ABSTRACT
This article outlines the tensions and problems besetting the narrow political centre in Northern Ireland, utilizing the first academic survey of the membership of the ‘non-sectarian’ Alliance Party. The political centre in Northern Ireland has occupied infertile ground during nearly 30 years of ethnic conflict and polarization. The Alliance Party has claimed to offer a home for electors rejecting unionist-nationalist zero-sum game politics. Yet, as Northern Ireland’s main centre party, Alliance faces a number of problems. First, its membership is unrepresentative, comprising mainly middle-class professionals, aged over 50. Second, the party’s support among Catholics is limited due to Alliance’s innate unionism. Third, the party itself does not constitute a homogeneous centre, as there are attitudinal divisions between Protestants and Catholics within the same party. Finally, and ironically for a party long supportive of devolved power-sharing, Alliance may be a victim of the Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement legitimizes the ethnic bloc, unionist versus nationalist politics condemned by Alliance. The form of consociational democracy introduced in Northern Ireland threatens to marginalize Alliance, now reduced to the status of ‘other’ party within the devolved Assembly.
