“If Sylvia was running, she would’ve romped this street,” laughed Stephen Farry, the deputy leader of Northern Ireland’s cross-community Alliance party, as he knocked on doors on a residential street in Bangor on a cold December evening . “She’s doing better than I am tonight,” he joked.
That was several weeks ago. The Sylvia in question is Lady Hermon, the highly regarded and much-liked former independent unionist MP for North Down. Farry, as of last night, is her successor. He is only the second Alliance politician to be elected to Westminster in the party’s 49-year history.
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