Voters in loyalist area eager to see Assembly 'up and running'

South Belfast:It's curious the way people talk. "As long as you're all working together, isn't that what's important?" the pointedly reasonable woman on the doorstep asks DUP candidate Jimmy Spratt.

He agrees that it's important to work together. Indeed he does. After all, he is the DUP mayor of Castlereagh and for many years served in the RUC and on its representative body. For working together, Spratt's your man, undoubtedly.

"As long as you're working together," repeats the woman with polite insistence.

"Absolutely," says Spratt, as the little circular verbal dance ensues.

The woman and Spratt each know what the other is saying. She's saying, between the lines, "Will, you just get on with running the place, even if it is with Sinn Féin."

Spratt understands that but can't acknowledge it directly. There's a protocol and a leadership diktat to be observed: nothing specific on powersharing until after polling day - if then.

We're tramping around the Rathmore estate area, off Finaghy Road South in the South Belfast constituency, a mainly loyalist area.

"You can certainly depend on my vote," says Victor Gourley.

Why so upfront and enthusiastic, The Irish Timesasks? "Because I think this is a very worthy candidate. He has done great service for this area, and for the RUC," he adds, addressing Spratt directly.

And does Gourley have a view as to whether the DUP should share power with Sinn Féin after the election? "Sinn Féin are elected; there should be powersharing," he says, straight and to the point, as is his nature, which we quickly discovered.

Now if Gourley and the woman's comments were an aberration, it would be wrong to major on their points of view. But here, in a loyalist area over a few hours of hard canvassing, nobody is making play of the tribal issues apart from saying explicitly or implicitly, "Give our head peace and get on with it".

Spratt is reasonably confident that he and his running partner, Christopher Stalford, will be elected to make a gain for the DUP in South Belfast. "I can't believe the Ulster Unionists are running three candidates," he says of the UUP, as if the main unionist opposition were intent on gifting the DUP that extra seat.

"Splitter Spratt has got it wrong," insists former Stormont minister Michael McGimpsey. Proportional representation will see him and either outgoing MLA Esmond Birnie or former Belfast lord mayor Robert Stoker being elected, he adds.

The "Splitter" tag came about when Spratt ran against McGimpsey in the Westminster election two years ago, allowing SDLP Assembly candidate Alasdair McDonnell to come through the middle and become the first nationalist MP for the constituency.

"There's a DUP nervousness out there about whether or not they are going to do the deal," he says, when canvassing in the mixed middle-class Cairns Hill estate. People just don't know where they are with the DUP, and that will be to the UUP's advantage in the constituency, McGimpsey feels.

A mile or so up the road in Primrose Hill, Anna Lo is canvassing for Alliance, focusing on the Chinese families living in the middle-class estate, of which there are at least 14. Lo and Carol Kwok chat away in Cantonese as Kwok's children watch a Chinese television station. Kwok, married with two children, has never voted before. But she will this time, and for Lo. "She says she will tell all her friends to do the same," says Lo.

"At least you have some policies," a homegrown Northern Ireland woman tells Lo. The pair discuss water rates, political accountability, and the crucifying costs for their children of managing their university debts. "Before it was the Troubles that drove young people out of Northern Ireland. Now it is the huge cost of living here," says the woman, as Lo nods sympathetically.

MP Alasdair McDonnell and Carmel Hanna, also a former Stormont minister, have split the constituency down the middle and - "so far," says Hanna - are observing each other's patches. There's a distant Glens of Antrim relationship between them by marriage, but the rivalry between the pair is fierce, and even joked about by local SDLP folk. It's that competitiveness which gives them a good chance of holding their two seats, Hanna says.

Sinn Féin's Alex Maskey has been pounding around middle-class, mixed community of Stranmillis. Some of the doors he calls to are professional unionists. Like Gourley, he says he is convinced of one fact: "The DUP's last Assembly manifesto was for a fair deal, not for no deal. They could pay a high price if they fluff this opportunity because, the unionists I have managed to engage with, I am very, very sure that they want the Assembly up and running."