If there is one thing which has always divided Northern Ireland, it is elections.

For more than a hundred years, the province has been dominated by the bitter conflict between Catholic nationalists and Protestant Unionists.

The historic Good Friday Agreement was meant to end all this. But as Northern Ireland’s political parties gear up for the 2005 election, such harmony appears as far away as ever. Recent polls show that sectarian polarisation has reached a new and bitter level and that the North’s more moderate parties (the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP) are being put firmly on the defensive by the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein.

For the first time, Ian Paisley’s DUP has a 12-point lead over David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists. It is more respectable to say that one is a Paisleyite in Northern Ireland today than it has ever been.

There is one crumb of comfort for David Trimble. He is still the politician most favoured to be First Minister and in 1998 his party recovered from poor poll ratings to squeak a victory in the Assembly elections.

But the context is different today. Mr Trimble is suffering from his association in the public mind with the continuing failure of the Agreement while cynicism about “the project” is at a record high.

Superficially, the polls are not quite so bad for the SDLP. The most recent, conducted by Millward Brown Ulster, put them roughly level pegging with Sinn Fein for the nationalist and Catholic vote, both on 20 per cent.

But there has never been a poll which puts Sinn Fein ahead of the SDLP; while in the real world there have been three Province-wide elections since 2001 in which Sinn Fein finished significantly ahead.

Assuming the same differential between polling and real behaviour, Sinn Fein must be expected to defeat the SDLP. Republican morale may have been dented by recent scandals but the fact remains that Sinn Fein has the most powerful, well-financed and well-oiled electoral machine.

That machine prevented a drop in Sinn Fein’s core vote in the recent Meath by-election in the Republic. But while it has held on to to its traditional support, Sinn Fein’s forward march in the Republic has been, temporarily at least, halted.

Gerry Adams will be all the more keen to ensure that momentum in the North is sustained. He wants to be able to address the two governments this May as the man in secure possession of the leadership of the Northern nationalist community. For that reason, Mr Adams appears to be exerting great pressure on some of those involved in the McCartney murder to hand themselves over. This is his best means of eliminating any possible electoral indigestion. The IRA has not withdrawn two recent threats to return to violence.

The campaign will contain a number of uncertainties. There is still a discussion between the two unionist parties about an electoral pact. The UUP wants to protect its existing seats and maximise pressure on Sinn Fein through an understanding with moderate nationalists.

The DUP, which wishes above all to squeeze the life out of the Ulster Unionist Party, is interested only in a limited arrangement to give it a crack at winning Fermanagh & South Tyrone from Sinn Fein.

The biggest unknown is the basis of the campaign. Sinn Fein and the Irish Government say that the DUP will be available for a deal with Sinn Fein after the election. But the fallout from the collapse of the December 2004 negotiations is so toxic that even modernisers in the DUP say publicly that it will take a generation to return to that agenda.

A large section of the unionist electorate takes relative peace and prosperity rather for granted. They would rather gamble on the assumption that an IRA campaign of the old type is impossible in the changed world since 9/11 than have Sinn Fein back in government. As late as the autumn of 2003, polls suggested a widespread Protestant willingness to accept Sinn Fein into government if the IRA cleaned up its act.

But the most recent poll indicates that even if the IRA verifiably disbanded and decommissioned all its weapons, most Unionists would not wish to see Sinn Fein in government.

Mr Blair’s fatal decision was to call an election to the non-existent Assembly in 2003, despite 59 per cent of Unionists believing that it was unnecessary. That decision, which fatally damaged pro-Agreement Unionism, implied that Sinn Fein was driving the process. It was an especially damaging message as the Prime Minister had failed to persuade Sinn Fein to respond to a speech need calling for dramatic republican moves to reassure the unionist community.

To be fair, Mr Blair was a late convert to the election idea and to the idea that a DUP/Sinn Fein deal was the best way forward for Northern Ireland. The Irish Government and the US State Department made the running but, as always, the British Government pays the price when things go wrong in Northern Ireland.

Much now depends on the willingness of the parties to engage with each other after the election. At the moment there is little optimism that the election will help.

Paul Bew is professor of politics at Queen’s University, Belfast

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