Mid Ulster: McGuinness given a free run
Martin McGuinness, the high-profile Sinn Fein chief negotiator and former IRA member, might have expected a tough battle to retain his Mid Ulster seat this time around. Sinn Fein has had a poor year, battered by the furore over the murder of Belfast man Robert McCartney and snubbed by George Bush. And McGuinness’ continuing absence from the Commons – along with his fellow Sinn Fein MPs, he refuses to swear allegiance to the Queen – raises doubts about his effectiveness.
However, a sectarian argument between the two unionist parties, which has destroyed the agreement that saw them unite against McGuinness, seems to have handed him the seat on a plate.
Ever since 1983, the centrist Ulster Unionist Party has agreed not to field a candidate in Mid Ulster, a seat that sits right in the heart of rural Northern Ireland, stretching down through farmland along the west shore of Lough Neagh.
That has left the hardline Democratic Unionist Party a clear run at the seat; and for 14 years, William McCrea held the seat, as Sinn Fein and the SDLP split the nationalist vote.
But in 1997, boundary changes meant McCrea was defending a seat that contained only 30 per cent of his old constituency and was 65 per cent Catholic. McGuinness won the seat by around 2,000 votes, and in 2001 held it convincingly with a 10,000 majority, despite the UUP once more not fielding a candidate.
This time around, the Ulster Unionists have decided to contest the seat; their candidate is Billy Armstrong, since 1998 a Mid Ulster member of the moribund Northern Ireland Assembly.
So why has the situation changed? Not surprisingly, the two parties have different accounts.
The DUP candidate – William McCrea’s son Ian, a local councillor – lays the blame squarely with the Ulster Unionists. McCrea jnr claims that negotiations between the two parties on their overall strategy for the election broke down over two other marginal seats, Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Belfast South. The UUP insisted that the DUP stand aside from both to guarantee a unionist victory, in exchange for the UUP standing aside in Mid Ulster.
He says that a fair deal would have seen the parties “take one each” while the DUP retained Mid Ulster, and that the UUP’s insistence that it keep both southern seats was “ridiculous”.
“It’s unfortunate that the Ulster Unionists feel that now is the time to split the unionist vote,” he says.
McCrea says that splitting of the vote makes his attempt to unseat McGuinness impossible.
“All it does is they are increasing the Sinn Fein majority and the nationalist stronghold within Mid Ulster … only a single unionist candidate can at least make Martin McGuinness fight for his seat, whereas now he doesn’t even have to set foot in Mid Ulster.”
Attacking his rival’s decision to stand, he claims Armstrong is simply “on a power trip”.
Armstrong, however, denies there was ever a formal agreement, and says it had always been up to the Ulster Unionists to decide whether or not they stood a candidate.
“There was no agreement – the DUP never contacted anyone,” he says.
For years, the UUP judged it better not to stand a candidate, but then in 1997 the DUP failed to hold the seat against McGuinness. The final straw, Armstrong says, was when McCrea snr moved across Lough Neagh to contest the South Antrim seat in a 2000 by-election.
South Antrim had been held by the Ulster Unionist Clifford Forsythe since 1983 until his death prompted the by-election, but McCrea won the seat by 800 votes – although he only held it for nine months, losing it back to the UUP in the 2001 election.
Claiming that many locals were “offended” by the DUP’s actions, Armstrong says: “William McCrea abandoned the people of Mid Ulster when he stood in another constituency to fight another unionist candidate.”
He adds that he was selected and started campaigning before any of his opponents – “that was common knowledge throughout Mid Ulster for a long time before any other candidate was even selected” – though he admits the DUP were always going to stand a candidate.
He also denies the “power trip” charge, saying: “I’m there to work for the people . the people will be first and foremost in my mind.”
Asked about the damage the situation will do to hopes of a unionist victory, Armstrong says: “There is not much we can do about it now.”
However, unlike McCrea, he remains hopeful of beating McGuinness. Since the SDLP are also standing a candidate, there is a chance that opposition between the nationalist parties will allow him to “slip in between them”.
The main beneficiary of all this is, of course, McGuinness, who proclaims himself “pretty confident” of victory. He also denies that a single unionist candidate could have won the seat in any case, claiming that Sinn Fein has, in driving forward the Northern Ireland peace process, “transformed” people’s lives.
“We would be very confident of retaining the seat in any circumstances,” he says.
“We don’t take the voters for granted … but, you know, given the way things have gone we can be confident that we’re going to win.”
On the Robert McCartney affair, he says most voters – along with Sinn Fein – feel two things: a desire to see justice for the McCartney sisters, but also anger that Sinn Fein’s political opponents have used the affair “to beat Sinn Fein over the head with a big stick”.
McGuinness says his pitch to voters will stress his belief that there will soon be another breakthrough in the peace process. Most of the steps needed for progress had been completed last year before negotiations broke down, he says. (The breakdown came over the DUP’s insistence that the IRA provide photographic evidence of its decommissioning, something McGuinness describes as a “sackcloth and ashes” demand.)
In other words, only the final hurdle remains, he says: “We believe, in the aftermath of the election, that there is going to be another effort to break the deadlock.”
The other person reaping the benefit of the unionist dispute is McGuinness’ moderate nationalist rival, the SDLP’s Patsy McGlone, who like Armstrong and McGuinness is a Mid Ulster member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Because the danger of McGuinness losing his seat has disappeared, there is no longer any fear that the SDLP could cost him the election. And that, McGlone says, means the anger and abuse that have characterised past elections are no longer present.
Describing the campaign as “quite quiet”, he says: “The raw sectarian antagonism and ideas that have been expressed to us at the doorstep previously aren’t there this time … those emotions and ideas aren’t there.”
On the breakdown of the unionist arrangement, McGlone says that “shabby type of deal” has not been to the benefit of the Ulster Unionists, because encouraging their supporters to vote for another party in the Westminster elections has made it harder for them to “retrieve” those voters for local and Northern Ireland elections.
McGlone is confident that when the nationalist vote splits, the SDLP will be left as the second biggest party in Mid Ulster, and will use that to pick up council seats and possibly an Assembly seat. That could spark the “rebirth and regrowth” of his party in Mid Ulster, he adds.
The SDLP stands for “agreement through reconciliation and trust” and an alternative to the “retributive justice” endorsed by Sinn Fein, McGlone says.
Blaming extremists for the collapse of the 1998 Good Frida
