Emma Little-Pengelly to take Jeffrey Donaldson’s Assembly seat…

It seems Sir Jeff prefers the bright lights of London. Only five days after getting elected to Lagan Valley he has decided he would rather stay an MP, thank you very much. All this might be a bit of a shock to the good people of Lagan Valley who voted for one person and got someone entirely different. But those are the rules. Emma Little-Pengelly was gracious enough to take part in our election event last week and she went …

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Lagan Valley Constituency Profile – Assembly Elections 2022…

We can see that the pattern of tactical voting in Lagan Valley at Westminster elections has changed since 2017. The party figures reveal that while some UUP voters still vote tactically, it is as likely that they will do so for Alliance as for the DUP. This is maybe not surprising in a constituency where the UUP only transferred at 40% to the DUP in 2017. Westminster ’19 was also notably the poorest performance by Jeffrey Donaldson in the four …

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Seamus Close (1947-2019)

Growing up in Lisburn, with James Molyneaux’s victory a certainty in any General Election race, the interesting number to find was how well runner-up Alliance candidate Seamus Close polled this time. He was first elected to Lisburn Borough Council back in 1973, becoming the first non-unionist mayor in 1993 …

“Two balloons”? And the Facebook age finally strikes the Alliance party.

Looks like someone sneaked into the Alliance Party’s closed Facebook group and came out telling tales. Or maybe it was just someone inside the party who wasn’t too chuffed at the nature of some of the offline online chatter: In an exchange with supporters in the ‘Alliance Party Activists and Volunteers’ group about councillors Geraldine Rice and Vasundhara Kamble, Mrs Long wrote: “These two are complete balloons. They staged a sitdown protest when Anna Lo got a standing ovation because …

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Is there an election coming up?

I took the end of last week for half term. That meant minimal social media, no newspapers and not watching or listening to the news. It was a happy couple of days in a little bubble known as the real world. In that world, there is very little inkling that there is an election coming up. Imagine! Even when out and about, Lagan Valley is a poster-free zone so how normal voters who aren’t generally about to watch political programmes …

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#SluggerReport: What’s #AE17 about again? Plus, Lagan Valley and South Down.

So what’s this election about again? According to the media, it’s all about Sinn Fein vs the DUP. Trouble is that this delusion is so widespread no one questions it anymore. Indeed, the political apotheosis of this flawed thinking was the SDLP’s Stop the DUP lollipop signs in that bitterly cold campaign of 2003 (another case of timing being set to inconvenience all but one party). By the end of the first day’s count it was obvious there were to …

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Basil McCrea: we are increasingly looking at a policing response that does more than just contain the situation

Lagan Valley MLA Basil McCrea was interviewed on his local community radio station Lisburn’s 98FM today. Presenters of the weekly On The Record politics show – David McCann and Kerri Dunn – quizzed the whip-less politician about his previous statements on flag, the state of his party and his political future. listen to ‘Lagan Valley MLA @BasilMcCrea speaking to @dmcbfs & @KerriDunn on @lisburns98 radio’ on Audioboo You can listen to the entire 23 minute interview – with permission from …

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SF MLA Paul Butler to stand down

Sinn Féin MLA for Lagan Valley, Paul Butler, has announced that he will not contest the May Assembly elections after only one term as an MLA.  He resigned from Lisburn Council last month, as the Antrim Times reported. “I am standing down,” confirmed Mr Butler. “The Party’s position on this is that anyone who is a councillor and an MLA should only have one job.” The BBC reports that Paul Butler has “denied he was retiring from party politics because of disappointment …

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Auntie’s election bloomers or I’m sorry, I’ll read that again…

I think Mark’s got some stories about the comedy of errors arising from the boundary changes which I will leave to him. But here’s a couple from the media. A friend on Facebook noted this incident the other day: On Evening Extra Andy Martin ran us through a constituency profile of South Antrim in which he said that transfers would be crucial in deciding who was eventually elected. Now either South Antrim has been unilaterally declared the only Proportional Representation …

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