Local notables standing is a new departure – but the sectarian nature of Northern elections is going nowhere, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
TALK ABOUT coaxing Olivia O’Leary into the political arena doesn’t mark a new departure for the South, where inviting media celebrity to shine up parties has form – though the stellar O’Leary is convincing that it isn’t for her. Ex-television presenters on the campaign trail north of the Border operate in a different world. Fearghal McKinney and Mike Nesbitt make neat bookends: ex-UTV, frontmen on tea-time news, instantly recognisable. Always proper professionals on screen, their choice of parties won’t have surprised many. McKinney has lined out for the SDLP in Fermanagh-South Tyrone against Sinn Féin, Nesbitt as Ulster Unionist contender for the Strangford seat vacated by Iris Robinson. Both are presumably limbering up for the next Assembly election.
Nesbitt has more chance of protest votes about the Robinson affair than McKinney of winning over unreconstructed anti-Sinn Féiners, in a constituency where unionists and nationalists run each other so close that only a single tribal champion can ensure success. (Abstentionist MP Michelle Gildernew of Sinn Féin first won her seat by a margin of 53.)
Much old-style political recruitment was bad: the family fiefdoms North and South, the Paisleys and Robinsons, the Flynns, the grey undistinguished men who were “big in the Orange”, or the GAA. But there’s a lot to be said for the traditional and often demanding political ladder – people living and working in the real world while giving up time for policies and parties they believe in, serving as councillors while earning a living, building up voter support by work on the ground, then a few of them going on to full-time politics.
Inviting local celebrities to start at the top with nominations as MPs has a sting. Celebrity blow-ins are harsh on those who have paid their dues knocking doors. And when established parties and politicians give a free run to a non-politico, standing as an Independent, there is bound to be coolness from the slighted, and from observers.
The other new feature in this election is the link between Ulster Unionism and Cameron’s Conservatives. A process of selection – meant to involve the two parties on equal terms – generated more rows than candidates and ended in a welter of familiar anxiety about splitting the vote. Pompous assurances from Cameron’s shadow Northern secretary Owen Paterson, and Cameron himself, that theirs was the way of the future, designed to win new voters to a modern, non-sectarian unionism, melted away.
Vote-splitting dread swamped Cameronian pretensions. Fermanagh-South Tyrone unionists found their shared champion. Rodney Connor, just retired as former chief executive of Fermanagh council, will run as an Independent rather than under the unfortunate, and now largely redundant label of “Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force”, UCUNF for short. It was a curious sort of advertisement that his main merit was his lack of previous political experience. He promises if elected to take the Tory whip, reserving the right to vote differently on local interests. Whatever about attempts to blend New Toryism and shined-up unionism elsewhere, this was a blatant attempt to defeat the candidate favoured by Catholic voters. The pretext was Gildernew’s abstentionism but there is equal keenness to eliminate the SDLP’s Alasdair McDonnell in South Belfast.
The choice and designation of Connor was a “model”, the DUP said, for unionist unity against the rising republican tide. But what kind of model? Posters with the banner of “Conservatives and Unionists” and the slogan “Vote for Change in South Belfast” had hit the lamp-posts even before those of the industrious McDonnell. Paula Bradshaw, pictured against a background of misty red, white and blue, is another newcomer to politics, but has headed a development group in the depressed loyalist Village district. She looked good in her literature, and her posters.
Then the Orange Order cracked the whip, with a threat to advise South Belfast members to withhold their votes unless an agreed candidate was found. Bradshaw said she would do as bid by UUP leader Sir Reg Empey.
Though new SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie has sharply rejected a Gerry Adams invitation to discussions, there will be internal SDLP arguments in future elections, in the face of revived pan-unionism, for an agreed electoral strategy with Sinn Féin. The argument against is that elections should not be a sectarian headcount. The argument for is that the war is over – principle no longer demands self-sacrificing campaigns against the IRA’s political wing; and, like it or not, Northern Ireland is divided on sectarian lines.
The Fermanagh-South Tyrone model might cost Sinn Féin a seat. Or it will tempt SDLP voters to desert their new candidate, for all his telly-charm, to keep “them ’uns” out of the seat. In South Belfast, Alasdair McDonnell may just bank on inter-unionist loathing.