Sinn Fein on track for Northern Ireland’s best ever local election results

Nationalist party Sinn Féin was on course for its best-ever local election result in Northern Ireland on Saturday, in a contest widely regarded as a vote on the post-Brexit political impasse.

Sinn Féin, which supports Irish unity, scored just under 31 per cent of first preference votes – up 7.7 per cent since the 2019 local elections, with all first preference votes for the region’s councils increasing. and up from 29 percent earlier. The preferences it got in last year’s assembly elections.

The Democratic Unionist Party, the region’s largest party in favor of keeping Northern Ireland in the UK, had 23.3 percent of its first preference, down 0.8 percent from 2019 but up from last year’s 21.3 percent.

Sinn Féin’s first minister-in-waiting Michelle O’Neill called it a “significant election result”.

“It is very important, politically and psychologically, that the nationalist vote is bigger than the unionist vote,” tweeted Alex Kane, former head of communications for the small Ulster Unionist Party.

DUP leader Sir Geoffrey Donaldson said he was “very pleased that our vote has stood”. UUP leader Doug Beattie said he was disappointed by the results.

Smaller nationalist and unionist parties took major blows, while the centrist Alliance Party, which climbed to third place in assembly elections last May, was set to win the third-highest number of councillors.

O’Neill called on London and Dublin – co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended Northern Ireland’s three-decade-long conflict in 1998 – to end the DUP’s boycott of the power-sharing executive and assembly at Stormont to help do.

The DUP has brought the region’s politics to a standstill since last May’s assembly elections in an attempt to press for further changes to post-Brexit business rules, saying Northern Ireland as part of the UK role has been underestimated.

“I think there is a lot of responsibility now on both governments,” O’Neill told BBC Northern Ireland. “I call upon the two governments to actually come together now as co-guarantors. , , Put a plan on the table, through the British Irish Intergovernmental Conference, to have that meeting as a matter of urgency. , , How will we have a restored executive?”.

The Irish Foreign Office said the British Irish Intergovernmental Conference would “meet again in the coming weeks”.

There was no immediate reaction from London or Dublin. Britain and the EU this year agreed on the Windsor Framework to streamline trade rules.

The DUP said it had made significant changes to its stance on the post-Brexit trade arrangement, but insisted more was needed.

The council election results are the latest in a series of setbacks for Northern Irish unionism. Sinn Féin overtook the DUP as the largest party in the territory’s assembly last May and Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland, according to the latest census figures.

“It (the result) is going to change the landscape,” Sarah Creighton, a lawyer and unionist commentator, told BBC Northern Ireland.