I find it unnerving, how wise journalists and other deep thinkers become when they check things in the rear-view mirror. For example, how many got Sinn Féin’s thunderous performance in the South’s last general election before it happened? Right, none. The fact that Sinn Féin itself didn’t get it right in advance doesn’t change the hopelessly inaccurate predictions by columnists and pundits. And how many of them saw the huge vote-swell for the Alliance Party here last week? I think every hack should be required by law to fill in their own report card on inaccurate predictions.
Some commentators can be wrong in the rear-view mirror and in what they can see ahead. For example, the Alliance Party doubled its size, which would seem to encourage the belief that a great deal more people are joining the forget-about-border brigade. Does that stand up under scrutiny?
Check the figures. Alliance went from 72,717 first preference votes in 2017 to 116, 681 last week. That’s an increase of near to 44,000. But many of Alliance’s votes came from cannibalising other centrist parties. The SDLP got 95, 958 in 2017; they got 78,237 in 2022. That’s approaching 18,000 fewer votes. The Green Party got 18,527 in 2017; they got 16, 433 in 2022. That’s a drop of more than 2,000. Already that’s half of the Alliance Party increase. So enough with the growth of a new generation of Rory McIlroys who describe themselves as ‘Northern Irish’.
If I wanted to be seriously stupid at this point (shut up, Virginia), I’d paint a picture of the Alliance Party ranks swelling more and more, until all trace of ‘sectarian’ voting in our stateen had been suffocated. But the results look more like people passing out on voting for a middle-of-the-road party by giving their vote to another middle-of-the-road party.
And have you ever wondered how many Catholics/nationalists and Protestants/unionists were in Alliance? I was in touch with a young man over the weekend and he figured you could calculate it by considering what parties the Alliance voters gave their second preference to. Guess what? By a proportion of 2:1, Alliance voters gave their second preference to nationalist parties. Not scientific, of course, but it does give you an idea of how Alliance might split, should there ever be a border poll.
Mind you, the very notion that Alliance Party members are agnostic on the border question is the same as saying the party accepts the status quo – that is, as things stand, it’s giving its support to the union with Britain.
Funny the things you see when you lift a stone and look underneath.
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