Post by therealriga on Nov 20, 2023 10:48:54 GMT
Belfast West is Northern Ireland’s safest constituency, its most Catholic, its poorest and the heartland of militant Irish Republicanism, being held by Sinn Féin for all but 5 years since 1983.
At the last boundary review, West consisted of 13 Belfast city wards, 4 whole wards of Lisburn council and half of the only split ward in the region, after the Lisburn ward of Derriaghy was divided between Lagan Valley and this constituency. Following local government reorganisation in 2014, all the former Lisburn council areas were added to Belfast city council, making West the only one of Belfast’s four constituencies contained wholly within the city boundary, something that will cease to be true at the next election.
The core of the constituency is the Falls Road area, with even the outlying parts near Lisburn (the Twinbrook, Lagmore and Poleglass areas) being overspill estates created to rehouse people from the Falls. This is bolstered by the more middle class Catholic Dunmurry area, which more closely resembles the neighbouring South Belfast ward of Finaghy than any of the Falls. Somewhat awkwardly, two non-contiguous parts of the Greater Shankill are tagged on at the northern end: the Shankill ward, which consists of the Lower Shankill and, separated from this by a salient of Belfast North, the Glencairn and Highfield wards. (Following local government reform, these now make up most of the current Forth River and Ballygomartin wards.)
While most of the Falls wards have a Catholic community background figure of over 90%, Shankill, Highfield and Glencairn had Catholic community background figures of 8, 9 and 17% respectively. The higher figure in the Glencairn ward is due to the inclusion of the Catholic Mountainview estate, which is really just an appendage to the Ardoyne area of North Belfast. The only other Protestant communities were in Dunmurry ward, which still registered an 81% Catholic community background figure in 2011, and a small loyalist enclave of around 800 people in the Suffolk area in the Upper Falls.
West ranks highly on most deprivation indices. Eleven of the 19 wards in Belfast West are ranked in the 10% most deprived wards in Northern Ireland. Recorded crime, unemployment benefit claimants and the percentage of children in low income families were all nearly double the regional average in 2015.(***) The constituency’s owner-occupancy rate was 55% in 2011, well below the regional and national average. 5 wards, Clonard, Whiterock, Collin Glen, Falls and Shankill, had rates below 40%, with the lowest figures in the latter two wards at 29% and 21% respectively. The highest rates were found around Andersonstown and Ladybrook, with Dunmurry ranking first at 77%.
While West is currently a safe seat, it has not always been so. The 20 years after World War 2 saw representation alternate between the Ulster Unionist Party and Irish nationalist leaning candidates of various local Labour groupings unrelated to the larger Labour party in Great Britain. The last UUP MP, James Kilfedder, who would later represent North Down, lost to Gerry Fitt in 1966. Four years later, Fitt founded the SDLP, which he would lead for the next decade. Fitt held on throughout the 1970s helped by a gradual decline in the unionist vote. In 1979, his abstention in the vote of confidence in James Callaghan’s government proved crucial in its demise. He grew increasingly distant from the SDLP in the late 70s, believing it had lost its socialist focus to become an Irish nationalist party. He resigned the leadership soon after the 1979 general election and from the party shortly afterwards, sitting thereafter as an Independent Socialist.
The 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly election, at which Fitt did not stand, saw the emergence of Sinn Féin. Its future leader, Gerry Adams, topped the poll, nearly 5,000 votes ahead of the new SDLP candidate Joe Hendron. Overall, Sinn Féin outpolled the SDLP by 30% to 24%. The following year’s Westminster election saw Adams become the new MP, beating Hendron by 5,445 votes, with Fitt narrowly behind Hendron. At least half of Fitt’s vote appeared to have come from the Shankill area. This election also marked the end of any unionist hopes in the seat. The boundary changes for 1983 transferred around 7,000 voters in the loyalist Donegal Road and Sandy Row areas to South Belfast, replacing them with newer Catholic estates in the Upper Falls. Adams held on in 1987 but in 1992, in a surprise result, Joe Hendron beat him by 589 votes. Tactical voting by residents of the Shankill proved crucial.
The boundary review of 1995 proved controversial. Its initial recommendations reduced Belfast to three seats, with Belfast South abolished and half of it added to West. As most of these wards were part of the Balmoral electoral area, where Sinn Féin had not even stood a candidate and where the SDLP had topped the poll, this would have greatly helped Hendron. At local enquiries, Sinn Féin fought successfully for the retention of 4 Belfast seats and West extended instead into the Republican estates of Poleglass and Twinbrook, the former home of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
The first election fought under the new boundaries was to the 1996 regional forum. It saw Sinn Féin outpoll the SDLP by 2 to 1 and win four of the five seats. It came as no surprise when Adams, strengthened by the IRA ceasefire, beat Hendron by nearly 8,000 votes in the following year’s general election. For the next fifteen years, Sinn Féin were able to win commanding victories, taking between 66 and 71% of the vote. Not even Adams' resignation, to enter Republic of Ireland politics, damaged the Sinn Féin hegemony. His successor, Paul Maskey, took over 70% in the 2011 by-election to replace him. Some senior Sinn Féin figures, such as Danny Morrison, had mooted the party backing George Galloway as an independent candidate instead.
