Election Results: deep dive on Northern Ireland
Northern Irish politics are complicated - in this article I try to explain what's going on ...
In a previous post I lamented the lack of attention—both from politicians and pollsters—paid to Northern Ireland. I’m taking a moment to rectify that.
In fact, things have been rather shaken up by the General Election:
I was originally going to include Northern Ireland in my post-election roundup. However, I realised I couldn’t do the subject justice in a short space—in part because while some readers will know much more than me about the history and politics of Northern Ireland, to others it is a completely blank slate.
I’m going to do my best to inform the latter without annoying the former.
Background
Here’s a lightning primer for those who are not au fait with the politics of the six counties.
While the Good Friday agreement of 1997 ended the period of violence known as the Troubles, Northern Ireland remains a divided society. Its politics are sectarian: almost monolithically the Protestant community votes for Unionist parties (who want to remain part of the United Kingdom), the Catholic community for Nationalist parties (who want to become part of the Republic of Ireland)1.
You might also sometimes hear the terms ‘Loyalist’ and ‘Republican’. These are particular (extreme) strands of Unionism and Nationalism respectively, often associated with the paramilitary groups that were active during the Troubles … most famously the provisional IRA—the Irish Republican Army.
As well as parliamentary seats there is a devolved Assembly (often referred to as ‘Stormont’—similar to calling the UK parliament ‘Westminster’). This works via a somewhat complex power-sharing mechanism that sees parties from both sides of the divide represented in the devolved government. From time to time devolution and power-sharing breaks down (due to one or other side pulling out) and the assembly is suspended—this has happened a lot in the last decade.
The parties
There are some non-aligned/cross-community parties. Their chief difficulty tends to be that it’s hard to finesse the binary nature of the constitutional question. The most important party of this kind is the Alliance Party (the sister party of the Liberal Democrats), which has risen to become the third largest party at Stormont and has one Westminster MP.
The most important Nationalist parties are
Sinn Féin (that’s Irish for ‘Ourselves’), who were closely identified with the IRA during the Troubles and whose MPs do not attend Westminster or vote on principle
The SDLP (Social Democratic & Labour Party) is more moderate than Sinn Féin, advocating non-violence during the Troubles and attending Westminster
And on the Unionist side we have
The DUP (Democratic Unionist Party), which opposed the Good Friday agreement and is currently the largest Unionist force
The UUP (Ulster Unionist Party), which was the primary Unionist party up until the early 2000s and is today a moderate, centre-right party
The TUV (Traditional Unionist Voice), which is more hardline still than the DUP (arising in the late 2000s after the DUP signed up to devolution for Northern Ireland)
The SDLP and the UUP were the main political forces at the time of the Good Friday agreement—their respective leaders shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Their electoral fortunes have since waned: at the 2017 election, the only parties to win any seats were Sinn Féin (7 seats) and the DUP (10 seats)2.
Under First Past the Post it makes electoral sense for Unionists and Nationalists to settle on one party in each constituency—otherwise their vote will be split. This dynamic has tended to push each community towards one party overall. However, since 2017 the duopoly has broken down. First, the SDLP and Alliance won a small number of seats in 2019. And now …
The 2024 results
We’re now ready to return to the map. The key thing here is that the Unionist side has fragmented—the DUP have 5 MPs, UUP 1, TUV 1, and there is an independent Unionist MP as well.
The map can’t show you everything. This fragmentation is all the clearer when we look at the size of the majorities—the difference in the number of votes between the winning party and the second-placed party in each constituency:
This allows us to see that, in addition to losing seats, the DUP were run very close in a number of other constituencies. Meanwhile most of Sinn Féin’s seats are extremely safe.
There are a number of reasons for this. The leader of the DUP stepped down earlier this year after being arrested and charged with extremely serious offences; under the circumstances it is perhaps unsurprising that Alliance took his seat, Lagan Valley3. But the party’s problems are deeper than this. In truth, the long-term consequences of Brexit have put them in a difficult position.
