In old money, this is north Co Armagh up to the edges of Lough Neagh above Portadown and Lurgan and the eastern parts of Co Down and almost into what you might think of as the south of that historic county even reaching as far as the religiously mixed town of Loughbrickland.
Its major towns are all relatively prosperous. However, both Portadown and Lurgan (either end of “Craigavon”) are affected by strong delineations of Catholic North and Protestant south which extend well into the countryside. Banbridge and much of the Down end is more mixed and middle class.
The boundaries have barely changed since 1983 when it was set up, but this is a constituency in flux, which seems to mirror (almost step for step) the same religious balance of the whole of Northern Ireland. It currently stands at 50% Protestant to 44% Catholic.
The DUP majority for David Simpson here last time was 7,992. However, that was on the back of a post “crocodile” bounce back for the DUP of 10.8%, so the party’s real strength may be lower than that. Young, Banbridge based MLA Carla Lockhart is well favoured to take Simpson’s seat.
Until the Assembly election in 2017, she was a councillor in Lurgan. Adding in the fact the DUP’s core strength is in Portadown, her geographic is pretty widespread. What will aid her locally is the party’s by now routine campaign that the seat could fall to Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd.
So to some extent, there is only interest here in terms of how the intra-unionist, and indeed the intra-nationalist, game stacks up for the next election (which could be the sixth electoral type event in the five years since 2015. Doug Beattie of the UUP will be happy with just closing the gap.
O’Dowd is well placed to come second, but failing some unexpected collapse in the DUP, is likely to be a long way back. And a long way after him Dolores Kelly, local MLA for the SDLP. Keep an eye on Eóin Tennyson of Alliance. A big rise the locals got them three brand new council seats.
Likely winner: Carla Lockhart. This constituency shows just how hard it is to dislodge an incumbent MP under the First Past The Post electoral system, particularly where there is a high profile candidate lurking on ‘the other side’ to take advantage of any even split between two parties.
Word on the ground is that two issues are dominating, when is Stormont going to return, and the health crisis. Brexit, despite potentially storing up a lot of trouble if Johnson gets his majority, is probably by now too abstract to play with voter belief (rather than confidence) in the DUP.
“Westminster Bridge, London” by Arran Bee is licensed under CC BY
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
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