What actually happened in Northern Ireland?

Now that all the votes are counted and transfered, the results are in: Sinn Fein gains 6 seats and the SDLP lose 6 seats, neatly reversing the positions in the last election. Meanwhile, the DUP gain a bunch of seats, mostly at the expense of the UUP and a number of minor parties (the BBC is not, at the moment, helpful, as the number of gained seats is greater than the number of lost seats, which Should Not Happen).

How did this happen? Well, the overall narrative is that extreme parties have gained votes from the moderates; but that doesn’t explain everything. There will always be personal factors, local issues; beyond that, the “national” story assumes that people are still voting in sectarian blocs, but ignores the issue of the Catholics slowly, but surely, out-breeding the Protestants.

Annoyingly, though, the full results, including how the votes distributed - given that Northern Ireland uses the Single Transferable Vote system, this is important - are not available. So I’ve just deleted a huge blog post, because I can’t actually talk about the things that are interesting. Bah.

Having said that, if you look at the results one by one, you’ll notice a fair amount of instances where the DUP loses a seat and Sinn Féinn gains one. It’s not a unionist/republican zero-sum game like many would want you to believe.