The NI European Count Live Blog

Slugger live blog: Republic's local elections...

Right, we are going to be following the southern count today, with a live blog of our own. If you want the genuine southern article, Suzy and co have already moved in... It starts about 9, but we don't expect the action to start until 11am... Follow Sean O'Rourke and Rachel English on RTE radio from 11am until 4pm. Catch the TV coverage from 1-2 and 4-6 in the pm at RTE Live...

It fell off the back of a lorry....honest

(Mark here - think my blogger account gives a different display name)

Some limited and not particularly good raw polling data I got my hands on, 10ish boxes per area that probably benefit the UUP/Greens/Alliance.

Massive pinch of salt time but here you go, make of it what you will:

North Down

UUP - mid 20%
DUP/TUV/APNI - all around 20%
Greens - mid teens
SDLP - 4%ish
SF - 2%ish

South Down

SDLP/SF - high teens (very close)
TUV/UUP - mid teens
Green - 10%ish
DUP - 6% (wtf!)
Alliance - 5%


Newry and Armagh

SF - 50%
SDLP - 30%
TUV/UUP - 8%
Greens/DUP - 5%

Gamechanging moments: Sinn Fein will top the poll by an Irish mile...

They've kept their counsel on the likely result the whole way through campaign, but it looks like McGuinness's post Massereene statement on dissident Republican paramilitaries bought him a huge chunk of the Nationalist electorate... Nationalist gamechanging moment number 1.

The SDLP on the other hand are back on a familiar knife edge: if the numbers from verification move slightly in their favour (DUP down 2, them up 1 is possible given the provisional nature of these early tallies), they could get the break their activists have been working day and night for; or they will get nothing, and must ask themselves how when Nationalism is at it's height, they get just under half of the political equity. That would be 1999 all over again. After 8 years, Mark Durkan will have questions to answer. That could be Nationalist gamechanging moment number 2.

The party bust a gut this election and in places like South Belfast they were well organised and had some inspirational leadership in the constituency from a hard working MP and good organisation. Other areas like Foyle may prove to add that extra point or two that gives Alban his bus ride home. But that gaping void between themselves and Sinn Fein must prompt the biggest question they need to ask themselves. What, in this post agreement days, is the SDLP for?

As for Sinn Fein, this Tweet from Gerry Adams in Dublin says it all:

Eating nuts and raisins in the car. Makes it harder to loudhail, but... Me predicts a good turnout. Gerry Adams

Today's news may have fortify him against more unwelcome news on Monday in Dublin (Mary Lou is in a fight to the death with FF's Eoin Ryan, amongst others) and North and West... The good news in the south though will certainly come in South with a good performance from Toireasa Ferris and the chance will soon present itself to blood the capable and personable Senator Pearse Doherty in the by election for Pat the Cope's seat, if as seems likely, he takes the MEP's for FF...

Election rumours, odds and sods..

In case Slugger goes belly up, here's a facsimile of the gossip thread intro:

This is a kind of open thread… I’d advise people to take what passes below as rumour until proven… but it’s a opportunity to share whispers gossip and general chat about how things are going inside in the verification process… I’ll start with one that should be taken with some salt… Allister is said to be polling well in Lagan Valley… with one unsubstantiated rumour that he’s pushed the DUP into third in one box… I’ve no idea which box, or where, but I’d probably guess Finis/Dromara direction… Just remember that extrapolation from rumour is dangerous!!

Northern Ireland's polling day turnout

Starter for one:

South Belfast: 176 at Donegall Road in a ward of 2,500 registered voters.

Allister postering until 10 in Holywood last night...

The big question is how well will Jim Allister do... Well enough in the heartland, but he's up against big machines... Hardly surprising Holywood was a last resort for votes, but a few posters about the place may just get him another small margin...

This is the emergency site for Slugger O'Toole...

We're expecting a big surge of traffic on the count day of the European election... On that day we'll be double posting all information to this place and Slugger main..

Apologies...

I'm having to do an upgrade on the site to try and get rid of a syntax error. Please bear with us whilst we try to get us back to Slugger basecamp again.

East Belfast Results

Naomi Long 5583
Peter Robinson 5635
Wallace Browne 3185
Sir Reg Empey 4139
Robin Newton 2335
Dawn Purvis 3045
Michael Copeland 1557
Jim Rodgers 820
Turnout: 29,873
Electorate: 49,757

Turnout
2003 figures here

Making progress...

It's now about week since we lost touch with old Slugger. Since then we've had to rescue it from the clutches of a particularly nasty server. It's now with the new hosts, and mostly intelligible. He still has all his old memory. But some parts of the code have been mangled, and would mean asking people scroll down to get to the heart of the blog.

