“BACK IN THE day, and I mean way back in the day, I would have mistook you for somebody undercover!”
As I walked back and forth, here and there, on the Whiterock Road in west Belfast trying to work out where the Sinn Féin canvassing team were meeting, I imagine I did look more than a touch out of place.
We meet at Caulfield’s Bar and the undercover remark is made by somebody I approach after correctly identifying them as a member of the canvassing team.
There’s an INLA mural across the street which includes images of hunger striker Patsy O’Hara alongside Che Guevara.
In front of me is less than complimentary graffiti about the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
The local elections are just over a week away and I’m following sitting Sinn Féin councillor Michael Donnelly.
Over two evenings, I follow Donnelly, Alliance’s Chris Ogle, the SDLP’s Donal Lyons, and the Ulster Unionist Pary’s (UUP) Carole Howard.
They are all running in different districts across Belfast City Council for this Thursday’s local elections.
There’s 60 seats up for grabs across Belfast City Council, and last time out in 2019, Sinn Féin were the biggest party with 18 seats.
The DUP came next with 15 seats, followed by Alliance with 10 seats, and then the SDLP with six seats.
The UUP came away from the 2019 election with two seats.
Donnelly is a Sinn Féin councillor for the Black Mountain district electoral area.
Sinn Féin hold six of seven seats here and are hoping to emulate that in the upcoming election on Thursday.
Walking around the doors on the canvass trail, it easy to see why an unfamiliar face would quickly stick out.
It seems to be a very tight-knit community where everyone knows one another.
Donnelly told The Journal that he was born and raised in the area and wants to do whatever he can to better the community.
Joining the canvass is Sinn Féin MP Paul Maskey.
It’s the third time Donnelly has been around this area in an effort to make sure he speaks to everyone at least once.
Maskey tells me anywhere between 70 and 100 Sinn Féin activists will be out in west Belfast in the run up to the election.
At the first door we go to, Michael pulls up a video of Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O’Neill wishing the resident a happy birthday.
At another door, we are invited in for a cup of tea. At a third door, the resident worries that the documentation for his proxy vote hasn’t arrived yet.
Michael quickly recalls that the resident will be heading off on his holidays on Sunday and tells me that this is how eager people are to vote.
“I’d hate to miss out on the chance to vote,” says the resident.
“People have died for the vote,” he adds sombrely.
Donnelly says that while the mood towards Sinn Féin is very positive on the doorsteps, “there is a lot of anger in relation to a lack of a functioning executive at the hands of one party and it’s causing real frustration”.
“We need it up and running ASAP for everyone and it’s the common message that we are hearing everywhere,” said Donnelly.
“No matter where you go, people want to see the executive up and running because everywhere is feeling the pinch, including our education and healthcare system.”
There has been no functioning government in Stormont since last year when the DUP withdrew in protest over the post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland.
Donnelly says his constituents “know that Sinn Féin wants to be back in the executive” and adds that Michelle O’Neill is “waiting to get in there” and commends her “tremendous leadership”.
Anger over the lack of an executive is the recurring theme across the doors when I join candidates from the SDLP, UUP, and Alliance on a canvass.
While Michael Donnelly is running for re-election, it’s Chris Ogle’s first time running for office and he’s on the Alliance ticket in the Botanic area of Belfast.
I joined him in a leafy suburb of south Belfast, in a housing estate which is also home to the US Consulate General.
The resident of the first door we knock bemoans the “nonsense” of local politics and wishes that people would stop voting for the same parties.
Another pledges his vote to Alliance in order to “send a message about Stormont”.
All of this aligns with what Ogle told The Journal before the canvass.
“I think everybody is fed up; fed up with politics, fed up with deadlock, fed up with how things have been in our politics, fed up with the constant soap opera of Northern Ireland politics.
“For the last 25 years, we’ve only really had a government around 60% of the time. People want to see more stability and delivery from their public representatives.
