Vote Management in West Belfast
So IRA hunger striker Pat Sheehan has been selected to take Gerry Adams' West Belfast assembly seat. With 71% of the vote there seems little doubt Sinn Fein will successfully defend this safest of seats at the next Westminster election (although we still don't know how an y boundary changes will redraw the constituency). But, given the Sinn Fein President's absence from the ballot paper, will they be able to repeat their previous achievement in returning 5 MLAs next May?
The vote management required to pull this off in the last Assembly election was the envy of Sinn Fein's opponents. If you look at you can see that Diane Dodds had more first preference votes than Alex Attwood in 2007, yet got beaten by Sinn Fein's Jennifer McCann by 481 votes on the last count. Nicholas points out that Sinn Fein still had 266 undistributed transfers which, if they had come into play, would have widened the margin.
Unless the Irish general election coincides exactly with the Assembly campaign, Gerry Adams will no doubt continue to maintain a high profile in West Belfast in the weeks running up to the vote in May. Still it will be another interesting test for the party's vote management machine.
Whilst Sinn Fein were selecting their candidate, over in London the Secretary of State was making a speech setting out various options he is considering for dealing with the past.
Owen Paterson also said he's increasingly attracted to the idea of passing a Northern Ireland "normalisation bill" during the course of this parliament. Mr Paterson argued this bill could deal with issues such as political donations, elements of electoral law and, if it has not been resolved by consensus, ending once and for all double jobbing at Stormont and Westminster.
Mr Paterson repeated that the government will not be neutral on the union, and defended the financial settlement provided for Northern Ireland under the spending review. He said Northern Ireland ministers had been briefed that they would be facing reductions of 18 per cent on current spending and 48 per cent on capital spending. He says that in fact, the Executive is being asked to make savings on current spending of 6.9 per cent and a reduction in the capital budget of 37 per cent.
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