NI elections:

I'm back from Dublin today. I do have a lot to say about the trip, but not now. I went to Newry, in County Down, in the north of Ireland as part of my trip and that's what I want to blog about.

A little background, for those of you who don't follow such things. NI held elections on Thursday for seats in a body that would allow government of NI from Belfast. These elections operated on a preference system, that is you could select your first, second, third, etc choice. If your first choice had enough votes, your vote would go to your second choice and so on. It's a confusing system and one that has made the voting difficult to tabulate.

The elections went heavily Sinn Fein and Ulster Unionist. This by itself is not good news. The UUP is the anti-agreement unionist party and, well, Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA. The SDLP and the DUP, the two moderate parties in Ireland, both held roughly constant and the smaller parties were wiped out.

However, there's a lot of good news that came out of these elections. One piece is simply that they went well, no problems other than minor disturbances at the polling booths. No records of violence/intimidation used.

Another is that the majority of the people seemed pro-peace. Some unionists even preffed the Sinn Fein or SDLP candidates over those of the UUP, showing their dissatisfaction at Ian Paisley's opposition to the peace process. And at least some who voted Sinn Fein did so because of Gerry Adams' and the party's role in the peace process.

And that brings me to Newry. Newry is a heavily Catholic/Republican (and the two terms aren't interchangeable but I'm going to use them this way anyway) market town (maybe 70,000 people) just on the UK side of the border. I wish I could post my pictures of the town, they feature a tricolour, pIRA grafiti, and Sinn Fein election posters. I will try to get to a computer for that soon. The people here aren't pro-British. I spoke with the woman I stayed with about the elections and said something along the lines of "they went well." I wish I could quote her whole response, but I'll do the best I can. She said, "depending on what side you're on. I voted Sinn Fein, I don't know if you know what that means. They're basically the political face of the IRA. I voted Sinn Fein for one reason only. You know who Gerry Adams is, he's the reason there's peace here. I voted for Gerry Adams because, because-- it used to be there were soldiers coming up that street here [and she pointed to her suburban street], they'd just come up the hill here. And now there aren't. Now there's peace here and you hardly ever see any soldiers and it's so much better than it was. It was really terrible here."

And that's really why I think these elections went pretty well.

The real question now is what happens next. With the number of seats that Paisley's UUP picked up, there's really no way that anything can happen on the Assembly yet. It's going to take some renegotation with both sides to try to put together a workable system. But now there's hope and I really think this might be it.