“If people want to send a message about the state of politics, they need to vote Alliance,” said Ogle.
A third resident informs Ogle that he will be giving his first preference vote to the SDLP candidate because of his help in a local planning dispute.
However, he assures him the Ogle will get his second preference.
The voting system used in Northern Ireland Assembly and local elections is the single transferable vote system, the same system used in elections in the Republic of Ireland.
Looking towards Thursday, Ogle said he is “hoping to see the continuation of the trends we’ve seen over the last couple of years, the consolidation of the Alliance surge”.
Ogle is joined by Alliance MLA Paula Bradshaw on his canvass, along with a group of three volunteers.
One of these volunteers is Meghan McCollum, who is a politics student at Queen’s University, Belfast.
She describes Alliance as “inspiring” and adds that they are “creating a movement with young people”.
Alliance designates as “other” and this is one of its draws for Meghan.
“It’s really inspiring to see a sort of middle ground being a new thing.”
The middle ground is anything but inspiring for people in the unionist stronghold where I meet Ulster Unionist Party candidate Carole Howard.
I met Howard on the outskirts of Belfast, close to the George Best Belfast City Airport.
Union flag bunting is out, perhaps due to the recent coronation, and a big union flag with an image of King Charles and the wording of ‘God Save The King’ flies outside one of the homes.
She is a candidate in the Ormiston district electoral area.
In the 2019 election, she won a seat in the neighbouring Titanic district with the Alliance Party.
However, in December of 2021, she defected from Alliance to the UUP in order to “comfortably” express her pro-union views.
“I’ll not be giving my vote to Alliance anyway,” says one person on the door.
Speaking to The Journal, Howard is of the opinion that Alliance needs to come down one way or the other on the constitutional question.
“UUP leader Doug Beattie approached me and asked me if I would consider moving over and I had been very closely watching Doug’s leadership grow.
“The timing was quite good actually when he came to me but I did take a while to think about it, I don’t rush into decisions.
“But for me, certainly my main issue is that I’m very much pro-union. I was finding that issues of the Union were becoming a problem for me within Alliance.
“I have many friends in Alliance but on that issue, I was being squeezed more and more and finding myself tending to be amongst people who were more nationalist thinking, so that was a major problem for me,” said Howard.
While she said it was a “big gamble” to move to the UUP, she said these opportunities don’t often arise, “especially for women, and especially when you get to a certain age”.
Howard is also confident of taking votes from the DUP, the party behind the most recent collapse of Stormont.
“We’re hearing people saying, ‘we used to vote DUP but until they go back into Stormont, we’re not voting for them’.
“I know that the DUP will be asking people to transfer down the unionist ticket, and to be fair, we will probably be saying, ‘after you vote for our candidate, vote down the unionist ticket’.
“But I also tell people that the local Green Party candidate is also a great guy, so once you get down your ticket, have a look at his vote.
“I think you vote for the councillor that you like, and it shouldn’t matter what party they’re in, but it does in Northern Ireland.
“But I will be hopeful that we will get DUP transfers, and the DUP is definitely telling people to go down the transfer to the unionists, so they’re probably hoping for transfers from ours to them as well.”
Howard also told The Journal: “On the doors that I’ve rapped, some people have started with, ‘if you had been the DUP, I would have been saying I don’t want your leaflet, but I’m quite happy to take yours because you’re willing to go back to work’.”
The UUP candidate added that she is getting a “very positive response on the doors” but that the recurring opening line from people is: “When is Stormont getting back?”
She said her reply is: “We’re back, rapping the door, we’re waiting to get in, just open it.”
Local councils are still operating as normal despite the collapse of Stormont.
When asked if it is frustrating to hear people ask her when she will return to work, Howard recounts a recent run-in with a jogger.
“I was putting posters up recently and a guy jogged past and shouted at me, ‘get yourself back to work’.
