Saturday 4th April 2015. Glengormley.
Thanks to my (free travel) Translink Pass…a bus ride from Belfast for a walk around Glengormley. Quite a surprise to see so many SDLP posters for North Belfast candidate, Alban Maginness.
Beginning (amusingly) at Clifton Street Orange Hall, there were posters for Alban, all along Antrim Road. I would estimate that SDLP posters outnumbered Sinn Féin posters at least 10:1 and outnumbered DUP posters by maybe 20:1.
Posters for SDLP were at all points…New Lodge, Newington, Fortwilliam, Bellevue and into Glengormley. Likewise posters for Gerry Kelly (SF) were at all points on the Antrim Road to Glengormley but more spaced out. DUP (Dodds) posters were mostly in the Fortwilliam and Glengormley area.
I realise that Posters are not Votes. But I was really surprised to see SDLP so visible.
Keeping An Eye On the Czar of Russia 
‘I realise that Posters are not Votes. But I was really surprised to see SDLP so visible.’
Posters I think help when the candidate is new or unknown to the area but for someone well established in that area it wont make much difference. If Alban has no posters or whether he has thousands of posters he will still get his core 4000 votes, which is bad news for Kelly as he will be about 1500 short of Dodds.
I was sitting on the front seat upstairs on the bus. I heard a conversation of twogirls behind me…early teens.
“What are all the posters on the lamp posts for?”
“I dont know”
So…a lot of apathy.
Arguably SDLP’s target audience have switched off from politics and news in general. They need to be visible on social media and probably not so much twitter. My kids tell me that twitter is only for old or boring people. There is a big data opportunity out there for political parties and I don’t see that they have realised it yet. A smart party would be creating viral news events though that’s not an easy thing to do.
It might seem strange for a Blogger but I am not a big fan of social media.
The World seems more stupid than when I was young.
I dont think that young people can be made to take an interest until something happens that really matters to them.
The number of posters means nothing.Last year McCottor of Eirigi featured massively on posters- his vote actually went down.Also I was in Dublin at that time and Boylan of SF barely featured in the poster wars yet she beat everyone else out of sight.In my own area the SDLP have to pay people to put up posters and again to very little effect as SF elect 3 councillors to the SDLP’S NONE.
Yes Roddy….if you had bothered to read my post, you would have seen that I actually said that Posters are not Votes.
Try and keep up.
I was merely agreeing with you that posters are not votes!