Sinn Féin was poised on Friday night to overtake the DUP as the largest party of local government after a day that saw the party emerge as the big winners in the North’s council elections.
If successful, it would be the first time a nationalist party has held the most seats at council level and would reinforce the position won by Sinn Féin last year as the largest party in the Assembly.
Speaking to reporters at the count centre in Belfast City Hall on Friday, the Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald said the election had resulted in a “very strong showing for Sinn Féin right across the North” and the “big issue” had been the need for the return of the Stormont institutions.
The North’s First Minister designate and the party’s vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, said there had to be a “plan now for a way back to a restored Executive” and called on the two governments to take joint action to re-establish the powersharing government.
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She also called for a meeting of the British Irish Inter-governmental Conference to take place as soon as possible.
Voters, she said, “made it very clear to me they all want the Assembly up and running, they want last year’s election result respected”, she said.
At about 8pm on Friday, with more than half of the 462 seats yet to be filled, Sinn Féin was estimated to have gained at least 12 seats on its 2019 performance and was closing on the DUP, which is expected to return a roughly similar number of seats to last time, when it took 122 seats, 17 in advance of Sinn Féin’s 105.
In the District Electoral Areas (DEAs) where counting was begun, Sinn Féin took approximately 31 per cent of the first preference vote, compared to the DUP’s 24 per cent; Alliance was on 13 per cent, the UUP on 12 and the SDLP on nine.
Counting was due to continue late into the night and will resume on Saturday morning.
The DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson told reporters on Friday the party’s vote was “holding up extremely well” but said if Sinn Féin did emerge as the largest party there would be “lessons that unionism need to learn”.
“The DUP without a shadow of a doubt is by far the largest unionist party and I think that unionism needs to look at where it’s going and regroup around a strong voice for unionism,” he said.
The Alliance Party is expected to pick up seats on Saturday, with party insiders confident it will return a tally of upwards of 60 seats, up from the 53 it secured in 2019.
“Any of the gains we hope to make will come much later, but it looks good,” the Alliance leader Naomi Long said.
Both the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and SDLP lost seats, but indications were the SDLP’s losses were not as significant as had been feared.
The SDLP leader Colum Eastwood told UTV the party had expected a “difficult day” and a lot of nationalists were “very angry, very fed up, wanting to send a message to the DUP to get back to work and I think a lot of people felt the best way to do that was to vote for Sinn Féin”.
The Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie acknowledged his party was “under pressure” but said the problem for unionism was it was “likely to take a hit right across the board in some shape or form ... that’s a question for us, what is going wrong?”
One of the day’s big fallers was the leader of the Green Party, Mal O’Hara, who lost his seat in the Castle DEA in north Belfast, a year after his predecessor Clare Bailey stood down after losing her seat in the Assembly.
The Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leader Billy Hutchinson was also expected to lose his seat in the Court DEA in north Belfast.
