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Boost for Sinn Féin but result underlines differences between North and South

Party up by more than 4% since 2019, delivering timely morale boost after reversal down South at local and European elections

Sinn Féin's advance is mirrored by a corresponding 4% decline in the SDLP vote. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA
Sinn Féin's advance is mirrored by a corresponding 4% decline in the SDLP vote. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA
Pat Leahy's picture
Pat Leahy
Fri Jul 05 2024 - 17:00

In Northern Ireland’s zero-sum politics, a bad night for the DUP is a good night for Sinn Féin. If the split — as Brendan Behan said — used to be the first item on any republican agenda, it is unionism which is now increasingly divided, with predictable electoral consequences.

Sinn Féin has now achieved quite a hat-trick: the largest party in local government, in Stormont, and now in Westminster — though the party does not, of course, take its seats in the British parliament (a detail that didn’t stop Mary Lou McDonald from promising to badger Keir Starmer for additional funding for Northern Ireland).

Sinn Féin’s vote was up by over four per cent since 2019, delivering an important morale boost after the battering at the recent local and European elections in the South. It held its seven seats, came close to taking Gregory Campbell’s seat in East Derry and served notice that it will be coming after what’s left of Colum Eastwood’s majority in Foyle.

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Take those two and the electoral map of Northern Ireland would show Sinn Féin winning everything outside the Antrim and Belfast unionist heartlands; even now, Mick Fealty of the Slugger O’Toole website describes the south and west of Northern Ireland as “a closed shop that endures tiny episodic challenges to the hegemony of Sinn Féin”.

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“It’s a good result and certainly gives us a boost,” says Waterford TD David Cullinane. “We’ve always said that general elections are different in both North and South.”

But look a little closer. The Sinn Féin rise of 4 per cent is mirrored by a 4 per cent decline in the SDLP vote. Moreover, at a combined 40 per cent or so between the two nationalist parties, it is at about the same level it has been for a long time. Back in 2010, at the beginning of this long phase of Conservative governments, the combined Sinn Féin-SDLP vote was about 41 per cent. So Sinn Féin’s lock on the nationalist vote is growing, but the vote for candidates of the two main nationalist parties is pretty static. The volatility that we see in so many electorates is much more pronounced among unionist voters in the North.

By contrast, Sinn Féin’s support in the South has swung wildly in recent years: from under 10 per cent in the local elections in 2019, to nearly 25 per cent in the general election the following year. From there, it surged to 35-36 per cent for a period in 2022-23 before nosediving to just 12 per cent in the recent elections. That sort of rollercoaster is unimaginable amid the sectarian certainties and slow demographic changes that dominate the politics of Northern Ireland.

There’s no doubt Sinn Féin needed a boost — and no doubt it got one. Whether the party is any closer to diagnosing and remedying its problems in the South will take longer to assess. In supplying a boost to Sinn Féin, these elections also underline the political differences between the two jurisdictions. What works in the North, does not necessarily work in the South, and vice versa.