first-time Taoiseach during that period.

There has been no period when there were no living ex-Taoisigh, thanks in part to the longevity of Eamon de Valera. After the death of John A. Costello in 1976, Jack Lynch was the only living ex-Taoiseach until Liam Cosgrave lost the 1977 election (and Lynch came back to power).

The number of living former heads of the devolved administration in Northern Ireland is also current at an all-time high, at five (Mark Durkan, Peter Robinson, Arlene Foster, Paul Givan and Michelle O’Neill – counting First Minister and Deputy First Minister equally, but not counting those who served only in an acting capacity such as Reg Empey and John O’Dowd).

In the olden days there was no living ex-Prime Minster of Northern Ireland until John Miller Andrews was kicked out in 1943, Lord Craigavon having died in office, and then again from Andrews’ death in 1956 until Brookeborough retired in 1963. James Chichester-Clark, briefly PM ion the dying days of Stormont, lived to 2002, by which time devolution had been more or less restored.

Aren’t you glad I worked that out for you?

Northern Ireland local elections 2023

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So, the headline is that Nationalist parties (those who would designate as Nationalists in the Assembly) outpolled Unionist parties (those who would designate as Nationalists in the Assembly) in Thursday’s local elections by 19,000 votes, and more than two percentage points. This is a first for Northern Ireland.

Nationalists (SF + SDLP + Aontu + IRSP): 300,565 (40.8%, +4.5%)
Unionists (DUP + UUP + TUV + PUP + Cons): 281,196 (38.2%, -3.7%)

My tweet about this last night got a lot of pickup, including getting me quoted in the Guardian. Some people pushed back at me saying that I should have counted People Before Profit as Nationalists, though they don’t designate as such; or that I should have counted Alliance as Unionists, though they too don’t designate as such; or that I should have counted independents, though they are not political parties by definition; or that I shouldn’t have done the calculation at all. The point remains: Unionist parties were outpolled by Nationalist parties for the first time ever.

This is important psychologically but not operationally. The criterion for triggering a referendum on a United Ireland is pretty much that the UK thinks it is likely to go that way. That outcome is not apparent from the above numbers, which show only 40.8% of voters supporting the election of candidates from Nationalist parties to local councils with limited powers. 40.8% is a lot – it’s more than 38.2% – but it’s not 50%, and the Nationalist vote share would need to be higher or have a larger lead to justify calling a Border Poll.

In the case of Catalonia, which I am familiar with, where pro-independence forces were in the zone of getting a majority of the electorate, the picture was complicated by a significant clump of voters who wanted a referendum on independence, for the sake of clarity and dignity, but also wanted to stay part of Spain. There is no such pro-referendum caucus within the 20% swing voters of the centre in Northern Ireland. Nationalists (in both Northern Ireland and Scotland) might start usefully working out how such a caucus could be persuaded into existence.

And, as I’ve said before, winning such a referendum is a different matter again. It requires three things: Brexit continues to be an obvious negative (✔), Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and ignore the persuadable middle (✔) and Nationalists come up with a credible counter-offer, including robust proposals on health care (✘). Nationalists have time to work on the third of these; Unionists are running out of time to work on the first two.

Looking at the details:

CouncilDUPUUPTUVAllianceOthersSDLPSFTotal
Antrim & Newtownabbey13-7–08+2+ Ind 1—9++++40
Ards & North Down1480-12++3 Ind, 2- Green1040
Armagh, Banbridge & Craigavon13++6—-1+4+1 Ind1—–15+++++41
Belfast City14-21+11+3- Green, 1– PBP, 1+ Ind5-22++++60
Causeway Coast & Glens13-4—2++5+++1+ PUP3—12+++40
Derry & Strabane5–3+00–3- Ind, 1- PBP10-18+++++++40
Fermanagh & Omagh6+7–02+1— Ind3–21++++++40
Lisburn & Castlereagh14-6—–013++++1+ Ind24++40
Mid & East Antrim14-8+572- Ind0-4++40
Mid-Ulster11++2—-003+ Ind5-19++40
Newry, Mourne & Down5++1—05+++2— Ind8—20++++41
Total122549672739144462
±0-21+3+14-15-20+39
Not shown in above table:
2 PUP losses in Belfast
1 Ind loss in Causeway Coast and Glens
1 Aontu loss in Derry and Strabane
1 Lab loss in Fermanagh and Omagh
1 Green loss in Lisburn and Castlereagh

It will be apparent that while the majority of the SDLP’s losses were directly to Sinn Fein, only about half of the Sinn Fein gains came from the SDLP. The rest came from smaller groups/independents and Unionists. The campaign successfully persuaded many voters who don’t normally vote SF, or vote at all, to show solidarity with the concept that the leader of the party with the most votes should become First Minister. It is a stunning success, the best vote share ever for Sinn Fein in a Northern Ireland election. Alliance’s gains also demonstrated support for getting the institutions back up and running.

