Jeff Peel's Diary

Robinson needs to start cleansing his party of flat-earth nutters if he is to "do an SNP" Image via Wikipedia

I’m remarkably up-beat this morning. I have cast aside my normal grumpiness.  While the Northern Ireland election count has been a spectacular mess – the fact that we still have hordes of minor civil servants counting little slips of paper days after the vote is stupefying – the emerging result is good.

Let me explain.

There are a few interesting developments.  Let’s skip over all the constitutional garbage. All the parties are now Little Ulster parties. Even I am beginning to give up on any romantic notions I ever had that Northern Ireland could be ‘integrated’ and treated like, erm, Finchley.

That would be depressing but for a few developments. The first is that the UUP is pretty much dead. The Alliance Party is now a more important party and a vast swathe of middle-class voters is defecting from the UUP to Alliance. Alliance has become the middle class Unionist party (that doesn’t call itself Unionist and whose voter base is not exclusively Protestant). And it’s even beginning to behave a bit more like a sensible, thinking Party. David Forde was the only leader to face-up to the water charges issue and fess-up that he could countenance them (somebody has to pay for the investment needed).  Oh and it had by far the best election broadcast – all CGI – and Naomi Long’s narration was excellent.

Meanwhile, Peter Robinson made clear in the hustings that he wanted the ‘whole community’ to vote DUP. He was at pains to make clear that the constitutional issues were a done deal and that we needed to move on to more bread-and-butter (AKA secular) issues. Well said.  Pity though about all the new-earth creationist nutters in his Party and the fact that the majority of candidates are well-known bigots.

When I showed up at the polling station to cast my own vote (for Alliance by the way, reluctantly, given that Trevor Lunn was my only AP Assembly candidate) I was greeted by the usual horde of DUP leafleters and hangers-on – all of whom, I’m pretty sure, played flutes.

But all things considered things are looking better. The UUP is on the verge of being eradicated from the ballot paper (one less sectarian party to worry about). As I type there is a real prospect that Connal McDevitt may not be elected (one less hectoring know-all from the South to look at on television).  The Alliance Party has more popular support (meaning it will be forced to decide what it stands for in terms of real policy issues rather than merely be ‘nice’).  And the DUP needs to start thinking about how it cleanses itself of the rotten core of sectarianism at its heart in order to “do an SNP” and win an overall majority at Stormont.

Tantalisingly, there is a real prospect that the DUP – if it can, genuinely, cleanse itself of its sectarian baggage, might start eating into more of a cross-community voter base.  There is a prospect that we may see the emergence of two leading parties here in Northern Ireland that will vie for electoral dominance. I predict (and I appreciate that prediction is a mug’s game) that those two parties will be the DUP and Alliance.  Their challenge is to secure as large a swathe of the Sinn Fein vote as possible. Only Alliance and the DUP could achieve what the SNP has achieved in Scotland – because only they are unashamedly Northern Ireland grounded parties.

If either Party has such grand ambitions both need to start focusing on Sinn Fein’s achille’s heel: it’s crazy, confused, ultra-left-wing policies.