The last Irish Times/MRBI poll, published on Friday May 15th, indicated that the Belfast Agreement was likely to be comfortably carried in the Republic, with the situation less clear-cut in Northern Ireland.
That poll had been conducted on Tuesday May 12th, three days after the appearance of IRA prisoners at the Sinn Fein Ardfheis and before Tony Blair's visit to Northern Ireland and his attempt to assuage unionist fears regarding the impact of a Yes vote.
Since then, political commentators have primarily focused on the Northern Ireland referendum and specifically on the voting intentions of the unionist electorate as the anti-agreement unionist campaign appeared to have gained ground. Today's poll was conducted on Monday and Tuesday of this week and thus will have picked up to some degree the reactions of Ulster Unionist Party supporters to the assurances given by the party leadership of a more unified approach to the assembly elections after the referendum.
With a general consensus that an overall majority of 65%-70% in favour of the agreement is required to facilitate its implementation as smoothly as possible in the months ahead, the indications from today's poll are that such an outcome is still possible.
In broad terms (Table A), it can be seen that the significant shift away from support for the agreement and towards the No and undecided camps has been halted in recent days. Thus, 60 per cent now indicate their intention to vote in favour of the agreement, 25 per cent against, with 15 per cent still undecided. When the undecideds are excluded, overall support for the agreement has slipped from 84 per cent in the immediate aftermath of Good Friday to 69 per cent by May 12th/13th, recovering to a level of 71 per cent in the poll conducted last Monday and Tuesday.
Based on these figures, it would appear that the agreement is likely to be carried by a majority of the electorate in Northern Ireland, the key question being what proportion of that majority will be made up of unionist voters.
Table B illustrates that support for the agreement remains remarkably firm among the combined nationalist electorate (96 per cent in favour, 3 per cent against, with just 1 per cent undecided), with SDLP and Sinn Fein voters registering practically identical levels of support (96 per cent and 97 per cent respectively). The vast majority of DUP supporters remain firmly opposed to the agreement, a fact which, coupled with an increased level of support among UUP supporters, contributes to a combined unionist/loyalist figure of 40 per cent in favour of the agreement, 43 per cent against and 17 per cent undecided.
Excluding the undecideds, if these figures were replicated in the referendum itself, the agreement would be carried by an overall margin of over two-to-one with the support of approximately half of the combined unionist electorate. This assumes a similar turnout across both communities tomorrow. As to the likelihood of a disproportionate number of the unionist undecideds switching towards a Yes vote during the closing days of the campaign, it is worthwhile examining the trended data from mid-April to the present (Table C).
One of the more significant findings from the MRBI poll published last Friday was the degree to which unionist support for the agreement had dropped significantly over the previous four-week period from 62 per cent to 35 per cent, with a corresponding increase in the proportion opposed from 24 per cent to 45 per cent. This week's poll suggests that support among unionists has increased by five percentage points, with just over half of this increase accounted for by undecided voters moving towards a Yes vote.
The proportion of unionist voters now intending to vote against the agreement remains at a comparable level to that prevailing in last week's poll. Regardless of party affiliations, support for the agreement is highest among the middle classes and the Catholic population.
In line with the upturn in support for the agreement, the percentage suggesting that there is a "reasonably" or "very" poor chance of a lasting peace has dropped from 35 per cent to 30 per cent (Table D). While the number of people prepared to suggest that there is now a strong chance of lasting peace has dropped by a similar proportion, most of these have moved to the more neutral "maybe/maybe not" category, indicating that more people are prepared to withhold their judgement on the likely outcome of the process for the time being.
(Jack Jones is on leave)