NI’s two blocs have one problem: their lack of delivery in government is starting to bite with the voters

The lazy way to read a Northern Ireland poll is to check Sinn Féin’s number, then the DUP’s, and file another entry under “unionism in decline.” The latest LucidTalk survey for the Belfast Telegraph reads very differently if you switch gaze from the individual parties and total them up into blocs.

The three main unionist parties together take 43% — UUP 16, DUP 15, TUV 12 — while the nationalist parties reach around 38, with Sinn Féin on 22, the SDLP on 13 and Aontú on 3. Set against the 2022 Assembly result, the unionist bloc is up about three and a half points and the nationalist bloc down about a point and a half.

It is only a slight shift, very close to the margin of error, and no basis for prophecy. But the direction is what matters, because almost everyone assumes it can only run one way. Yet there’s no sign of the momentum on either side, particularly when you consider that disengagement is significantly bigger on the unionist side of the ledger

Unionism’s problem is not what it looks like

The DUP is unmistakably in trouble. At 15% it is on its worst showing in memory, and its overall trust score of 24% is the lowest of any party measured, with only 57% of its own voters convinced it has been straight about what it knew of Jeffrey Donaldson.

Writing in the Belfast Telegraph, David Graham argues that the DUP is not unionism, that its lost votes have moved sideways to the UUP under new leader Jon Burrows and to Jim Allister’s TUV, and that unionism’s real weakness is fragmentation across three parties — curable, he suggests, by consolidation into two.

David’s diagnosis is largely right but the remedy is wrong. Fragmentation is not a malfunction under the single transferable vote; it is how it was designed to operate. A bloc spread across three parties loses nothing so long as they transfer to one another. What costs unionism seats is not the party count but transfer failure and Graham’s own evidence, the 38% of non-DUP unionists who say they will no longer give the DUP a preference, proves it.

“Unionist unity,” meanwhile, a remedy as old as the hills, never arrives.

So why are the transfers slowing? For one, the thing that once enforced them is gone. For a decade, discipline inside unionism rested on a single shared prize: keeping Sinn Féin out of the First Minister’s office. That prize was spent in 2022 and buried when Michelle O’Neill took the post. Remove the threat that manufactured unity, and voters do what a preferential system invites: they vote sincerely rather than tactically.

This is also where the DUP’s trouble turns structural rather than merely Donaldson-shaped: at 15% it sits on barely half the 30% it commanded at its 2011 peak, the height it reached precisely when “keep them out” still sold. Strip that prize away and all that remains on the shelf is the party’s record: the best part of nineteen years of power-sharing with Sinn Féin, punctuated by walkouts and stalemate, for a return few unionists would call impressive.

That leaves it pincered between the TUV attacking from a purism from never having sat in an executive with Sinn Féin, and the UUP offering a fresher version of a volubly pro Agreement unionism. A party whose whole pitch was keeping Sinn Féin out, and which governed beside them anyway, has little answer to either challenge.

Yet the unionist bloc remains consistently ahead of parties that are explicitly pro unity.

Nationalism’s problem is quieter, but may be harder to solve

Nationalism has the opposite profile: a clear number-one party and no fragmentation to speak of, but no momentum either. Sinn Féin shed seven points and nobody obviously caught them. The SDLP’s rise to 13% is real, its best since around 2011 but nowhere near enough to absorb SF’s drop, and Alliance fell too. When a bloc’s leading party bleeds and no rival soaks it up, the likeliest explanation is not realignment but demobilisation: voters staying home.

The answer may be found where a new Casement Park was meant to rise from the ashes of the old. O’Neill becoming First Minister was a real moment, but the top office has delivered nothing the base can point to: on health, not cost of living, nor the flagship stadium stalled in the heart of west Belfast, which four in ten SF voters call a major political failure.

John Garry’s research albeit from 2013 suggests that performance-based accountability has historically failed to bite within the nationalist camp. Unionists have long been willing to punish their parties on competence and probity rather than on the border. The RHI “cash for ash” scandal battered the DUP in 2017, and the collapse of trust over Jeffrey Donaldson similarly now.<

Nationalist choice,  the research suggests, has stayed far more anchored to ethno-national identity. That is what makes Sinn Féin’s slide in the polls a real puzzle: is Casement the issue that finally brings performance politics to a bloc that never really been interest in it?

Much commentary reads the slide as Sinn Féin being too passive: ie. too wedded to O’Neill’s “First Minister for all” posture, too slow to go toe-to-toe with the DUP and suggests taking the gloves off. But this gets things backwards. If Sinn Féin were losing ground because an aggressive DUP had outmuscled it, you’d expect the DUP to be a beneficiary, when it is plainly isn’t.

The DUP is down six points too, almost exactly in step. Both governing principals are being punished at once, and for the same thing: ie, a partnership that in recent years has produced little more than photo ops and smiles to the camera.

Instead the dysfunction is generating a die back effect, which more confrontation will only feed: you do not build a stadium, or fix a health service, by going further to war with the partner you need to build it. A base that calls its own flagship project a failure is not one itching for more trench warfare, but one disappointed by the absence of delivery.

On this reading, the base staying home is a verdict on SF holding office without providing any visible product.

An old diagnosis coming due

Some of this I argued a long time ago. Writing in 2012, amid the flags protests, I made the case that Northern Ireland’s deeper problem was a politics hollowed of content: a settlement in which every party was guaranteed office through D’Hondt, with no opposition and nothing to lose, so no one paid a price for a poor product.

More than a decade on, this poll may indicate that diagnosis is finally coming due. Alliance, which I suggested even then had made itself indispensable without ever securing a defensible position of its own, is now the centre party going backwards: a five-year low, its promised rebrand shelved, and no direct answer to a reviving UUP.

For unionism, the lesson is not to broker a merger but to find a new organising purpose, or to accept there isn’t one; consolidation without a shared prize just relocates the same argument inside a bigger tent. For the SDLP, 13% is more than a green shoot, Claire Hanna’s personal standing seems to be translating into higher party support, after polls stuck around 11 and a low of 6% against SF’s 31 in 2023.

It seems like the SDLP has been waiting for an age for some opportunistic tide to finally raise its boats. But in spite of the encouraging news here, thin organisation may still turn a flattering poll into disappointing transfers. It must work harder at its offering to a broader base of voters if its serious about making the weather.

Repositioning is not substance. From the Opposition benches it cannot pass bills or cut waiting lists, but it can do what the office holders cannot: expose the Executive’s failures and set out the alternatives their internal bickerings continue to block.

It should return to the Belfast Agreement, whose rigid provisions can only work when the lead partners actively seek to cooperate together, as its primary cause, thereby paralleling Burrows, in order to deliver benefits across all communities.

If it wants to tempt ex Sinn Féin voters from the sofa it needs a distinct constitutional vision of the future, one that allows them to work with unionists in the here-and-now rather than always deferring to a winner-takes-all border poll that never comes.

The richest rewards will go to parties prepared not just to demand the destination but to show a practical route to their preferred futures. In 2003, we argued the only escape from NI’s prisoner dilemma requires dealing fairly with each other.

Both blocs, then, are really facing the same problem in two forms. A bloc only holds together while it has something worth holding together for and that something, these numbers suggest, now has to mean delivery, not just constitutional positioning.

Now we’ve found out nothing else that’s been tried has worked, this pot of gold has been hidden in plain sight since April 1998.