Northern Ireland Votes: West Tyrone

West Tyrone is the penultimate Northern Irish seat. It consists of the majority of County Tyrone, lying in the West of the Province, fairly central in North-South terms, which makes it the positional opposite of Strangford. The seat is largely rural, with two moderately sized towns – Strabane, and the county town, Omagh, site of the Omagh bombing by the ‘Real IRA’ the worst single attack in Northern Ireland, killing 29 people, and injuring 220. The fact that this came in 1998, four months after the Belfast Agreement, spurred the Peace Process on. Strabane has a reputation for poverty and unemployment, often making it into the top 10 UK’s ‘crap towns’ list. The constituency also features Northern Ireland’s biggest concentration of rural poverty by far. Omagh is more prosperous, but nonetheless the constituency is still very deprived. In common with most of the South and West the constituency is also Catholic dominated. Indeed only Foyle and West Belfast are more so, around 2/3rds of the population are Catholic, and the deprivation combines to make this seat Sinn Fein leaning. When the seat was originally created in 1997 it was won by the UUP on 34.6%% as the DUP didn’t run a candidate and the Nationalist vote split fairly evenly between the SDLP (32.1%) and Sinn Fein (30.9% - incidentally stories like these always make me wonder about the effect of moving to AV in Northern Ireland). Sinn Fein was able to effectively homogenise the nationalist vote around it in 2001, and Pat Doherty has been MP for the seat ever since.

Candidate	Party	Vote	Change
Pat Doherty	Sinn Fein	48.4%	+9.5%
Thomas Buchanan	DUP	19.8%	+2.0%
Ross Hussey	UUP/Con	14.2%	+7.3%
Joe Byrne	SDLP	14.0%	+4.9%
Michael Bower	Alliance	2.3%	+2.3%
Ciaran McClean	Independent	1.4%	+1.4%

One thing you will note is that in 2010 every single candidate increased their vote. This is because in 2005 an independent called Kieran Deeny (more on him later) took 27.4% of the vote. Without Deeny on the ballot Doherty held his seat without trouble.

MLA	Party	First Pref	Round Elected
Barry McElduff	Sinn Fein	16.8%	1
Pat Doherty	Sinn Fein	16.2%	1
Claire McGill	Sinn Fein	11.5%	3
Thomas Buchanan	DUP	11.2%	6
Allan Bresland	DUP	10.2%	7
Kieran Deeny	Independent	9.1%	7

Losers	Party	First Pref	Round Eliminated
Derek Hussey	UUP	8.9%	5
Jo Deehan	SDLP	6.5%	7
Eugene McMenamin	SDLP	5.5%	5
Seamus Shields	SDLP	2.5%	4
Joe O'Neill	Independent	1.1%	4
Robert McCartney	UKUP	0.5%	4

Overall Result

Party	Vote	Seats
Sinn Fein	44.5%	3
DUP	21.4%	2
SDLP	14.5%	0
Kieran Deeny (Independent)	9.1%	1
UUP	8.9%	0

A couple of notes about the result. Firstly the Alliance stood no candidate, preferring to back Kieran Deeny. The SDLP got enough votes to gain a seat, but screwed it up through silliness. Essentially in STV the more candidates a party stands, the more transfers ‘leak’. Simply put, there is a small, but notable minority, who do not, for whatever reason, preference candidates in the order a party prefers. Thus the best strategy is always to stand one more candidate than prior performance suggests, if one is feeling confident, or at what prior performance indicates, if one is not. Based on the prior vote in this constituency the SDLP, in 2007, should have stood one candidate, maybe two if it was feeling REALLY cocky. Instead the local constituency party deselected the Strabane-based then two term MLA Eugene McMenamin, in favour of two candidates, Jo Deehan and Seamus Shields from Omagh in what was reportedly a highly fractious selection meeting. To make matters worse the SDLP executive then shoved McMenamin onto the ballot, giving the SDLP perhaps the most tactically foolish slate of any major party anywhere in Northern Ireland, and that is the story of how the SDLP turned 14.5% of the vote, more than enough to reach quota, into 0 seats.

The Incumbents

Barry McElduff (Sinn Fein) has been a MLA for this seat since 1998. He is also a member of Sinn Fein’s executive, the Ard Comhairle, of the British-Irish Parliamentary group and is the party’s spokesman on All-Ireland development. McElduff is fairly prominent on twitter, and is known for a certain self-parodying anti-establishment Irish nationalist style. He should be safe.

Pat Doherty (Sinn Fein) is this seat’s MP, and was Vice-President of Sinn Fein from 1988-2009 (making him the second ranked member of the Sinn Fein internal hierarchy). He has been a MLA since 1998. He has been accused of being a member of the IRA’s army council (the executive which leads the IRA). An easy hold should be at hand.

Claire McGill (Sinn Fein) is the final Sinn Fein MLA in this seat. A local councillor, Sinn Fein claims she is one of the hardest working MLAs in the area. McGill is standing down at this election.

