Sinn Fein top Tele poll with 21% of vote…
Sinn Fein tops the BelTel poll… with 21% (a 1/5) of the electorate. Hmmm… Pre Ritchie SDLP is on 13% which is a nice squeeze that could lose them Assembly seats, but with what’s happening in Unionism get them an extra ministerial seat through d’hondt… The DUP is on 18%… The UUP is on 15%… Alliance is on 7%… And Jim Allister a more realistic 6%… PUP and the Greens pull up the rear with 3% each…
Adds: there’s a lot of people not declaring… so we might expect that to add a slight benefit to the TUV… Also worth adding is that polls in NI come few and far between and are notoriously poor at replicating reliable results…
Ahem….
Sorry to interrupt yer intra-Northern Ireland wee bicker, but, has anyone asked people south of the border do they want to have anything to do with you?
The political leadership both your communities have elected are starting to make our shower look competent… and thats saying something.
I’m still amazed at how worked up people can get about ‘united ireland’ yet you didn’t give a damn about health cuts and education cuts…
yes indeed, why would anyone want to have anything to do with you???
sush, dont tell them Dewi, they might just wake up to that fact, the SF vote will be most interesting in westminister elections. The high PUP poll is the biggest surprise, it def should get PR worried about his seat if it looks as if alot of his working class voters are drifing in Dawns direction, prob less of a threat to Doddsy though. On first appearances the TUV sitting on the same as the Alliance would you think give them similar number of seats, however there vote is probably more evenly spread across the country and they are on the “transfer repellant” when it comes to the assembly election, on these figures I cant see them breaking through.
With the nationalist and unionist blocs approaching parity and both blocs being divided into a number of parties, the logic of mandatory coalition involving every single significant party is getting increasingly threadbare.
50%+1, with at least one unionist and one nationalist MLA in support should be enough of a safeguard to create a coalition which would actually have to agree on its policies.
Thanks, Gerry lvs castro (#25)! Yes. We ALL need to get a life. It would be brilliant if we had a rail link from Belfast to Newtownards, but when you say so to certain politicians, they look at you as if you’re not right in the head.
NI means NOT INTERESTED. Favourite question of the Wise Old Ulsterman: ‘Sure, what would you want to do that for?’ It’s a wonder we’re not all still churning butter by hand. As a matter of principle.
We need a New Sensible Party. (I know the Alliance people will say, ‘We ARE the New Sensible Party.’ But then they would, wouldn’t they?) If the PUP joined up with the Greens, that would be a start.
Blow-In, did a quick check on whats the big story “down south” on Politics.ie, and it is “Jim Corr – Illuminati Plant?”. Guess we are missing the big picture up here squabblnig over the border and should be joing together to fight the New World Order.
Message #5
.”Bairbre topped the poll in June with 26%… that’s a statistically significant loss of 5% in 8 months.”
Ah Mr Fealty, your much appreciated neutrality is showing again.
Ms de Bruns 26% was REAL.
This 21% is a Belfast Telegraph POLL…..and not worth a candle.
You I think have been around long enough to know that BT polls ALWAYS understate the extremes.
Msg 14 Mr Morse…..yes indeed. Same again
“But everyone is within a margin of error of their Euro 2009 performance, except for Alliance (polls always overstate our vote – I’m hoping this one is wrong!!!)”
Alliance Bloggers also have a habit of overstating their vote.
Well said Blow in! Is it not time we stopped calling catholic people nationalists or republicans? They are patently not all Nats or Reps indeed not even a majority are. And Blow in makes the perfectly valid point that a referendum in the south would not wish for a United Ireland sorry they might WISH as in a sentimental dream but they certainly wouldnt vote for one.
Dewi 24 That word, ‘interestingly’ again, Dewi. You’re not by any chance UTV’s Ken Reid posting here on the sly? He can never get through a sentence without that. He must be making Steve Davis jealous. I don’t think SF need worry, it’s the SDLP voters who are most likely to stay away, Mrs Ritchie or no Mrs Ritchie.
The Blow-in: no reason at all, sir, but thanks for all the joy you’re bringin’ to unionists, as that nice girl Agnetha Fältskog might have said.
Drumlins Rock: you can’t satirize some people. Yesterday on the web I found a reference to BILDERBERG PUPPET LADY GAGA! You can sum up Jordan Maxwell, Anthony J Hilder, and the rest in four words. ‘Everything is everything else.’ I’m waiting for someone to warn me that the Chinese Lantern is really an Illuminati plant. Maybe you’re right, and the Irish border is far less dangerous than the herbaceous border.
But sure didn’t St Patrick drive all the reptilians out of Ireland.
herbaceous border..
Is parsley herbaceous?