“He didn’t stop for me to reply to him, he just carried on with his earphones and had he given me the right to reply, I would have said: ‘I work full-time in Belfast Met College, I also have this 24/7 council job for the past 12 years, so I am certainly not out of work.’
“But we are all getting tarred with the same brush and that made me really angry that night, well more frustrated, because he wouldn’t wait for me to reply.”
Howard also notes that MLAs are still working despite the doors being closed in Stormont.
When I join her on her canvass, she is going round the doors with UUP MLA Andy Allen.
Howard said he has been “working solid” and that he’s “flat out and never stops”.
Speaking to The Journal, Allen said: “We are working day and daily, addressing the bread and butter issues that are facing people, whether it be the cost of living crisis, the lack of education places, the spiralling waiting lists, or the lack of investment in delivering new, social and affordable housing.”
On the evening I join Howard on her canvass however, it’s the local issues that dominate; the cost of bin collections, repairs to footpaths, potholes.
One resident complained about a huge pothole across from a big Tesco store and I should have heeded this prophetic warning, as I too became victim of this admittedly huge pothole on my way home.
Another resident wasn’t keen on US president Joe Biden, nor the money that was spent on his short-lived visit to the North.
If Biden’s gaffe on “beating the hell out of the Black and Tans” annoyed her, further grievance may have been caused when the US president announced that he visited Ireland last month to “make sure the Brits didn’t screw around”.
Biden fared considerably better among SDLP voters across the city in an estate off the Malone Road where I met with the SDLP’s Donal Lyons and Sarah Mulgrew.
Lyons is a sitting councillor, while Mulgrew is running for the first time.
Lyons told The Journal: “It has to be said that the overwhelming feedback is deep, deep frustration at the DUP and the fact that the assembly isn’t sitting at a time when we are being hit by economic headwinds, and we’re still at the tail end of trying to come out of the COVID and those very difficult years.
“We’re also in a situation where public services are under serious strain right across the board and people I think are correctly identifying that as the DUP’s refusal to accept the real politics of the moment.”
Lyons adds that sometimes candidates from other parties get criticism for the DUP collapsing Stormont.
“Of course, sometimes when someone knocks on the door and says, ‘hello, I’m here from politics’, they’re going to say, ‘I’m very upset at politics at the moment’.
“But nine times out of 10, you outline your solution and urge people to not view the election as a problem but as an opportunity to vote for a solution and a better way.
“But I can completely understand why people are frustrated and angry because they have an absolute right to be angry”.
This frustration rears its head on one of the doors when the resident wonders why she has to go to work when the politicians don’t.
Another labels the lack of an executive a “world class embarrassment”.
On the doors with the Alliance’s Chris Ogle in the neighbouring Botanic area, some voters were torn between Alliance and the SDLP.
Lyons notes that both parties take a similar course in Belfast and “share that same kind of progressive approach”.
He also acknowledges that in south Belfast both parties “fish from the same pond and attract from the same area of support”.
However, he adds that there is a “divergence with Alliance” on economic issues and describes the SDLP as “left of centre” and a party that “doesn’t believe that the market should be allowed to do what the market does”.
Mulgrew also says there is a real frustration at the lack of an executive and that “people aren’t fixated on the local issues for the most part, and it is the wider problems they are bringing up”.
As a first time candidate, she said she is “throwing everything I have at it and going at it full charge”.
Later in the evening, two doors in a row express concern that their children who have left to find employment elsewhere will never return.
On one of these visits, the resident talks about how great Northern Ireland can be, with world-class educational facilities and high end jobs coming to Belfast, but worries that it won’t be enough to coax his children home.
At another door, a young man answers and reveals that he won’t be voting because he has become disassociated with politics and finds it increasingly difficult to care.
Lyons is able to persuade him of the merits of the SDLP but it’s a vote he will only benefit from in future elections, as the ship has sailed on registering in time for the polls opening on Thursday.
The DUP was approached for this article but did not respond to The Journal’s request.
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