Northern Ireland Votes: West Belfast

So far we’ve dealt with most Unionist-leaning constituencies. So buckle your seatbelts folks, for what is not only a nationalist constituency, but the constituency most dominated by a single party in all of Northern Ireland. To call West Belfast ‘Sinn Fein-dominated’ is a supreme understatement of the word ‘dominated’. The seat has been held by Catholics at every Westminster election since 1966, originally by Gerry Fitt who founded and was the first leader of the SDLP. Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein leader, first won control of the seat in 1983, in part because Fitt left the SDLP and ran as an Independent, dividing the soft nationalist vote two ways. Adams has held the seat ever since, however, with the single exception of the 1992-7 Parliament when the seat was briefly regained by the SDLP. As you might expect this is the most Catholic constituency in Northern Ireland, it’s about 80% Catholic to 15% Protestant. It is also the poorest constituency on just about every measure. What Protestants are here live in segregated communities, and most of the Shankill is here, the notorious impoverished area which was a focal point for The Troubles. The area has historically been loyalist in orientation and loyalist paramilitaries have often acted there. Shankill is also the poorest electoral ward in all of Northern Ireland. The almost equally as infamous Falls Road area, a sort of Catholic mirror image area of Shankill, is also here. The two roads neighbour each other and are separated by ‘peace lines’ (walls built to separate communities from each other, supposedly to create ‘peace’). It is not in fact possible to go from one to the other without either crossing a ‘peace line’ or going around, through North Belfast. Even where there are ‘middle class’ areas in West Belfast they tend to actually be below the economic average for Northern Ireland. The area is also very young (Sinn Fein tends to be more popular with younger Catholics than the SDLP).

Candidate	Party	Vote	Change
Gerry Adams	Sinn Fein	71.1%	+2.5%
Alex Attwood	SDLP	16.4%	+0.3%
William Humphrey	DUP	7.6%	-3.3%
Bill Manwaring	UUP/Con	3.1%	+0.6%
Maire Hendron	Alliance	1.9%	+1.8%

The level of Sinn Fein dominance should be absolutely clear from this table alone. Honestly I could almost have lead with it and it would have told you everything you need to know(!) As you can see the cross-community vote in the constituency is almost non-existent, what gains there is are likely the result of slight boundary changes. The Unionist vote is also smaller than the census figures would suggest. This appears to be an issue of differential turnout, with those living in the Shankill much less likely to turnout than those in the Catholic majority of the constituency. Adams recently stood down from the seat in order to contest the Louth constituency in the forthcoming Irish election. In 2007 the result looked like this:

MLA	Party	First Pref	Round Elected
Gerry Adams	Sinn Fein	17.8%	1
Sue Ramsey	Sinn Fein	14.0%	2
Paul Maskey	Sinn Fein	12.9%	6
Jennifer McCann	Sinn Fein	12.6%	6
Fra McCann	Sinn Fein	12.6%	6
Alex Attwood	SDLP	9.0%	6
Pat Sheehan	Sinn Fein	N/A	N/A

Best Losers	Party	First Pref	Round Eliminated
Diane Dodds	DUP	10.8%	6
Margaret Walsh	SDLP	3.2%	6
Sean Mitchell	People Before Profit	2.3%	6
Louis West	UUP	1.7%	6

Overall Result

Party	Vote	Seats
Sinn Fein	69.9%	5
SDLP	12.2%	1
DUP	10.8%	0
UUP	1.7%	0
Alliance	0.4%	0

If you had any doubts about the nature of this constituency that should do away with them.

