What a difference five years makes. In 2019, the clash between Sinn Féin’s John Finucane and one of the DUP’s big beasts, Nigel Dodds, in North Belfast was one of the stories of the election, as the constituency passed from a unionist to a nationalist MP for the first time.
Come the 2024 general election and, for all Sinn Féin emphasised it was taking nothing for granted, throughout the campaign the result never really felt in doubt.
And so it proved. The sitting MP John Finucane – a well-known lawyer and son of another lawyer, Pat Finucane, murdered by loyalists in 1989 – held his seat with a substantially increased majority of 5,612.
It says something about the recent history of north Belfast that his opponent Philip Brett, a DUP MLA, also lost a family member to violence during the Troubles – his 18-year-old brother, Gavin, who was shot dead in 2001 in a sectarian killing by loyalists who mistakenly believed he was a Catholic.
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Boundary changes helped Sinn Féin this time round – the constituency lost around 2,000 unionist votes with the move of the Shankill Road area into west Belfast, while approximately the same number of nationalist votes moved into the constituency.
It is another sign of the North’s changing political landscape that this seat will be a relatively safe Sinn Féin hold next time around.
Speaking of changing political landscapes, Finucane used his victory speech to make an appeal to the incoming Labour government in London to resource public services, reset the relationships “that have been damaged by so cruelly by the Tories” and build Casement Park and the A5 upgrade.
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