Back to Brexit
Membership of the EU meant free movement and trade between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. This smoothed over a lot of potential difficulties in Northern Ireland—parties such as Alliance and the UUP opposed Brexit (as did the Nationalist parties) partly on this basis. The DUP supported it.
No doubt you’ve all tried to put the more tortuous elements of those years out of your minds, but a reminder is needed. Remember the talk of a ‘no deal’ Brexit? That is: a state of affairs in which the UK triggered Article 50 and left the EU after two years without coming to a mutually acceptable arrangement for how the post-Brexit relationship would function? The default outcome would have been a hard border on the island of Ireland. As an EU member, the Republic of Ireland would have been bound by treaty obligations to enforce this.
Twenty years prior, a civil war4 ended with a peace deal—a peace deal that works largely because both sides could see nonviolent pathways to pursue their respective political projects. Brexit jeopardised that. There were only three possible outcomes:
create a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (unacceptable to Nationalists)
keep the entire United Kingdom in the orbit of the EU (unacceptable to Leave supporters)
create a separate status for Northern Ireland, different from the rest of the United Kingdom (unacceptable to Unionists)
The last option is, of course, what the UK government chose. Northern Ireland has a special arrangement wherein it stays ‘aligned’ with the EU single market (while not being part of the single market) while the rest of the UK can go its own way. There is no hard border.
Yet, while this avoids putting Nationalists in an intolerable position, it undermines the Unionist political project by creating a ‘border in the Irish sea’ (i.e. there are customs checks on goods passing from Northern Ireland to the rest of the United Kingdom and vice versa). This is the reason the devolved government at Stormont was most recently suspended until earlier this year—the DUP withdrew in protest.
Recent events
In order to mitigate this problem the deal has undergone some tweaks. The DUP signed up to the most recent iteration—the ‘Windsor Framework’—and power sharing was restored. But the truth is that it is just a mitigation—the root problem hasn’t gone anywhere.
It was this that really breathed life into the TUV—that, and the pact they made with Reform UK.
Yes, that’s right. It seems to have passed most people by, but Reform actually5 won six seats, not five. The TUV stood and won their first seat under Reform party branding.
After their change of leader, and in the last weeks before the election in particular, the DUP changed their tone somewhat, perhaps attempting to take the sting out of the campaign. But as we see from the results this was surely too little, too late.
The future
So what next for Northern Ireland?
Right now Nationalist parties hold half the seats. Sinn Féin has seven and is also the largest party in the devolved Assembly—the first time a Nationalist party has taken that position.
It’s worth noting that, down in the Republic6, Sinn Féin has recently achieved historically high levels of popularity (although this has gone into sharp reverse this year). Here’s the polling for the three most popular parties:
Without getting into the detail of Republic of Ireland politics as well, suffice to say that this is because
the two historically largest parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) have been in coalition with each other since 2020—an unprecedented situation
Sinn Féin has tried, with some success, to reinvent itself as a party of the populist left
The fact that Sinn Féin has lately been riding high on both sides of the border led to a certain amount of talk of Irish reunification—their ultimate political project.
However, while Sinn Féin becoming the largest party in Northern Ireland is a significant moment, reunification is far from imminent. The power sharing mechanisms in Northern Ireland prevent unilateral action by Unionist or Nationalist parties. Instead, the Good Friday agreement sets out the criteria under which a referendum could be held. In practice, it would require a persistent majority in favour of Irish reunification to demonstrably exist in Northern Ireland—which is not presently the case.
Though claims of impending reunification are overwrought, this kind of talk is no doubt keeping Unionist politicians awake at night. The fragmentation of Unionist support is not a stable state: it is highly likely to coalesce behind a single party again, given time. But it’s hard to say which party that will be. Will the DUP bounce back? Will the UUP instead start to hoover up their voters? Or will the TUV—bolstered by their pact with Reform UK—succeed in squeezing the DUP out?
Time will tell.
To add some complexity the Unionist parties tend to be more right-wing than the Nationalist parties.
There was also an independent Unionist MP.
While losing another elsewhere.
For all intents and purposes, that’s what the Troubles amounted to.
In a manner of speaking.
Sinn Féin stands on both sides of the border.