WESTMINSTER 2010: NORTHERN IRELAND ELECTIONS:Michelle Gildernew, Fearghal McKinney and Rodney Connor are, in their own disparate ways, excellent candidates, writes DAN KEENAN, Northern Editor, in Fermanagh-South Tyrone
MICHELLE Gildernew is looking to borrow some SDLP votes. That’s an old story in Fermanagh-South Tyrone. Calling on doors in the huge constituency she advises people she knows generally lean to a softer form of nationalism that SDLP candidate Fearghal McKinney can’t win – but he can stop her winning.
“Maybe you would have a word with the rest of the family and let them know that,” she repeats. The argument is left at that. Nothing more needs to be said.
Churchill would have understood what the Sinn Féin Minister was at among “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”. So does her chief rival in the constituency, agreed unionist unity candidate Rodney Connor. Who wins this battle – Gildernew or Connor – hinges on how unionists and nationalists respond to the Orange or Green them-and-us argument that’s been played here for centuries.
Gildernew is a well-known and popular figure originally from Caledon in south Tyrone. Some unionist farmers give credit for her ministerial work and, while not going so far as to vote for her, admit she is far from being the bête noire figure some of her party colleagues represent in their eyes.
That intra-nationalist battle has been rejoined, but this time the SDLP has selected former UTV journalist McKinney. Almost immediately he and his party found themselves in a nightmare scenario, cast as the “splitters” as Sinn Féin faces a single Independent candidate determined to wrest the seat from Gildernew, an abstentionist republican. The dilemma is made more stark by Sinn Féin’s withdrawal from South Belfast, clearing the path there for SDLP MP Alasdair McDonnell. The question will be why this is not reciprocated in Fermanagh. McKinney risks being rubbished as an irrelevance if she wins, or being blamed for her defeat to non-nationalist forces if she loses.
Their Independent opponent, Rodney Connor, is the undeclared unionist candidate. His posters simply portray his name and photograph. They are devoid of Union flags, indeed any words beginning with “U”. The only thing that approaches a slogan is the word “Representation” – a one-word manifesto aimed at countering the Sinn Féin position on fighting to win but not take a House of Commons seat.
They are, in their own disparate ways, three excellent candidates.
Alongside Alliance candidate Vasundhara Kamble, doggedly fighting to build on his party’s electoral foothold here, they are the latest combatants in the old struggle between historic foes.
Michelle Gildernew, deliberately targeting the SDLP and the stay-at-home vote, cites the logic and tactics that won for hunger striker Bobby Sands nearly 30 years ago.
On a carefully targeted canvass on a quiet Sunday she appeals for solidarity. Connor, if elected, would back a public expenditure-cutting Cameron government, thus imperilling measures aimed at alleviating rural poverty and challenging its viability. He is also the Orange preferred candidate. In the townlands around Brookeborough, the village that bears the former unionist leader’s name, Sinn Féin canvassers believe the old unionist ideology still holds good – they still don’t really want a Catholic about the place. She doggedly backs her abstentionist position, arguing there is little point in taking a Westminster seat but every point in being an MP. Rodney Connor’s style could hardly be more different. Polite to a fault and quietly spoken, he accentuates the positive. There is never any direct reference to his chief republican rival – only to her failing.
“I want to be a voice for the people of Fermanagh and South Tyrone at Westminster,” he says over and over. His election handouts state he is a “unionist by inclination and background” who believes Northern Ireland is best served within the United Kingdom even if on its western periphery.
He spent a warm spring Saturday at a vintage car rally in Caledon, discreetly preaching the value of taking one’s Westminster seat and vowing to work for everyone without favour.
In tow are unionist big hitters Fermanagh-born DUP Minister Arlene Foster and her colleague Lord (Maurice) Morrow from Dungannon. Also there is Tom Elliott, a key broker in the deal which backed the Connor candidacy.
History weaves its way through this constituency, separating the sides yet, strangely, tying them together all the while. This is picturesque and stately Caledon, named after the mill owner and lord, where local unionists plot their lineage back to the 17th century. It’s also the same village where, in 1968, a young Austin Currie squatted in a house to highlight discrimination against a Catholic family – the Gildernews.
Connor professes innocence of all Sinn Féin’s charges. He is a servant of “the entire community” – itself a backward jibe at Sinn Féin. He is no cutter of public services, he says. “My entire career has been in public service. I know the role the public sector plays.” And he firmly denies there is anything sectarian about an agreed candidate on the unionist side, as Gildernew alleges.
Although the Connor campaign does not say it in so few words – it’s Sinn Féin or him. Westminster’s first-past-the-post voting system seems crude alongside the complexities and alternatives offered by PR, and if offers simple, if crude, choices.
None of which seems to offer McKinney much room for manoeuvre. The SDLP stood aside for Bobby Sands in 1981 and for Owen Carron after the hunger striker’s death. It felt it had little option. Refusing Gerry Adams’s appeals for a pact, the SDLP looks to some in Sinn Féin as if it is trying to regain the virginity it lost in the dire days of H-Block protest.
But for McKinney and the SDLP, history in Fermanagh and South Tyrone is something to be freed from, not repeated. He vociferously retaliates against one voter’s charge that he is a splitter, an imposter in a republican constituency. The election is not about territory, he says, it’s about representation at Westminster where the people will need robust defence from Tory economics.
This line of argument could hold sway in one house, canvassed by Sinn Féin, where four voters, all workers for the Quinn group, are fearful of ruin. His main rivals are either Conservative or abstentionist and both are divisive, he alleges. “By voting SDLP there is an opportunity to say No to those that would further divide this community.”
It’s a bold appeal to the centre, but he knows that in Northern politics the middle-of-the-road candidate can get run over.
Since Churchill’s “dreary steeples” speech in 1920 further cataclysms have swept the world, removing empires, toppling leaders and their big ideas. Yet the more things change, the more they appear to stay the same in Fermanagh South Tyrone.