I'm still working on it (in a bumblingly, non techie sort of way), and I'm hopeful we'll have him back before long.

In the meantime, my heartfelt thanks to John, John, Joe, Samuel, Martina, Alan and David for their kind and generous support in Slugger’s hour of need. If you want to add your own support, then just hit the paypal button below. Believe me, it is much appreciated!

Rea: Sinn Fein's inaction creating a policing vacuum

Interesting that the media seems to be shifting onto Sinn Fein again over policing. Owen Bowcott in the Guardian interviews Des Rae, former chair of the Policing Board:

I have written to all the political parties to say we are available to brief them on the workings of the board.

"The policing problem is easy: it's important that every part of this community is policed and it's important we draw recruits from every part of this community," Sir Desmond said.

"Once trained they [must be able to] go back home and visit their parents without fear.

"To the extent that Sinn Féin is not on [the policing] board it leaves a vacuum in which [republican] dissidents can play their game and be a threat to police officers."

Heading towards a 'dual monarchy'?

I've no idea whether he has used this phrase before, but Barry White's reference to the necessary Sinn Fein/DUP agreement to work in office together as a Dual Monarchy reflects some privately held fears amongst liberals, on both sides, that their supposedly mutually exclusive agendas will lead to a de facto repartition of Northern Ireland (cue: Green Flag). A long way from that Shared Future some people keep talking about. Emily Moulton reports:

Trevor Ringland said the Carran Crescent development in Enniskillen, which will see Protestant and Catholic families live side-by-side, could be a catalyst for very significant change.

"We cannot have a truly modern, dynamic and successful society and economy if our community continues to be divided along sectarian lines," he said.

"No society can be vibrant and prosperous if the resources of the entire community are not pooled and if two sets of services such as schools, libraries and health centres are required due to division where one would otherwise be necessary.

"Carran Crescent has to be the shape of things to come and must only be the tip of the iceberg. Division in Northern Ireland serves no one."

Carran Crescent, which will become home to 20 Protestant and Catholic families, is the first mixed housing estate to be built in Ulster in the last few decades.

The Northern Ireland Housing Executive spent £2m on the pilot scheme and there are plans for another mixed development in Loughbrickland, Co Down.

Robinson: SF's timeslip seems inevitable...

For all the talk of heated exchanges in the DUP's big consultation Peter Robinson sounded incredibly relaxed on Inside Politics on Saturday. He noted, rather laconically, that Sinn Fein's arrangements for consulting their party make it likely that the government's deadlines will slip by. He repeated his belief that Sinn Fein should ask for more time, if they need it. Deadlines, he argued were not, and never have been, his party's preferred means of closing this deal.

TG4 has put language back in Ireland's cultural life

Farrel Corcoran was involved with TG4, or TnaG as it was on the day it launched ten years ago. In a debate around language that has often become distracted on politics and an often disabling obsession with tokenism, TG4, he believes is a perfect example of how utility has succeeded when given its head:

It was never going to be easy, not just because of severe resource limitations but because of the hostile ideological environment, policed by a small number of newspaper pundits trying to shout down the message from opinion polls showing broad support for public funding of broadcasting in Irish.

It was clear by the 1980s that the old polarised ways in which we thought about Irish were changing. Insistence on a highly prescriptive sense of Irish identity, based on claustrophobic policies that held sway since Independence, began to wane, as did its opposite, the post-colonial shame that associated the Irish language with backwardness.

Deepening contact with the EEC fostered the novel idea that linguistic minorities in all parts of Europe should have a "right to communicate". This new self-confidence was put to the test in the campaigns of the 1980s to establish a Gaeltacht television service, a reaction to the arrival of S4C in Wales and to the perceived marginalisation of Irish language programming in RTÉ, where commercial pressure to maximise audience size was getting intense. Those campaigns were a direct riposte to what Gaeltacht activists rightly saw as political dithering and posturing in Dublin.

What has changed in the 10 years since the launch of TG4 and how do we evaluate its current role in Irish society?

For media critics working totally within a market ideology, with no interest in TG4's actual output, the only question has been its audience share. In fact, TG4 has managed to increase its audience each year, to the point where its share is now five times greater than when it started.

'B' is for building...

I can't believe he did that. Hat tip Piaras!

Magners leaving Guinness in the poor place

It started as a bit of prematch banter, but Huw Richards thinks there may be something in the idea that in rugby the Magners (Celtic) League is spectacularly outgunning the Guinness Premiership in England.

Northampton play Scottish Borders today, while Cardiff entertain Leicester at the Millennium Stadium tomorrow. These contests between members of England's Guinness Premiership and the Magner's Celtic League follow the opening weekend's 4-0 clean sweep in head-to-heads by the Celts.

