Northern Ireland Assembly results
In continuation of my efforts to learn more about the politics of Ireland and Northern Ireland and share them with you, I give you this follow-up piece. The results are in from the Northern Ireland Assembly election held last Thursday and as expected, The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) took the lead as the largest party with 36 seats out of the 108-member Assembly. Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican party, took the second largest position with 28 seats. The two parties are now faced with a 26 March deadline to form a power-sharing agreement in the Executive.
DUP leader Ian Paisley is poised to take the First Minister position in the Executive, while Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness would take the Deputy First Minister spot. Of the ten Executive positions, the DUP will take four positions, Sinn Féin next with three, then two Ulster Unionists and one nationalist SDLP.
This should be interesting with such polar-opposite leaders potentlially sharing the number one and number two Executive positions. Paisley is an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church who once called Pope John Paul II the anti-Christ, while McGuinness was a former second-in-command leader of the Provisional IRA during Bloody Sunday and, like his fellow Sinn Féin members, refuses to take his seat as a Member of British Parliament. We’ll just have to wait and see if the power-sharing agreement can be made before 26 March.
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Monday, 26 March 2007 at 1:01 pm
[...] marked the deadline of reaching an agreement between the loyalists and the Irish Republicans in the Executive, otherwise the ...