Constituency profile/Mid-Ulster: A second generation of McCreas is taking on Martin McGuinness, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
One of the certainties of the Westminster elections in Northern Ireland is that Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin will hold his seat in Mid-Ulster.
Like his party colleagues in neighbouring West Tyrone and Fermanagh-South Tyrone, once elected he has consolidated his position and now looks virtually immovable.
McGuinness first ran for this constituency in 1997, challenging the Rev Willie McCrea for a seat the DUP man had held since 1983. The SDLP's Denis Haughey was also a strong contender for the nationalist vote and, with the IRA off ceasefire at the time, McGuinness's victory was by no means certain.
But nationalists who might have had reservations about voting Sinn Féin decided to opt for McGuinness on the basis that he had the best chance of unseating McCrea. The DUP incumbent aroused massive resentment after he appeared on a public platform with Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright, who was later shot dead by a republican inmate of the Maze Prison. McGuinness won by 1,883 votes over his DUP rival.
The Rev McCrea won a Westminster by-election in South Antrim for the DUP in 2000 and therefore it was logical to run him again in that constituency in the 2001 General Election when he lost the seat by a narrow margin to David Burnside of the Ulster Unionists.
The party chose McCrea's son, Ian, as its contender in Mid-Ulster and, although he polled a creditable 15,549 votes, McGuinness had by now pulled way ahead of the field and secured a majority of 10,118 votes over the DUP candidate. McCrea snr returned to Mid-Ulster for the 2003 Assembly elections when he topped the poll but, on this occasion, he has gone back to South Antrim.
For the first time since 1983, the Ulster Unionist Party is running a candidate in Mid-Ulster, local farmer Billy Armstrong MLA from Stewartstown. Pointing to the Assembly vote, where the DUP got 20.8 per cent compared with 14.4 per cent for the Ulster Unionists, Ian McCrea says it "proves that the DUP is the largest of the two unionist parties." He believes that, as has been the case in Westminster elections in this constituency for the past 22 years, the DUP should have a clear run "and try to defeat Martin McGuinness". . .
An accomplished Gospel-singer like his father, 28-year-old Ian has recorded several CDs, with such titles as This Ship Will Sail and Sustaining Grace. He has never visited Dublin: "Maybe on a protest." On the UUP leadership, he says: "David Trimble makes it easy for the DUP." Citing as an example the slogan: "Decent people vote Ulster Unionists". "No one in their right mind would think of these things," says McCrea.
Billy Armstrong explains that the motivation for his candidacy was all the DUP sniping at his party. "They started to undermine and ridicule us," he says. If anyone stood aside, it should have been the DUP because Armstrong was first in the field: "I had my posters up, I was selected long before they selected their candidate."
He believes the DUP should have had the "decency" to step back. He now hopes to surpass young McCrea's total: "We have to turn the tables."
The SDLP's Patsy McGlone is running in a Westminster election for the first time, but got elected to the Assembly in 2003. He was previously the party's general secretary and press adviser to John Hume. "The people are saying to us on the doorsteps, 'We lent Sinn Féin our votes in the past: the Provisional movement has taken far too much for granted and we aren't going to fall for any more duplicity'," he says. "There is a comeback to the SDLP."
He predicts the SDLP will take votes back from Martin McGuinness this time. Since the unionist vote is split, he believes nationalists will feel under less pressure to rally round the incumbent.
Martin McGuinness sharply rejects claims by other candidates that he is not just an abstentionist but an "absentee" MP. "Not true," he says. "I'm in the constituency several days a week." He says he is not taking the result in Mid-Ulster for granted and he flatly denies any suggestion he was ever tempted to return to his native Derry to run in the Foyle constituency.
"Never: once I committed myself to this constituency here I was always very determined to continue to represent people who gave me such a huge vote of confidence by electing me their MP in the first place and then an even greater one the second time around when I went to defend the seat."
The Northern Bank raid and the death of Robert McCartney may be seen as difficult issues for Sinn Féin but McGuinness says that, in the course of the campaign, "the Northern Bank hasn't been mentioned at all". He said the McCartney case had been mentioned just a few times by "people voicing their anger at the murderers of Robert McCartney, not blaming us in any way because they know we don't want to be associated with such people".
There had also been "an awful lot of anger at our political opponents and the way they tried to use it against us", he added.