This should go live about 11 tonight… I’ve set it up to feed from our Slugger team from their Twitter feeds and few others. I’ll be in Dublin providing Studio comment with Allison Morris of the Irish News and Gary Murphy of DCU.
Here’s the expected order (expect things to be later than this):
I’ll be on air with RTE One from about 11.15 and trying to use my iPad in the studio to keep things moving along nicely here.
A few observations. Most of the SDLP’s election budget appears to have been spent on South Belfast. There’s virtually no other posters from the top of the Ormeau Road to the roundabout in Carryduff, whilst North Belfast there’s huge gaps even in core SDLP areas.
I did try to catch up with the DUP challenger in South Belfast Jonny Bell to see how things were going from his point of view. I had more success in catching up with Alliance Party David Ford.
Without taking a view on how people say their campaign is going it strikes me that Alliance (and the DUP actually) are the only big players in this election who have spent some time prepping a narrative to fight this election. In the case of Alliance they have gone on the progressive politics line, using it to divide the electorate precisely.
They say the flag stuff is fading as time passes, and are confident they are getting decent conversion rates from the 2010 Ringland UUP voters who simply walked off the pitch in 2011. Of course we’ll see later tonight. Boxes will be gone through in microscopic detail, win or lose for the new dynamics for next year.
Out in the country, in Strangford and South Down, the density of posters thins and tend to be predominated by incumbent posters. In other news, keep an out of the TUV runner in North Antrim. There seems to be some TUV enthusiasm for a clear face off between old Paisleyites and new DUP Paisley voters (see what I did there?).
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
