Sinn Féin on course for Northern Ireland’s best local election results

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The nationalist Sinn Féin party was on course for its best local election result in Northern Ireland on Saturday, in a contest widely seen as a vote on the region’s post-Brexit political deadlock.

The party, which supports Irish unity, gained council seats where it had never won before and opened up a large lead over the Democratic Unionist Party, the largest party in the region in favor of keeping Northern Ireland in the UK .

Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein prime minister-in-waiting, called him an “important election result”. In the early afternoon his party had joined 26 seats to his tally in the 2019 council election, winning 124 of 462 seats in 11 councils to the DUP’s 105. The full results were expected to be tallied by late evening.

Smaller nationalist and unionist parties have taken big hits while the centrist Alliance party, which surged to third place in assembly elections last May, reportedly won the third-most councillors.

O’Neill named London and Dublin as co-sponsors of the Good Friday Agreement which ended Northern Ireland’s 30-year conflict in 1998 – to help end the DUP’s boycott of the executive and power-sharing assembly at Stormont.

The DUP brought the the region’s politics at a standstill since last May’s assembly elections in a bid to push for more changes to post-Brexit trade rules, which he said had undermined Northern Ireland’s role as part of the UK.

“I think the burden now falls a lot on the two governments,” O’Neill told BBC Northern Ireland. “I am now calling on the two governments as co-guarantors to effectively unite. . . through the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, to urgently organize such a meeting, put a plan on the table. . . How are we going to get a restored leader?

DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was “very pleased our vote held”. Doug Beattie, leader of the small Ulster Unionist Party, said he was disappointed with the results.

There was no immediate reaction from London or Dublin. The UK and the EU agreed on the Windsor framework this year to simplify trade rules.

The DUP said its position on post-Brexit trade deals warranted major changes, but insisted more were needed.

The council election results are the latest in a series of setbacks for Northern Irish trade unionism. Sinn Féin overtook the DUP as the largest party in the region’s assembly last May, and now Catholics they outnumber the Protestants in Northern Ireland, according to the latest census data.

“This [result] it will change the landscape,” lawyer and trade union commentator Sarah Creighton told BBC Northern Ireland.