The 2015 United Kingdom general election in Northern Ireland was held on 7 May 2015 and all 18 seats were contested. 1,236,765 people were eligible to vote, up 67,581 from the 2010 general election. 58.45% of eligible voters turned out, an increase of half a percentage point from the last general election. This election saw the return of Ulster Unionists to the House of Commons, after they targeted 4 seats but secured 2.
Debate
A political debate was held between the leaders of the five main parties in Northern Ireland: the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionist Party, Social Democratic and Labour Party and Alliance Party of Northern Ireland as part of BBC Newsnight on 16 April 2015.
Constituencies and MPs
Northern Ireland returned eighteen members of parliament to House of Commons, one for each of its 18 parliamentary constituencies.
Results
In total, three seats changed hands in Northern Ireland – Belfast East, Fermanagh and South Tyrone and South Antrim.
Unionists
Prior to the election, the two main unionist parties – the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) – had agreed not to stand against each other in certain seats. The DUP stood aside in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, and in Newry and Armagh, while the UUP did not contest Belfast East and Belfast North.
The DUP retained their position as the largest unionist party, and also overtook Sinn Féin to once again poll the largest number of votes in Northern Ireland (they had last achieved this in 2005, with Sinn Féin taking the top position in 2010). The DUP succeeded in re-taking one of the unionist pact seats – Belfast East – which party leader Peter Robinson had lost to the Alliance Party's Naomi Long in 2010. Gavin Robinson (no relation to Peter) won the seat with a majority of over 2,500 votes. Elsewhere, the DUP retained Belfast North where the UUP had also stood aside, as well as East Antrim, East Londonderry, Lagan Valley, North Antrim, Strangford and Upper Bann.
In a surprise result, the UUP gained South Antrim from the DUP, where Danny Kinahan defeated veteran MP William McCrea by 949 votes. They also gained Fermanagh and South Tyrone from Sinn Féin, as former leader Tom Elliott took the seat from Michelle Gildernew by 530 votes. The seat had been the site of a unionist pact in 2010, when the DUP and UUP both supported an independent candidate, who went on to be defeated by Gildernew by just four votes. The two seats for the UUP marked their best election since 2001, and they also managed to increase their vote share slightly to overtake the SDLP into third place in Northern Ireland.
No other unionist parties won seats, with Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) seeing their vote fall by almost 10,000 (though with three fewer candidates). TUV did however retain second place in North Antrim, though they remained over 11,000 votes behind the DUP. They also saved their deposit in three other seats. The United Kingdom Independence Party contested their first general election in Northern Ireland. They polled 18,000 votes in ten constituencies, saving their deposit in four. Their best performance came in East Antrim where they won nearly 11% of the vote. The Northern Ireland Conservatives were contesting a general election as a separate party for the first time since 2005 (they had previously entered into an electoral alliance with the UUP). The party stood in 16 constituencies (not in Belfast North and Fermanagh and South Tyrone), polling just over 9,000 votes in total. They kept their deposit in one seat – Strangford.
Nationalists
Sinn Féin were the second largest Northern Ireland party, and the largest nationalist party in terms of both votes and seats, despite their loss of Fermanagh and South Tyrone and a small drop in vote share. They easily retained Belfast West, Mid Ulster and West Tyrone – the first of these being the safest seat in Northern Ireland with a 35% majority. In Newry and Armagh, new candidate Mickey Brady saw off the UUP's Danny Kennedy despite the unionist unity pact in the constituency. Brady secured a majority of over 4,000 votes, though this was about half the Sinn Féin majority in 2010.