Can Sinn Fein win the UK’s most marginal constituency again?

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m walking through the estate where I was born on the outskirts of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Here in the United Kingdom’s most westerly and most marginal constituency, politics continues to be war by other means. The Unionist marching season beckons and as well as the usual red white and blue bunting, there are a sea of Israeli flags fluttering in the drizzle. Across town, in nationalist estates, Palestinian flags abound. These adopted tribal identities epitomise the immutable sectarian character of the competition for the seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. While Northern Ireland is slowly becoming a more homogenous society and progressive politics makes progress in the urban east, out here on the rural edge of the union, it’s different.

In the 2019 general election, just 57 votes separated the winner Sinn Fein’s Michelle Gildrenew from her Unionist rival. In 2010, after numerous recounts and a legal challenge Gildrenew won with a majority of four votes. The constituency as a whole has a narrow nationalist majority but a single unionist candidate and two nationalist contenders makes it mathematically possible for Ulster Unionist candidate Diana Armstrong to squeak through. Voting outturn here, sometimes as high as 70 per cent, routinely puts the rest of the Union to shame. The non-partisan alternatives to unionism and republicanism, mainly represented by the Alliance party struggles to make much of a dent in proceedings. Westminster contests, shorn of the nuance available in regional elections, is and ever was an orange and green dogfight.

Sinn Fein’s candidate is Pat Cullen and for once, they have put up a candidate who has something of a national profile, albeit one that is proving difficult to reconcile. Cullen was until earlier this year the chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, negotiating with the government over the long-running nurses pay dispute. That battle ended with a below inflation pay rise giving rise to some criticism of Cullen as a negotiator. Others praise a ‘steely’ resolve that prompted her to lead nurses on their first strike in 106 years. Fermanagh and South Tyrone is a far cry from smoke-filled rooms in Whitehall. But standing for Sinn Fein requires candidates to adhere to a strict and limited set of lines to take on the recent conflict here – specifically on the IRA’s terror campaign. In the constituency she wants to represent, the Protestant population was traumatised by violent extremists who murdered dozens of their neighbours in cold blood in circumstances that were nakedly sectarian, cowardly and brutal.

These horrifying acts culminated in the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomb in 1987 when the IRA killed 12 people in an attack at the town’s cenotaph. It was a horror so extreme that it was condemned even by the Kremlin. In that incident, three nurses were slain: two retired and one, Marie Wilson, was just starting on her career. All were, or had been, members of the Royal College of Nursing.

Cullen, who has been avoiding some media encounters, has been unable to condemn the murders of people who still have living and traumatised relatives. When pressed, she deploys the standard Sinn Fein line that all killings were awful and it’s time we move on.

It remains to be seen whether this ‘nothing to see here’ PR strategy will have any impact on her support base. This seems unlikely given the fact that this constituency has returned an IRA hunger striker in Bobby Sands and, after his death, his election agent, to parliament. Sinn Fein’s dismal performance in the recent local and European elections south of the border may have more of an impact. This is widely seen as a rejection of their pro-migration stance, which has led to widespread ill feeling and even riots as asylum seekers are bussed around the Republic of Ireland into communities badly prepared to receive them.

Unlike Pat Cullen, her Unionist rival, Diana Armstrong is born and bred in the constituency. She is a councillor and past chair of Fermanagh and Omagh district council and, unlike Sinn Fein, if elected she will take the King’s oath and her place in the House of Commons. She feels that Sinn Fein’s abstentionist policy has damaged the reputation of this beautiful region and that the missing voice on the green benches has blocked representation and opportunities. She’s pointedly not going after Cullen’s refusal to condemn IRA attacks and focused instead on her record and the future:

‘I know this patch like the back of my hand. I’ve been to every corner of this constituency and knocked on thousands of doors, unlike my rivals. People might not like my politics but they know me and they know that as a public representative, whatever their national identity, I will do my best for them. Agribusiness in this constituency feeds the United Kingdom. The natural beauty here is waiting to be harnessed. Developing our potential in these areas needs a strong voice not a parochial one’

There’s nothing to suggest that Cullen won’t also do her best for all of the people of the constituency, the boundary of which has been redrawn slightly in the build-up to this election. However, her refusal to condemn the IRA bombing – as well as the fact she won’t take up a seat in the Commons – make this distinction real.

Churchill once decried the ‘integrity’ of the quarrel of the people in the ‘dull and dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ He was half right. This is a stunningly beautiful part of the world. The light pouring over the huge glacial bowl Lower Lough Erne sits in is heart-stoppingly beautiful. The killing that disfigured this edge of the Union has stopped and, for most of the people most of the time, the constitutional question takes a back seat to disaffection with roads, schools and healthcare. But every five years or so, the atavistic elements of grievance and identity are disinterred. This is a constituency that has bled much in the past and is now on a razor’s edge. Anything can happen.