On the other side of the argument, the TUV failed to break through in any significant numbers – though they are still there – and the DUP were fortunate to avoid a net loss of seats despite slipping a full percentage point on vote share. It’s clear that their message has not resonated beyond the core vote, which is tactically a successful defence but strategically questionable. Cards on the table: I don’t see how blocking the institutions can be a successful strategy. It’s clear that London doesn’t care very much, so the blockade imposes no pressure on Westminster, while damaging the interests of the people who Unionism claims to represent. Worse, it undermines the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s continued existence as an entity. (See above.)

The crunch on smaller parties is severe, and I don’t see an easy way out of it. It’s the worst election result ever for the SDLP, and the second worst for the UUP. Neither has a clear unique selling point relevant to the current situation. I heard one SDLP speaker complaining that the electorate have forgotten who got the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago. In the real world, nobody fights this year’s elections on 1998’s outcomes. A UUP speaker complained that Nationalists were running too many candidates and should let other parties have a chance. That’s not how elections work.

On these numbers, the SDLP Westminster seats in Foyle and South Belfast look vulnerable, though I’m inclined to think that the incumbent will hang on in South Belfast. On the other hand, Alliance look more secure in North Down and better placed in East Belfast. Come an Assembly election, SF would be well in the lead, and Alliance in third place but some way behind the DUP.

So how was your weekend?

Lyra McKee, and why I split up with the News Letter

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I had the great pleasure last night of watching Alison Millar’s documentary, Lyra, about the life and death of journalist Lyra McKee. It’s a tremendous portrait of a committed young woman, killed in the middle of doing her job just before Easter in 2019. The showing was presented by the UK mission to the EU and the Northern Ireland representation in Brussels, as part of the Brussels Irish Film Festival, and Alison Millar was on hand to answer questions both formally and informally. The film is beautiful and I strongly recommend it. Here’s a trailer:

I did not know Lyra McKee myself – she was six years old when I left Northern Ireland – but inevitably we had a lot of mutual friends (38 according to Facebook, I’m sure a lot more in reality), all of whom seem to remember her fondly. She first hit my radar screen in 2013, when she began her research into the murder of Robert Bradford, nineteen years before she was born. This particularly fascinated me because he was our local MP, and he and the caretaker for his office were killed just ten minutes’ walk from our home. Her book was eventually published, available here, an extract here.

In July 2019, three months after Lyra’s death, the News Letter, one of the main Belfast news outlets, ran a front page story revealing that the royalties from the book were going to a non-profit organisation, one of whose directors was a former paramilitary. The article evoked a furious response from Lyra McKee’s publisher and family. I too felt that this was a crappy piece of journalism. A former paramilitary being associated with a non-profit organisation is hardly news and not really interesting, and it was barely relevant to Lyra McKee’s work. The News Letter subsequently successfully defended a libel case, with the defence that the article was true (or at least, that the points complained of in the article were true). But what is true is not always right, even without considering the innuendo in the piece.

Over the previous few years I had written a few pages of political analysis for the News Letter in advance of each election in Northern Ireland, often featuring on the front page of the newspaper’s election specials. But I felt very uncomfortable about what they were now putting on the front page. I wrote to the then editor, saying that in my view the article was “sensationalist and did not serve the public interest. I am very disappointed. I thought you were better than that.” Consequently, I permanently severed my relationship with the newspaper. I am all in favour of being part of a broad spectrum of voices, but only if I can feel confident in the ethical values underlying the editorial choices being made.