Boundary changes for the 2010 election brought in half the Derriaghy ward, in the form of the Lagmore estate, after the mainly Protestant residents in the ward's southern end objected to the whole ward being moved to West. This change doomed unionist hopes of winning an Assembly seat in the constituency, with the unionist vote now too small. Unionists have only won a seat in one of the last seven regional elections in the constituency. In 2003, the DUP's Diane Dodds, wife of the North Belfast MP, ended Joe Hendron's political career by narrowly taking the last seat before losing in 2007.
Recent Westminster and Assembly elections have seen the emergence of a new challenger. The People Before Profit (PBP) grouping was formed by Trotskyite members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. It exists as an All-Ireland grouping with representation in Dáil Éireann and the Northern Ireland Assembly where it eschews nationalist and unionist labels to sit as “other.” Its Assembly member, Gerry Carroll, took 19% of the vote in 2015, 13% in 2017 and 16% in 2019, pushing the Sinn Féin vote down to just over 50% from previous highs. The dip in the PBP vote in 2017 was attributed to its support for Brexit. Belfast West had voted over 74% remain in the 2016 referendum, the 19th highest figure in the UK, so PBP’s support for leave, albeit from a socialist perspective, was felt to damage their prospects. At both the 2022 Assembly election and the 2023 council elections PBP fell back, losing nearly half their vote across the constituency, consequently, the prospects of them mounting any serious challenge to SF here look remote, with the SF vote recovering to over 60%.
The revised proposals effectively swap the Forthriver and Woodvale wards, with the latter joining from Belfast North and the former going the other way. The North Shankill area also joins from Belfast North. The Derriaghy ward is added from Lagan Valley, taking the constituency to the fringes of Lisburn. These changes will make no difference at Westminster level, but will give unionists a better chance of winning the 5th seat at Assembly level.
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***Demographic data here: www.niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/documents/raise/constituency-profiles/2016/belfast-west-profile-june-2016.pdf
At the last boundary review, West consisted of 13 Belfast city wards, 4 whole wards of Lisburn council and half of the only split ward in the region, after the Lisburn ward of Derriaghy was divided between Lagan Valley and this constituency. Following local government reorganisation in 2014, all the former Lisburn council areas were added to Belfast city council, making West the only one of Belfast’s four constituencies contained wholly within the city boundary, something that will cease to be true at the next election.
The core of the constituency is the Falls Road area, with even the outlying parts near Lisburn (the Twinbrook, Lagmore and Poleglass areas) being overspill estates created to rehouse people from the Falls. This is bolstered by the more middle class Catholic Dunmurry area, which more closely resembles the neighbouring South Belfast ward of Finaghy than any of the Falls. Somewhat awkwardly, two non-contiguous parts of the Greater Shankill are tagged on at the northern end: the Shankill ward, which consists of the Lower Shankill and, separated from this by a salient of Belfast North, the Glencairn and Highfield wards. (Following local government reform, these now make up most of the current Forth River and Ballygomartin wards.)
While most of the Falls wards have a Catholic community background figure of over 90%, Shankill, Highfield and Glencairn had Catholic community background figures of 8, 9 and 17% respectively. The higher figure in the Glencairn ward is due to the inclusion of the Catholic Mountainview estate, which is really just an appendage to the Ardoyne area of North Belfast. The only other Protestant communities were in Dunmurry ward, which still registered an 81% Catholic community background figure in 2011, and a small loyalist enclave of around 800 people in the Suffolk area in the Upper Falls.
West ranks highly on most deprivation indices. Eleven of the 19 wards in Belfast West are ranked in the 10% most deprived wards in Northern Ireland. Recorded crime, unemployment benefit claimants and the percentage of children in low income families were all nearly double the regional average in 2015.(***) The constituency’s owner-occupancy rate was 55% in 2011, well below the regional and national average. 5 wards, Clonard, Whiterock, Collin Glen, Falls and Shankill, had rates below 40%, with the lowest figures in the latter two wards at 29% and 21% respectively. The highest rates were found around Andersonstown and Ladybrook, with Dunmurry ranking first at 77%.