Following on from the vicissitudes of the national team, club failures are a further blow to the confidence and self-esteem of English rugby.

There's a whole season ahead yet, so it may be premature to pronounce the death of English club rugby. Northampton seems to be turning the tables on Border Scots at least.

Hollowing out the designation system?

Ian Parsley argues that one way Alliance could prove its cross community credentials by allowing its MLAs to register "a designation of identity" - as Unionist or Nationalist, as they see fit. He argues that:

Under the current arrangements, if three Alliance MLAs designated "Nationalist" and the rest "Unionist", the party would actually hold the balance of power "in both designations". That would mean, effectively, that where the parties within each camp were split (e.g. SDLP v. SF or UU v. DUP), Alliance would decide. We would, in effect, become the most relevant party in the Assembly - *because of the designation system*.

Ireland and the blurring of historic socio economic lines

I'm reading an excellent book by FT columnist called The Truth About Markets : Why Some Countries are Rich and Others Remain Poor. It suggests that the basis of the world's (extremely limited) economic prosperity has deep roots in history, culture and geography. But it was this passage that jumped out at me after reading one of the comments on the Trimble thread:

The correlation between religion and economic development is inescapable, but the nature of the connection is controversial. Max Weber explained how belief in predestination led to austere, hard-working morality we still call 'the Protestant ethic'. RH Tawney and Robert Merton gave greater weight to the intellectual ferment that followed the breakdown of clerical authoritarianism: the opportunity to challenge established ideas and practices which is essential to the co-evolution of technology and institutions. The combination of moral rigour and free inquiry is the basis of disciplined pluralism - the defining characteristic of the successful market economy.

Apart from anything else it underlines the massive social and economic changes that have taken place in the Republic over the last decade or so. Indeed, the roots of the current situation are deeper than that. As Andrew Greely noted in his 1999 essay Religions of Ireland:

...the southern Irish work longer hours than members of the other two communities [Northern Irelanders], almost forty four hours a week as opposed to slightly under forty for the Northerners. If number of hours worked is a sign of the Protestant Ethic then Irish Catholics are the last Protestants in Europe.

Oireachtas adds blogging to list of banned activities

Here's a statement I received this morning from the head of Human Resources at the Oireachtas, Dublin's equivalent of the Palace of Westminster:

"The policy of the Office of the Houses of the Oireachtas explicitly prohibits the use of our computer facilities for chat room purposes or for weblog (blog). Staff members who engage in blogging which is not related to their official duties, while using their Office computer will be subject to disciplinary action."

It follows several blog reports (here and here, and here). The story has yet to break in Ireland's mainstream media.

Let me say, straight away, Ireland is not banning its politicians from blogs. TD's like Ciaran Cuffe of the Greens and Liz McManus will continue to blog from both inside and outside parliament. Nor is it necessarily banning all its staff from reading blogs. But it says something for the power and pull of blogging that its capacity to waste people's valuable working time that it has been listed alongside porn surfing as a disciplinary offence.

Most of us who run moderately successful blogs can confirm that the big numbers come to us during the working day. In the Republic this is possibly exaggerated by the poor quality of its national roll out of broadband. One international company recently had to review its offer of a laptop and high speed broadband access to its employees, when a large number of them had to refuse on the basis they could not access it at home.

Clearly Leinster House feels that keeping staff on task is an important priority. But in using such a sledgehammer to crack a specific nut, it is also cutting them off from one of the major innovations in the way knowledge and information is transmitted. It is not inconceivable, for instance, that this same human resources department will be blogging all its messages to its staff, within a very short period of time.

Blogging is not about subversives sitting up half the night and day in their pajamas pushing out spikey missives about what's wrong with the world. It is just one intimation of a flatter, knowledge-driven world in which crucial connections are made quickly and transitively. Nor is blogging the definitive endgame. A ton of smart new collaborative applications are already in use or being developed. Flickr, Delicious, Digg, even YouTube all follow on and build on the networks established through the intitial blogging revolution. In the case of The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph, its technologies beginning to become embedded in its key online offering.

It is unlikely that the good burghers of the Oireachtas (Leinster House), who can already read the Guardian Unlimited or the BBC News with impunity, will face disciplinary proceedings for reading this blog (or the Editors Blog), since the focus of the directive appears to be on the act of blogging, rather than just reading them.

But this is a read/write revolution. If organisations blunt the capacity/opportunity for their members employees to engage in online communitication, they are, ultimately, also blunting their longer term capacity to function in this new, networked world. Those of us who care about the health of Irish democracy, will be hoping for a rapid change of mind on what looks to be a very hastily thought out policy.