Yes, Scaramoosh, at the moment, but tomorrow you may have to look for him among the Greens.
do you think Gerry talks to Shaun WOODward
the UUP share has fallen since the Euro election – seems david cameron cant help them, the DUP have a least stopped any further fall and allisters vote has been slashed by 50% -
No, Drumlins Rock, he’s too busy trying to SHADOW OUR DAWN.
Nevermind a pinch of salt, I’d take this information with whatever reserves of salts the councils had before the cold snap at xmas.
In case anyone has forgotten, this poll being brought to you by the same people that once projected that the PUP would win 3 seats in East Belfast.
“Once Unionism starts to see the DUP got a good deal their share of the vote will go up!
• There will be no sinn fein control of policing and justice.
• There will be no SF Justice Minister.
• There will be NO Irish Language Act.
• There will be NO new North-South Bodies
• The Parades Commission will not be in place next year.
• Outstanding Issues such as Education will be addressed and the working of Government will be improved.
• Additional resources for the Police and the Courts 1.1 Billion
• 400 million for hearing loss claims
• Part Time Reserve recognition payment 22 million
• PPW to be retained for former officers
• Parades There will be no jumping ahead – parades will be completed in the same way as policing. There is a timetable for parades legislation to be completed.
• Failure of other parties to keep their commitments will have consequences.
Posted by interested on Feb 12, 2010 @ 03:24 PM”
Far be it for me to offer the DUP advice as you are going enough damage to yourselves, but interested (I do not know if you are a staffer or just a supporter) this is what is wrong with the DUP strategy, a tick box exercise of what you have managed to block Sinn Fein doing prior to an election. It may have some currency with a section of your support but ordinary unionists and loyalists want delivery on the issues that effect them and you can only do that with Sinn Fein in a genuine partnership. So decisions need made or your fate is predictable.
Lets have an Assembly election to go with the Westminister election and put paid to all this interpretation of dodgy polls.
Give the politicians what they profess to love. Let them pay homage to their masters (well for a few weeks until after the election). Then as per usual post election the Servants get uppity again. Sadly in politics the Electorate just cannot get the staff.
FJH
I was beginning to think that you wouldn’t be tempted out on this one!
I offered the thought to you on another thread yesterday that one of the problems about caring about whether Northern Ireland remains in the UK or, alternatively, that it become part of an independent all-Ireland state, is that in both cases it seems that to be a true devotee you are required to abandon your critical faculties. In light of the serious statistical evidence adduced, this has been more than adequately demonstrated on this thread; and I have in consequence some wider points to make:
• Polls like those of the BT and NILT are of course full of flaws and hazards for the unwary – and margins of error
• But the sheer consistency in the series of findings over the years of a substantial number of Catholics who wish to remain in the UK makes the phenomenon – if I can call it that – statistically soundly-based
• What is also of importance – something already referred to here earlier, but worth some emphasis – is that it is not at all difficult to believe that Catholics who belong to the ‘stay in the UK’ tendency might nonetheless vote SDLP (or indeed SF), for what I might (offensively perhaps) describe as tribal-defensive reasons; and of course the same is certain to be true in regard to Protestant tribal attachment
• Related to that, in a piece of inelegant profundity, the English historian A J P Taylor once described himself as “a man of extreme views, weakly held” (he claimed to be a Marxist/Marxian, but acknowledged that he had never done anything to advance the cause of proletarian revolution)
• I think it fair to say that political scientists/sociologists/statisticians have not yet dealt adequately with the issue of the depth of individual sentiment identified by Taylor
• The relevance of this to our own situation is that we have no idea of how deeply or shallowly people are attached to their unionist or nationalist views, or about how little or how much it would take to move them away from those
A skill that our politicians need to develop, therefore, is to listen to people on the doorstep rather than engaging purely in pressing their party line.
Perfectly put DerTer. These labels are one of the most dangerous aspects and assumptions in what passes for political discussion in Norn Iron
If only I had stayed in full time education beyond the age of 23 I could have expressed those same thoughts succintly.
While much is made of the NILT survey by Unionists about the amount of Catholics that wish to stay in the union I’d have serious reservations about their methodology.
I honestly fail to believe that the Nationalists questioned come from the heartlands FST, WT, MU, Foyle, N&A, SD, West Belfast or the Nationalist parts of East Derry and Upper Bann – places the union has basically ignored.
I have no doubt there are ‘Nationalist’ voters in Unionist constituencies (and even South Belfast) that would have a looser opinion when it comes to the constitutional question and may even be closet unionists in an ‘I’m all right jack’ type of way but to suggest that 1 in 3 of your average SF or SDLP voting Joe Soaps in Dungannon, Derry or Downpatrick would actually vote to maintain the union in a border poll is nothing short of delusional.
