North Antrim
DUP hold

This has been the fiefdom of Ian Paisley since he burst upon the Northern Irish political scene in the late 1960s, based as it is on his home town of Ballymena, along with Ballymoney, Ballycastle and the dramatic north coast with its glens and the Giant's Causeway. there is a Roman Catholic majority of about a quarter of the population, but with Paisley's brand of anti-Good Friday Agreement politics becoming more popular rather than less among the Protestant and unionist majority, he will poll a majority of that majority here and win easily for a ninth consecutive time. At the age of 75, he still seems far from an irrelevance in a corner of Ireland which still remembers its the presyterian and settler mentality and its largely Scottish roots.

The Rev Dr Ian Paisley, one of the Commons most bizarre embellishments, has been MP here since 1970, when he ousted an MP representing the old Ulster Unionist establishment, Henry Clark. Paisley is sui generis - founder both of his own party, the Democratic Unionist Party, and of his own denomination, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, numbering a mere 12,363 souls spread over 67 churches, one of them- oddly enough- in Lowestoft and presided over by Paisley's son. Born in 1926, educated at schools in Ballymena and at sundry fundamentalist bible colleges, and described variously as a bellicose, paranoid, bigoted sectarian, he represents working class Protestants against the middle class Unionists. Though his doctorate is honorary and from Bob Jones University, South Carolina, he is no mean biblical scholar, but inevitably is seen as an anachronism in a secular age. Representing at least half the Protestant electorate in Northern Ireland, he is no joke there and in opposing all power-sharing threatens to split the Unionist vote in the election. He liked his Spitting Image puppet.