Adams takes fifth place in Sinn Fein hit parade

Outside the polling station where Gerry Adams voted, Sinn Fein workers urged supporters not to give him their number ones. In fact, they couldn't bring themselves to recommend anything better than a fifth preference for the party president, behind all the other Sinn Fein candidates.

But it was nothing personal. In an effort to maximise its already vast support in West Belfast, the party had carved up the constituency like a wedding cake. And in this slice of Andersonstown it was decreed that Alex Maskey was getting the top vote and Gerry Adams the bottom. Sample ballot papers were provided, marked accordingly.

As is usual by now, the world's media turned out to watch the Sinn Fein president vote. And in the inevitable scrum around the subsequent press conference, nobody thought to ask him if he'd followed party advice. Surrounded by children bearing "Vote Sinn Fein" posters, Mr Adams predicted an increased Sinn Fein vote, and talked of the beginning of "the next phase", before being swept away by the now-legendary Sinn Fein organisation.

A quarter of a mile up the road, at St Teresa's Primary School, Mr Adams was still number five in the Sinn Fein hit parade. But Alex Maskey had slipped to fourth and Sue Ramsey was the new number one. It wasn't quite that simple, though. Posters advised voters they should only vote in that order if they lived in certain streets, a system which took three separate posters to explain.

You had to go to Ballymurphy to find posters advising first preferences for Adams. The party workers outside Corpus Christi youth club on Whiterock Road handed out the sample ballots to voters with cheerful greetings: "There you are Eddie, just follow that there. All right?" And asked if supporters could be counted on to vote in the desired order, a party worker assured us that "people are very disciplined".

There was no apparent SDLP presence in West Belfast, and Sinn Fein needed no prompting to gloat. One of several activists outside a polling station on Glen Road said: "They're all kind of elderly. We have all the young people."

Over in East Belfast, Robin Stewart was the only party worker outside St Donard's Church in Bloomfield, where the Rev Ian Paisley had voted earlier in the morning.

A PUP supporter, he was scornful of the DUP leader and his entourage. "They were a bit more careful this time after what happened that wee Norwegian girl last month," he said, referring to an incident in which a female member of the foreign media broke her arm in the melee surrounding Dr Paisley's referendum vote.

If the Assembly vote went against the DUP, he claimed, "Paisley will probably declare Antrim independent".

In nearby Orangefield, there were no supporters of the Belfast Agreement outside the polling station. An almost tropical downpour had sent election workers scurrying for cover in the early afternoon and when it stopped raining, only the DUP and UKUP had re-emerged.