#GE2019 Profiles

This more or less the northern chunk of the old Londonderry County Council and a little sliver of northeast Antrim. Biggest town, Coleraine. The religious split is much closer than it used to be with Protestants in a majority, but only just at 53%. Catholics are 42%, and others 4.4%. The Unionist battle is pretty uneven, with the DUP’s Gregory Campbell easily outstripping his UUP rival in 2017 by 48.1% to 7.6%. He faces the same candidate, Richard Holmes again …

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Next, we skip over (and through) to Mid Ulster. As Gerry Lynch said in 2007, it “clusters around the exact geographical centre of Northern Ireland”, even though to most of us easterners thing it feels very west, most days Magherafelt is just an easy hour’s drive up the M2 from the centre of Belfast. The religious balance here stands at 67% Catholic to 31% Protestant, so there’s no question the seat goes any other way than nationalist. Sinn Féin’s Vice …

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Polling day is almost here, so I’m afraid, I’m going to have to wrap the last three remaining constituencies in slightly shorter order than previously. First of these is the one seat that the SDLP lost last time out, South Down. Notable mostly because few think it will change hands. It’s  a wide sprawling constituency that runs from the Windy Gap at the very top of Lagan valley down through Crossgar and Ballynahinch, through the old county town of Downpatrick …

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East Belfast (75%) vies for the title of most Protestant constituency usually with my own home place of North Down (74%) and Strangford (73%), although none of them compete with the most Catholic constituency, West Belfast which now stands at 80%. The shipyard is long gone, but according to Gerry Lynch’s profile in 2007, East Belfast remains home to a prosperous skilled working-class population. It’s most deprived areas lie in the inner east, where the Catholic Short Strand and the …

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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 …

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The most coastal of all Northern Irish constituencies, which contains hardly any inland aspect. East Antrim takes in most of the southern and eastern fringe of am Antrim coast running from Newtonabbey on the edge of North Belfast to the Glens just a few miles short of Torr Head. Its huge coastal reach was extended in 2010 after three wards from the old Moyle Council replaced Cloughfern in Newtonabbey making the whole constituency slightly more Catholic than before. The split …

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South Belfast is young and religiously mixed. Much of it is prosperous and in parts contains some of the most affluent parts of the city around the Malone and Stranmillis stretching to the upper Lisburn Road. Around the inner city, there is deprivation in the Markets and the Village. But for the most part, this constituency is one of the most atypical of the wider patterns in Northern Ireland in the very precise sense that outside the few single identity …

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South Antrim comprises a lot of disparate places from its north-west where it runs alongside Lough Neagh from Toomebridge to Antrim town and Crumlin, then over to Ballyclare, Doagh and down into the urbanised fringes of Belfast and parts of Newtonabbey like Glengormley. Although it comprises a lot of countryside as Gerry Lynch noted in 2007, “almost half of the electorate live in what, by most people’s definitions, would count as Belfast”. Most of the rest live or derive income …

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Well, it says Foyle, but it is actually Derry/Londonderry. Bit like Merseyside it describes a general place of belonging but by not naming it directly it uses a river to covers up the cracks in local identity. On the city side (the west bank) of the river the population now is almost entirely Catholic. Overall within the old Derry City Council area in 2011 Catholics made up 74.8% of the population, whilst Protestants made up 22.3%. Both denominations are in slight …

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Lagan Valley straddles the eponymous river that marks the boundary between two of the old county authorities of Antrim to the north and Down to the south. At its centre is the large town (although officially speaking it’s now the small city) of Lisburn. Billowing out north and south is a large rural hinterland stretching to the small hill farms around the river’s source in the Dromara Hills on the edge of South Down, west to the fringe of Banbridge …

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Strangford draws its name from the sea lough that bisects it between the Ards Peninsula and ‘mainland’ County Down. It is predominantly Protestant with a few enclaves of Catholic areas most notably the southern end of the Ards peninsula where most of the county’s Hurling players come from. It’s a relatively prosperous constituency where the farming land is relatively rich (Comber early potatoes have had protected geographical indication (PGI) since 2012), and most of the towns are, as Gerry Lynch …

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This constituency stretches from Dungannon in the middle of Northern Ireland to the border at Belleek which is just a ten-minute drive to the Atlantic coast of Donegal. It has had a small but substantial Catholic majority for much of the last twenty years. And yet it remains stubbornly competitive. Particularly in agriculture and agrifoods, the last twenty years have seen a level of cross border integration in agriculture undreamed of throughout the troubles when the border was much more …

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Welcome to the poorest and the most Catholic constituency in Northern Ireland. Containing all of the Greater Falls and the poorest lower Shankill area this constituency saw the highest death rates during the troubles. The peace line here delineates two almost completely different worlds. According to a profile Gerry Lynch wrote for the 2007 Assembly elections “over two-thirds of children were born to unmarried mothers in 2004”. Back then birthrates were even higher in the lower Shankill than anywhere on …

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In old money this constituency is mostly central and south Co Armagh which slices into Newry as far as the old boundary on the Clanrye river as it heads for Carlingford Lough but it leaves most of the more Protestant/Unionist northern part of the historic county within neighbouring Upper Bann. The population is younger than most other constituencies, which comes with a large housing need amongst that lower aged cohort. Even so there’s been a massive expansion of house building …

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The main town Ballymena accounts for about a quarter of the constituency, but the rest is divided between rugged coastline along with a few scattered hill farms of the high Antrim Plateau with most of the rural population in the valleys below. In contrast to West Tyrone, North Antrim is one of the wealthiest constituencies in Northern Ireland although in recent years it has taken some major blows with the loss of Gallaher and some 1400 employees were recently made …

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This constituency comprises Strabane end of Derry and Strabane District Council and the Omagh end of Fermanagh and Omagh District Council, which draw their names from the only two major towns in the area. In the third most Catholic constituency, nationalism is the commanding force. Like most seats in this election, West Tyrone is not under threat. Órfhlaith Begley, the retiring MP, is daughter of former Sinn Féin Omagh District Council chairman Seán Begley and is from the Republican stronghold of Carrickmore. She …

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