Mid Ulster.
Sinn Féin MP Cathal Mallaghan holds the seat on 53.0% of the vote.
9 Jun 2026
Small-town Tyrone seat, firmly nationalist since 2019
Mid Ulster is a Northern Ireland seat redrawn on the 2023 boundaries, with an electorate of around 74,000 and a Census population of just over 105,000. It is a comparatively young constituency by United Kingdom standards, with a median age of 37. Local services across its 29 wards are run by a single body, Mid Ulster District Council, one of the eleven local authorities created in Northern Ireland's 2015 reorganisation. The council operates from three inherited administrative centres, a structure that reflects the seat's spread of small towns and rural townlands rather than dominance by any one urban centre.
That dispersed geography sits beneath a parliamentary picture that has been settled for some time. At the 2024 general election Sinn Féin took the seat with 53 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Democratic Unionist Party on around 20 per cent, a margin of better than two to one. The pattern held from 2019, when Sinn Féin won on 46 per cent to the Democratic Unionist Party's 25 per cent, and the gap has if anything widened. Cathal Mallaghan, returned for Sinn Féin in 2024, has recorded no likely-whipped dissent in recent months. No recent ward-election results are on record for these boundaries, so the council's direction-of-travel cannot be read with confidence here.
The seat appears stable rather than contested, and recent local coverage has carried a routine, administrative tenor, weighted towards council business and ceremonial appointments rather than controversy. On the figures available, the parliamentary contest is not close, and the broad unionist-versus-nationalist division that frames so much of Northern Ireland politics is, in this constituency, settled firmly in the nationalist column. The absence of fresh ward data leaves the local tier harder to characterise, but nothing in the parliamentary numbers suggests a seat in flux. It reads, for now, as quiet and predictable.
Headline indicators.
| Indicator | Local | National | Δ |
|---|
Ethnicity.
Source · Census 2021
Population by age & sexCensus 2021 · 18 bands · click to expand
Source · Census 2021 (ONS) · % of usual residents; tick marks the median seat per band
No usable crime figures are available for this constituency — the local police force does not currently supply offence-level data to data.police.uk, so neither a crime rate nor a category breakdown can be shown.
2024 — full result.
| Candidate | Votes | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cathal MallaghanWON | Ind | 24,085 | 53.0 |
| Keith Buchanan | DUP | 9,162 | 20.2 |
| Denise Johnston | Ind | 3,722 | 8.2 |
| Glenn Moore | Ind | 2,978 | 6.5 |
| Jay Basra | Ind | 2,269 | 5.0 |
| Padraic Farrell | Ind | 2,001 | 4.4 |
| Alixandra Halliday | Ind | 1,047 | 2.3 |
| John Kelly | Ind | 181 | 0.4 |
Turnout 45,445
Prior contests.
| Year | Winner | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Francie Molloy | Ind | 45.9 |
| 2017 | Francie Molloy | Ind | 54.5 |
| 2015 | Francie Molloy | Ind | 48.7 |
| 2013 | Molloy, Francie | Ind | 46.9 |
| 2010 | McGuinness, Martin | Ind | 52.0 |
Sources, methods & last update
2023 boundary review
DCLEAPIL v1.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Census 2021
National avg over 575 seats
LSOA-aggregated · rolling 12mo