The Incumbents

Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein) is the leader of Sinn Fein and easily the single best known Irish Republican politician of recent times. Sinn Fein’s leader since 1983, Adams has long been a suspected IRA member, though the commonly held view of his membership has never been confirmed. He has been a member of Sinn Fein since 1964 (actually predating the party’s current form). Adams has moved his party into the mainstream and from not contesting elections, on the basis that British and Irish parliaments were illegitimate, to being the dominant Irish nationalist party (though the party still does not take its seats at Westminster). Adams appears to be turning his attention increasingly to Republic of Ireland politics rather than Northern Irish politics, and has resigned his Assembly seat, being replaced in December by Pat Sheehan. Sheehan is a former Maze Prison hunger striker, who went 55 days without food, who after being released from prison was imprisoned again on explosives charges. Sheehan earned a first class degree in Politics and Philosophy in prison and was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. This is the type of biography that goes down well in Republican West Belfast but Sheehan will be have to fight it out with four other Sinn Fein MLAs to keep his seat.

Sue Ramsey (Sinn Fein) is a former councillor, who was a MLA for this seat from 1998 until 2003 when she lost her seat to Diane Dodds of the DUP. She was co-opted back into the Assembly in 2004 and then re-elected in 2007, coming second in the poll only to Gerry Adams. While not prominent nationally my impression is that Ramsey is a hard-working constituency MLA and therefore can probably be expected to do well enough to beat out at least one of the other four MLAs here.

Paul Maskey (Sinn Fein) is the brother of Alex Maskey, the South Belfast MLA. As part of Sinn Fein’s strategy to ‘balance’ its vote, Maskey appears to primarily dedicated to the Andersonstown and Upper Falls area of West Belfast. He once represented the latter as a councillor.

Jennifer McCann (Sinn Fein) has a strong Republican pedigree, a former member of the IRA (she joined age 17) who was a friend of Bobby Sands as a child. Sinn Fein refers to her as an ‘ex-POW’ referring to her time in prison for shooting a police officer.

Fra McCann (Sinn Fein) is the final Sinn Fein MLA in West Belfast. A victim of internment (detention without charge) McCann, (who is no relation to Jennifer as far as I can tell) was in the H-Blocks, and after release spent much time attempting to highlight what he saw as inhumane treatment, and the hunger strikes.

Alex Attwood (SDLP) is the single MLA from this seat not from Sinn Fein. He is also the sole SDLP member of the Northern Ireland Executive, as the Minister for Social Development. It would probably not be unkind to say that the SDLP does not have the greatest infrastructure in West Belfast, unsurprising considering the generally middle class make-up of the party. Nonetheless there are always a few middle class nationalists around and a few working class nationalists who buck the Sinn Fein supporting trend for whatever reason. The SDLP vote here is weak compared to Sinn Fein’s certainly, and does not quite add up to a quota, but the party is well placed to benefit from transfers. In addition the SDLP has changed its ludicrous 2007 decision to run two candidates to simply running Attwood which is a far safer option. Attwood can probably count himself as just about safe.

The Challengers

On paper there is enough Unionist voters in this seat to elect a Unionist MLA and indeed there was a Unionist MLA for this seat from 2003-7. However Unionism suffers several challenges here. Firstly there are issues of differential turnout. Unionists in the seat have repeatedly shown less willingness to turn out and vote than nationalists. Secondly what Unionist vote there is, is dependent on impeccable transferring to actually secure a seat. Unfortunately those rascally voters sometimes insist on only expressing a preference for one candidate, in which case the seat is lost. Fortunately the Unionist vote has homogenised around the DUP, but it will still be a hard fight. Prior to now the DUP candidate, and former MLA, was Diane Dodds, wife of DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds. The DUP will thus need a new candidate. If the DUP does succeed in gaining a seat, which it very well may. It strikes me as more likely that Sinn Fein will lose a seat than the SDLP. However I would not like to hazard a guess as to which Sinn Fein MLA would lose their seat, as the Sinn Fein vote here is expertly managed so that all five MLAs have roughly similar votes. This is an advantageous situation under STV, and Sinn Fein are experts at proper vote ‘balancing’. Later we’ll see some seats where parties did not balance their vote properly in 2007, and the consequences.