I haven’t discussed any of this in public previously because fundamentally it’s not really about me. But I had the chance to tell the brief story last night to Alison Millar, and now that I’ve ticked that box I may as well go public here.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness

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Opening of Part Three:

The sound of water. Light up on Boa Island. Craig rests, smoking. Pyper enters.
Craig: Well?
Pyper: Good. Good place.
Craig: I hoped you’d like it.
Pyper: You rowed out here every day?
Craig: When I had the chance and I wanted to be on my island.
Pyper: Your island?
Craig: Sorry. Boa Island. I stand corrected. I meant when I wanted to be on my own.
Pyper: Nobody ever comes here?
Craig: Very few.
Pyper: Strange.
Craig: This place? Yes.
Pyper: The place is definitely strange, but strange too, people shouldn’t come.
Craig: Why should they come here?
Pyper: The carvings.
Craig: What are they?
Pyper: Signs.

This play won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize in 1986, and I was lucky enough to see it thirty years later, at the Abbey Theatre for the 2016 production commemorating the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. Reading the script now can’t really do justice to the memory of the theatre production, which starred Donal Gallery as Pyper, and crucially used the space of the stage to make the story come alive.

It’s a reflection on eight soldiers recruited to the Ulster Division during the First World War, exploring their understanding of the universe, life, love and loyalty. The narrative is bookended by Pyper in old age reflecting on how he survived and his friends did not (so the fact that seven of the eight die is signalled early on).

I find the third act the most effective, the eight characters back home on leave and split into four pairs, two on Boa island, two at a church, two at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, and two at the Field where Orange marches finish (which historically was at Finaghy, close to where I grew up, though I do not know if that was the case in 1915 or 1916). It gives the men a chance to explain themselves to each other, a sympathetic but informed audience.

By the lakeside in Fermanagh, Pyper and Craig make love, which must have been rather shocking in 1985 and was still a bit unexpected in 2016. (Also the weather must have been very good that day.) All of the characters reflect on the place of Ulster in Ireland, in Britainm in Europe and in the empire. There are some very good lines:

Old Pyper: Those I belonged to, those I have not forgotten, the irreplaceable ones, they kept their nerve, and they died. I survived. No, survival was not my lot. Darkness, for eternity, is not survival.

McIlwaine: The whole of Ulster will be lost. We’re not making a sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice.

Younger Pyper: I have seen horror
Elder Pyper: Ulster
Younger Pyper: They kept their nerve and they died.
Elder Pyper: Ulster
Younger Pyper: There would be and there will be, no surrender.
Elder Pyper: Ulster
Younger Pyper: The house has grown cold, the province has grown lonely.
Elder Pyper: Ulster
Younger Pyper: You’ll always guard Ulster.
Elder Pyper: Ulster.
Younger Pyper: Save it
Elder Pyper: Ulster
Younger Pyper: The temple of the Lord is ransacked.
Elder Pyper: Ulster.
(Pyper reaches toward himself)
Younger Pyper: Dance in this deserted temple of the Lord.
Elder Pyper: Dance
(Darkness)

You can get it here.

This was the non-sf fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next in that pile is The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, by Flann O’Brien, but it will have to wait until I have finished my 2016 books.

Ewart-Biggs Prize winners: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness | From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull | Setting the Truth Free: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Campaign, by Julieann Campbell | The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend | The Whole and Rain-Domed Universe, by Colette Bryce | The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell

The Halls of Narrow Water: A family history, by Bill Hall

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Second paragraph of third section of main narrative:

On arrival in Ireland, William Hall is believed to have been involved in mining at Red Bay near Carrickfergus  in Co. Antrim and to have died there in 1640.  There were other Halls in Antrim at that time.  However, they were no connection to William Hall and the subsequent Halls of Narrow Water.  William’s son Francis was born in 1620 and married Mary Lyndon daughter of Judge Lyndon of Galway.  We do not have any historical background on the Lyndon family of Galway, but given his status as a judge he would have been from a family of some influence.  There is a Francis Hall recorded as holding land in 1663 in the Barony of Glenarm, which is where Red Bay is located. Francis subsequently moved to Glassdrumman in County Armagh before buying the townland of Narrow Water and eight other townlands in 1680. Francis and Mary had four children, Roger, Edward, Alexander, Trevor and Frideswid.  The marriages of these children saw the beginning of a series of marriage alliances between the Halls and several influential and powerful families in Ireland.  Roger married Christine Poyntz, daughter of Sir Toby Poyntz; Edward married Anne Rowley and moved to Strangford, establishing another branch of the Hall family who were also to marry into a number of prominent families.  Frideswid married Colonel Chichester Fortescue of Drumiskin, the eldest son of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Thomas Fortescue Governor of Carrickfergus Castle, continuing the link with the Chichester Family.