While West is currently a safe seat, it has not always been so. The 20 years after World War 2 saw representation alternate between the Ulster Unionist Party and Irish nationalist leaning candidates of various local Labour groupings unrelated to the larger Labour party in Great Britain. The last UUP MP, James Kilfedder, who would later represent North Down, lost to Gerry Fitt in 1966. Four years later, Fitt founded the SDLP, which he would lead for the next decade. Fitt held on throughout the 1970s helped by a gradual decline in the unionist vote. In 1979, his abstention in the vote of confidence in James Callaghan’s government proved crucial in its demise. He grew increasingly distant from the SDLP in the late 70s, believing it had lost its socialist focus to become an Irish nationalist party. He resigned the leadership soon after the 1979 general election and from the party shortly afterwards, sitting thereafter as an Independent Socialist.
The 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly election, at which Fitt did not stand, saw the emergence of Sinn Féin. Its future leader, Gerry Adams, topped the poll, nearly 5,000 votes ahead of the new SDLP candidate Joe Hendron. Overall, Sinn Féin outpolled the SDLP by 30% to 24%. The following year’s Westminster election saw Adams become the new MP, beating Hendron by 5,445 votes, with Fitt narrowly behind Hendron. At least half of Fitt’s vote appeared to have come from the Shankill area. This election also marked the end of any unionist hopes in the seat. The boundary changes for 1983 transferred around 7,000 voters in the loyalist Donegal Road and Sandy Row areas to South Belfast, replacing them with newer Catholic estates in the Upper Falls. Adams held on in 1987 but in 1992, in a surprise result, Joe Hendron beat him by 589 votes. Tactical voting by residents of the Shankill proved crucial.
The boundary review of 1995 proved controversial. Its initial recommendations reduced Belfast to three seats, with Belfast South abolished and half of it added to West. As most of these wards were part of the Balmoral electoral area, where Sinn Féin had not even stood a candidate and where the SDLP had topped the poll, this would have greatly helped Hendron. At local enquiries, Sinn Féin fought successfully for the retention of 4 Belfast seats and West extended instead into the Republican estates of Poleglass and Twinbrook, the former home of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
The first election fought under the new boundaries was to the 1996 regional forum. It saw Sinn Féin outpoll the SDLP by 2 to 1 and win four of the five seats. It came as no surprise when Adams, strengthened by the IRA ceasefire, beat Hendron by nearly 8,000 votes in the following year’s general election. For the next fifteen years, Sinn Féin were able to win commanding victories, taking between 66 and 71% of the vote. Not even Adams' resignation, to enter Republic of Ireland politics, damaged the Sinn Féin hegemony. His successor, Paul Maskey, took over 70% in the 2011 by-election to replace him. Some senior Sinn Féin figures, such as Danny Morrison, had mooted the party backing George Galloway as an independent candidate instead.
Boundary changes for the 2010 election brought in half the Derriaghy ward, in the form of the Lagmore estate, after the mainly Protestant residents in the ward's southern end objected to the whole ward being moved to West. This change doomed unionist hopes of winning an Assembly seat in the constituency, with the unionist vote now too small. Unionists have only won a seat in one of the last seven regional elections in the constituency. In 2003, the DUP's Diane Dodds, wife of the North Belfast MP, ended Joe Hendron's political career by narrowly taking the last seat before losing in 2007.
Recent Westminster and Assembly elections have seen the emergence of a new challenger. The People Before Profit (PBP) grouping was formed by Trotskyite members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. It exists as an All-Ireland grouping with representation in Dáil Éireann and the Northern Ireland Assembly where it eschews nationalist and unionist labels to sit as “other.” Its Assembly member, Gerry Carroll, took 19% of the vote in 2015, 13% in 2017 and 16% in 2019, pushing the Sinn Féin vote down to just over 50% from previous highs. The dip in the PBP vote in 2017 was attributed to its support for Brexit. Belfast West had voted over 74% remain in the 2016 referendum, the 19th highest figure in the UK, so PBP’s support for leave, albeit from a socialist perspective, was felt to damage their prospects. At both the 2022 Assembly election and the 2023 council elections PBP fell back, losing nearly half their vote across the constituency, consequently, the prospects of them mounting any serious challenge to SF here look remote, with the SF vote recovering to over 60%.
The revised proposals effectively swap the Forthriver and Woodvale wards, with the latter joining from Belfast North and the former going the other way. The North Shankill area also joins from Belfast North. The Derriaghy ward is added from Lagan Valley, taking the constituency to the fringes of Lisburn. These changes will make no difference at Westminster level, but will give unionists a better chance of winning the 5th seat at Assembly level.
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***Demographic data here: www.niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/documents/raise/constituency-profiles/2016/belfast-west-profile-june-2016.pdf
