Nationalist party Sinn Féin was on course for its best-ever local election result in Northern Ireland on Saturday, in a contest widely regarded as a vote on the region’s post-Brexit political stalemate.
The party, which backs Irish unity, gained seats on councils where it had never won before and opened up a wide lead over the Democratic Unionist party, the region’s largest party in favour of keeping Northern Ireland in the UK.
Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s first minister-in-waiting, called it a “momentous election result”. By early afternoon her party had added 26 seats to its tally in the 2019 council elections, winning 124 of the 462 seats across 11 councils to the DUP’s 105. Full results were expected to be tallied by late evening.
Smaller nationalist and unionist parties suffered big hits while the centrist Alliance Party, which rose to third place in assembly elections last May, was set to win the third highest number of councillors.
O’Neill called on London and Dublin — as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement that ended Northern Ireland’s three decades-long conflict in 1998 — to help end the DUP’s boycott of the power-sharing executive and assembly at Stormont.
The DUP has brought the region’s politics to a standstill since last May’s assembly elections in an attempt press for further changes to post-Brexit trading rules that it says undermine Northern Ireland’s role as part of the UK.
“I do think the onus is very much on the two governments now,” O’Neill told BBC Northern Ireland. “I call on the two governments now as co-guarantors to actually come together . . . through the British Irish Intergovernmental Conference, to have that meeting as a matter of urgency, put a plan on the table . . . How are we going to have a restored executive?”.
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was “very pleased that our vote has held up”. Doug Beattie, leader of the small Ulster Unionist Party, said he was disappointed with the outcome so far.
There was no immediate reaction from London or Dublin. The UK and EU earlier this year agreed the Windsor framework to streamline trade rules.
The DUP says its stance on post-Brexit trade arrangements secured important changes but insists more are needed.
The council election results are the latest in a series of setbacks for Northern Irish unionism. Sinn Féin overtook the DUP as the largest party in the region’s assembly last May, and Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland, according to the latest census data.
“This [result] is going to change the landscape,” Sarah Creighton, a lawyer and unionist commentator, told BBC Northern Ireland.
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