Stick to the GAA Sam you are delusional
Wasnt gerry a beaten docket tonight on Tuberty?
the original
i think the point that is being made is that not all catholics would vote for united ireland, and therefore a simply head count of caths v prods is not a basics for saying it will happen,everyone would get to vote in a border poll even if they are a pale green from north down,
Belfast Telegraph Opinion Polls exist for the sole purpose of boosting “moderate” unionism since the days of Terence O’Neill when they helpfully produced coupons so that those supporting O’Neill could cut out and post to BT.
Not much has changed. The quite bizarre thing is that people put credibility in them.
My own methodology with pollsters (and of course canvassers) is to lie thru my teeth. As these arent real people , it doesnt matter.
For those tempted to express a foul mouthed opinion to canvassers in Cornmarket in late April.
I recommend “disappointment”.
“I always vote DUP but I dont like the Robinson affair”
“I always vote UUP but the pact/lack of pact with DUP disturbs me”
“I always vote Allaince but they dont deserve the Justice ministry”
“I always vote SDLP but dont like the new leader”
“I always vote Sinn Féin but I dont want parades to proceed”.
basically all parties can handle the fact that you never vote for them but it really pisses them off that they might have lost a vote.
The point I’d make LD is that the vast bulk of Nationalists wouldn’t contemplate voting to maintain the union in a border poll – NILT suggests a vast number would and while there may indeed be a few but nothing even remotely near what they would suggest.
original
i agree.
Who ever thought they’d see America vote in a black President in their lifetimes? I certainly didn’t. Yet here we are.
A UI will be voted for at some stage. It could be 50 years but it will happen. I just wish those pricks would first pointlessly stop killing people in the name of it.
My own methodology with pollsters (and of course canvassers) is to lie thru my teeth.
Good man; That’s what I do too. Nothing else makes sense – gives your opponents a false sense of security, makes those you do support work harder.
Opinion Polls aren’t really possible in NI: there are too many parties and too much local variation. The Belfast Telegraph poll is unsurprisingly too close to Belfast opinion and insufficiently representative of the peripheries. PUP and Alliance are too high, TUV too low.
Indeed in a pravince in which elections are held every year nearly, there is no need for opinion polls: one just refers to the most recent election. Polls are merely pacifiers for people who don’t like the election results.
The big surprise is the amazing recovery of the DUP vote. But then this is after all only a survey. Maybe the DUP had some input into its making. Given the troubles the DUP has been through recently you’d think their vote would have taken a battering. Indeed, I will continue to believe this a more likely hypothesis than what the BT says.
But then we have to bear in mind, we are not governed by opinion polls, nor are we even governed by a system which replicates the percentage results even of devastatingly accurate opinion polls. If the BT percentages were correct for every constituency, then Sinn Fein would gain 18 out of 18 seats in the forthcoming Westminster Election.
As no attempt is made to elicit the 2nd preference votes, the data here will be useless in predicting the results of a Stormont election, so you might as well forget it.
“A UI will be voted for at some stage. It could be 50 years but it will happen.”
I think this fits into the category of propaganda that has the purpose of neutralising threats to British sovereignty by creating the bogus impression that X will happen irrespective of efforts to make X happen therefore efforts to make X happen are redundant.
Of course, X hasn’t happened in 90 years, and there is no reason to assume that it will happen in the next 90 years – just as there is no reason to assume that NAFTA means that Mexico, America and Canada will merge into one state.
Id be interested in the actual “behind the scenes”at these polls.
Does the Belfast Telegraph think……hmmm lets generate some interest……lets approach our usual poll people.
The headlines will generate enough sales to pay for the poll.
Or does the Polling company sit around “brainstorming” and some pony tailed executive/office boy comes up with “does anybody remember the Belfast Telegraph phone number…..we might be able to convince them that if they pay us loadsa money for a survey, then it will pay for itself with a few extra copies”.
Gin and tonics all round.
Hey ,,,in two hundred years we might see N.Ireland’s first black First Minister …
scara, 15 yrs ago I was in Toronto and said to a mate Belfast will someday be a bit more like this with a mix of races, prob take about 20 yrs though, now my local town is 20% foreign nationals/immigrants, amny of whom are here over 5 yrs now, so things change quicker than we think, we have had out first woman First Minister, ok it was for a coupel of weeks just, but hey who knows lol
Scaramouch [8] In 50 years we might see our first Catholic FM [actually allowed by Unionists to do the job]. The FM post here doesn’t count because Marty is ALREADY Joint FM now.
Would that be Dunagannon you are talking about Drumlins?
minus that extra ‘a’.