Assembly Election 2022 Update

11/5/2022

Elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly took place on Thursday 5 May 2022.

Results

No doubt you will have been glued to your tv over the last few days and are aware of the final breakdown of seats, but we have included an overview by constituency for your convenience.

What now?

Primarily, of interest to RSUA members will be what will happen in the interim to the Infrastructure Minister’s role now Nichola Mallon has lost her seat.

Under Assembly rules, the SDLP could have replaced their Minister with another member, but instead opted not to do so. According to the D’hondt system used to allocate Executive seats, Sinn Féin will now be invited to nominate a caretaker Minister to the portfolio.

The first meeting of the Assembly will be Friday 13th May where Members will designate themselves as ‘Nationalist’, ‘Unionist’ or ‘Other’.  Ministers in other portfolios will continue in their roles as caretakers until a new Executive is agreed.

Democratic Unionist Party leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has told the media that he will not make nominations to the Executive until issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol have been addressed.  The UK Government has indicated it may review aspects of the Protocol which requires goods from the UK to be checked coming into Northern Ireland.

The DUP has also confirmed today that it has not made a determination that it will vote for a Speaker on Friday, which would paralyse the Assembly and halt the process of nominating MLAs to committees.

View the elected MLA’s in the below overview document.