I have mentioned previously that one of my father’s best friends as a child was Roger Hall, of the Halls of Narrow Water Castle near Warrenpoint on the southern shore of County Down; and my aunt Ursula and Roger’s sister Moira Hall shared a house in London for many years. I renewed contact with the Halls last summer, for the first time in decades; here’s F with Roger’s son M, who now runs the castle and the estate, in the snooker room which carries many memories.

Growing up, I didn’t especially know Roger and Moira’s younger brother Bill (formally Sir William Hall), but we had a great lunch together with various other relatives last August, and I was subsequently sent his book about the Hall family, which is available by private circulation only.

It’s a breezy 250-page compilation of archival material and personal reflection. The Troubles and the wider political situation are inevitably part of the book. One of the worst atrocities of the whole period took place literally at the castle gate. But the focus is on the Hall family and on their role within the community, and I must admit that my personal interest was in the anecdotes about my own family in the book.

To be honest, for most of the the three and a half centuries that the Halls have been based in Narrow Water, they kept their heads down and were unremarkable County Down landlords. The picture becomes more interesting with Frank Hall (Bill, Moira and Roger’s great uncle), a UVF gunrunner and spy. To Frank’s disgust, his nephew married a Gibraltarian and their children were brought up as Catholics, the ultimate betrayal for a fervent Loyalist.

Bill, Moira and Roger’s father died when the boys were still quite young, which led to complications in the administration of the Narrow Water estate. The legal convolutions to prevent it falling into the hands of the Catholic church are apparently a case study in such things. Undaunted, all of the children of that generation (there were three more sisters, but I only knew Moira) had adventurous lives. I’m very glad that Bill took the time to compile it all into digestible form.

The Sun is Open (and Type Face), by Gail McConnell

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Third page:

our house was on a street that slanted at the bottom a carriageway you didn't cross four lanes all going fifty to a roundabout nearby the dog next door was Honey a lab as old as me who loved to lie on the just cut lawn and sniff her tail going in the afternoon sun

I like to track the winners of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize because of my own past association with it, and was really interested to see that earlier this month it went to a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.

Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some incredible playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be. You can get it here.

This moved me to seek out an earlier poem by Gail McConnell, Type Face, which you can read here. It’s funnier, though the humour is rather dark; the theme is that it explains her reaction to reading the Historical Enquiries Team report into her father’s murder, and discovering that it was written in Comic Sans. The third verse is:

‘Nothing can separate me from the Love of God
in Christ Jesus Our Lord’. Nothing can, indeed.
I am guided by Google, my mother by Christ.
Awake most nights, I click and swipe.
I search and find Bill McConnell Paint and Body.
Under new management!!!!! Northeast Tennessee.
Where is God in a Messed-up World? Inside the Maze.
(My phone flashes up a message like a muse.)
Straight & Ready: A History of the 10th Belfast
Scout Group. (35) (PO) (IRA)
– for more and a photograph, push this link>>
the maroon death icon on CAIN.ulst.ac.uk
You visited this page on 06/02/15.
And here I am again.
And in The Violence of Incarceration
(Routledge, 2009), eds. Phil Scraton
and Jude McCulloch (page thirty-three), he
‘oversaw, but later denied in court, the brutality
of prison guards, [and] was executed by the IRA
on the 8 March 1984.’ (He’d been dead two days
by then.) Execute. Late Middle English:
from Latin exsequi ‘follow up, punish’.
There’s a listing on victims.org.uk,
‘an [sic] non-sectarian, non-political’ nook
complete with Union Jack and Ulster flag
campaigning pics, the Twitter feeds and tags,
a calendar and videos. Powered by WordPress.
And then there’s Voices from The Grave (and this
one’s hard to bear, though can I say so? I don’t know.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.)
I won’t write down the page. But something in me,
seeing that crazed portrait – something’s relieved.

Really good stuff, and very different in presentation from The Sun is Open. Both are recommended.

Ewart-Biggs Prize winners: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness | From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull | Setting the Truth Free: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Campaign, by Julieann Campbell | The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend | The Whole and Rain-Domed Universe, by Colette Bryce | The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell