Frank McCooke comes from a staunchly pro-UK background in Northern Ireland. But in Thursday’s local elections — a test for the biggest unionist party’s hardline stance on post-Brexit trade arrangements — his vote is not in the bag.
“Just because I’m a unionist doesn’t mean I’ll vote blindly for a unionist,” said McCooke, who owns the busy Slemish Market Garden shop in Ballymena, considered the heart of the region’s Protestant Bible belt.
The Democratic Unionist party has paralysed Northern Ireland’s executive and assembly for a year to protest against trade terms that it says undermine the region’s place in the UK by leaving it subject to EU rules.
It will be battling on May 18 to remain the dominant party in local government by making the vote a proxy for its wider campaign. Meanwhile, pro-Irish unity party Sinn Féin will be hoping to usurp the DUP to become the largest party of local government.
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has said his party’s “principled stance” has extracted concessions from London and Brussels under the Windsor framework.
The framework is a new trade deal struck by Rishi Sunak’s government that streamlines the original Northern Ireland protocol in a bid to reduce the impact of the customs border in the Irish Sea created by Brexit.
But Donaldson has insisted more changes are needed and urged voters who “want to see the union maintained . . . [to] unite around the clear stance the DUP has taken”.
McCooke’s business suffered disruption as a result of the protocol. He referred to the “clean hell” of not being able to buy seeds and plants from Britain, but he was pragmatic, sourcing them from the Republic of Ireland instead.
He is fed up of the DUP’s boycott of the Stormont assembly and power-sharing executive, which has coincided with rising living costs and a severe budget crisis that is squeezing public services.
“As a businessman, I feel we are being held to ransom,” he said. “It can’t go on — we need Stormont back up and running or the country is going to go bankrupt . . . talking to people, there’s definitely a change — we want to get on. Anything is better than this stalemate.”
“This is definitely a proxy election,” said David McCann, a political lecturer and deputy editor of news website Slugger O’Toole. “I’ll be looking out to see does unionism hold a majority on a majority of councils?”
Six of the 11 councils currently have a unionist majority, four have nationalist majorities and in one — Belfast — neither side has overall control.
Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s first minister-in-waiting from Sinn Féin, urged voters to “send a signal” to the DUP to end its veto of the political institutions. Her party emerged as the largest in Stormont at last May’s assembly elections in a region where Catholics now outnumber Protestants.
After failing to increase its share of council seats at the last election in 2019, Sinn Féin will be hoping to become the largest party of local government.
“If they don’t become the largest party, they’ll be disappointed,” said McCann. But he noted that both the nationalist and unionist vote shares fell in last year’s assembly election. Meanwhile, the Alliance party, which identifies with neither side, made big gains that it will now be seeking to replicate at a local level.
A recent Lucid Talk poll found nearly two-thirds of unionist voters overall backed the DUP’s hardline stance on Stormont. But the DUP, which lost eight seats in 2019, will be looking over its shoulder at the harder-line Traditional Unionist Voice.
Its leader, Jim Allister, has urged voters to cast their votes strongly against “the Windsor whitewash” that he says is dismantling the UK “in plain sight”.
London believes it can address unionists’ concerns and one minister saw a “window of opportunity” to get Stormont back before the traditional unionist marching season in July.
But few in the region expect movement before September at the earliest. That has pushed regional issues to the forefront of the local campaigns.
At the Magnet Centre for Young Adults in Newry, a largely nationalist town near the border, youth work co-ordinator Gemma McKeown said the lack of an executive meant official funding was only secure until the end of June.
“My generation has a pervasive sense of defeatism,” said William Callahan, 27, a student and barista. “Hopefully there’ll be a realisation on the part of the electorate that we need . . . politicians that show up.”
Shane Grimley, playing guitar in Magnet’s recording studio, is 18 and could vote for the first time on Thursday. But he will not. “It won’t make much difference if I did,” he shrugs.
David Coburn, a former soldier in Harryville, Ballymena, whose house is decked in tributes to fallen soldiers and coronation and Union Jack flags, complained that local community needs were being neglected.
The Mid and East Antrim council where Ballymena is located had one of the lowest turnouts in 2019, but he will still stay at home.
“All the parties should be working together to create a better lifestyle instead of arguing about the protocol,” said Coburn, who has ripped up his polling card.
He pulled another election leaflet from his letterbox, without reading it. “One more for the bin,” he said.
Additional reporting by George Parker in London
