As the outcome of the Assembly election firms up throughout the day thoughts will be drawn to d’Hondt and the eventual make up of a future Executive. Forget about a paper and pen, use this handy d’Hondt calculator to play with numbers. Blank
Time to play an early game of Fantasy NI Executive, or maybe more properly, Fantasy D’Hondt. The order in which parties select ministries is determined by the size of the parties. When the full D’Hondt process was last run on 8 May 2007, there were still only ten ministries. The DUP was the largest party with 36 elected MLAs, followed by SF (28), UUP (18) and then SDLP (16). The parties selected ministries in the following order. DUP – Finance …
SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie says the NI assembly continues to be ‘dysfunctional.’ In a blistering attack on incomplete projects in the term just ended the South Down MP predicts the Executive’s performance will worsen under the weight of further cuts. These are the key areas of ‘failure’ highlighted by her: “The long and expensive process of local government has collapsed in chaos. Letters informing principals that their new building is long-fingered again are landing on mats in empty schools. Sinn …
For me, the second most interesting result from the last General Election (after Long’s defeat of Robinson, of course) was the turnout figure. 57% is a far cry from the 70% turnout at the first Assembly election. Although a turnout of 57% would be considered respectable for, say, Scottish Parliament elections, hyper-political NI can’t be judged by the same yardstick. Apathy amongst the younger generation could explain a gradual decline towards the levels of political engagement seen elsewhere, but the …