Thomas Buchanan (DUP) was elected as the youngest councillor in Omagh city council in 1993, and was Vice Chairman in 2004. He was elected to the Assembly in 2003, as the DUP’s first MLA for the seat. Buchanan has been a PPC here, and seems to have a strong political base in the Unionist community in Omagh. The DUP vote here is only around enough to elect one and a half MLAs judging by the 2007 and 2010 result, but Buchanan is on more solid ground than his fellow MLA Alan Bresland in my opinion, so he should be fine. Nonetheless Buchanan should not take the chance of being unseated in favour of Bresland lightly.

Allan Bresland (DUP) has a similar story to his fellow DUPer Buchanan. He was elected to Strabane council in 1993 and became a MLA in 2007. A former lorry driver he claims the lowest expenses in Northern Ireland. Analysis of Kieran Deeny’s vote transfers in 2003 shows that the independent MLA was taking more votes from the UUP than the DUP by far, as do the changes from 2005 to 2010. There are enough Unionist votes in this constituency to elect two Unionist MLAs, and so it essentially comes down to the top two out of three, and who is eliminated from those three first. In 2007 the DUP ran the two current MLAs and the UUP ran one candidate. It seems that Deeny dragged enough votes from the UUP to have their candidate eliminated, meaning the UUP votes transferred to the DUP electing Bresland. As such Bresland is in huge danger here as Deeny is standing down at this election. His best chance of re-election is to defeat his running mate Thomas Buchanan, but Bresland’s base is in Strabane, whereas Buchanan’s is in Omagh, and there are simply more Unionist votes in Omagh than in Strabane.

Kieran Deeny (Independent) is the sole ‘true’ independent elected in 2007. Deeny is a former GP who won his seat in 2003 on a single issue campaign of retaining Tyrone County Hospital which was facing closure. He shocked pretty much everyone by topping the poll, winning 14.8% of the vote. He then ran to be the MP for this seat in 2005 running against Sinn Fein abstentionism, on the one hand, and with the strong backing of both Nationalist and Unionist activists on the other (though the four major parties all ran). He won 27.4% of the vote. There was a large (30,000 people) protest at the hospital in November 2005. The nearest alternative hospital is 27 miles away. The current status of the hospital remains in doubt with health minister Michael McGimpsey wanting to build a new hospital in Omagh, but the budget may not cover this with cuts on their way. Denny is, as far as I can tell, Catholic (judging by his history of supporting and playing Gaelic Football) but sits with the Alliance and the Green Party in the ‘United Community MLAs’ group. Deeny has announced he is standing down at this election (he actually announced it 3 hours before the time of writing, which is possibly the greatest timing ever).

The Challengers

One seat is very definitely open – Kieran Deeny’s. This seat is open in the truest sense of the word as well, as, with Deeny being a single-issue independent, no party is ‘defending’ it. Additionally, I consider Allan Bresland’s DUP seat to be under serious threat.

Let’s start with Deeny’s. By far and away the best placed party to take Deeny’s seat is the SDLP, and in fact were it not for over-nomination on the part of the party they would have taken it in 2007. This time the party has gotten over its temporary attack of the stupids in 2007 and nominated just the one candidate – Joe Byrne, who was not on the ballot at all in 2007, thankfully. He does, however, have a long prominence in the seat with the SDLP. He was only 1,161 votes behind the UUP in 1997, and was thus almost the seat’s MP. He was then a MLA from 1998 until 2003, when he lost out by 700 votes to his SDLP running mate Eugene McMenamin. He was the party’s candidate for MP again in 2010. Based upon the SDLP’s recent performances in the seat he should be able to take Deeny’s with ease, especially as Denny’s biggest source of votes always seemed to be the SDLP.

Allan Bresland’s seat is at risk from the UUP (for reasons I explained earlier). The UUP are standing Ross Hussey. Hussey is a local councillor in Omagh and is the brother of former UUP MLA Derek Hussey. He was also the UCUNF candidate for this seat in 2010. Hussey bears a resemblance to Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, something he has previously used on election posters. With Deeny gone Hussey should be able to secure a rare gain for the UUP in this seat, unless the TUV dig into the UUP vote too much.

Another possibility is that one of these seats is taken by Omagh councillor McGowan, who is running as an independent in an attempt to follow in Deeny's footsteps. However all the local candidates and MLAs are lobbying on the hospital issue and Deeny has been very frustrated by the inability of an independent candidate to have much influence in the Stormont system. Deeny's fall in vote in 2007 indicates to me that the single issue hospital movement in this seat was already running out of steam; were it not for SDLP silliness they would have taken the seat. I suspect that even if Deeny was on the ballot he wouldn't take a seat (probably one of the reasons he is standing down), so my suspicion is that McGowan's odds are very long indeed. That said, it would be foolhardy to rule him out completely, to my mind, given the obvious salience of the hospital issue in the seat.