Sitting comfortably on a knife-edge seat

You might imagine Diane Dodds would be feeling just a tad vulnerable, being the only unionist (and DUP at that!) MLA in West Belfast, but not a bit of it. She is no stunned rabbit stunned by the glare of headlights from the Sinn Féin juggernaut as it trundles through the constituency.

Not even if she won the seat by just 87 votes in 2003, on transfers from UUP and Alliance candidates and despite securing fewer first preferences then than Sinn Féin's Sue Ramsey and the SDLP's Joe Hendron.

In the 2005 Westminster election she increased her vote by 4.2 per cent, which helps account for her perkiness at the moment. In fact she is "more confident than ever before".

In the last Assembly election there were four unionist candidates in West Belfast, whereas this time there are just two, she pointed out.

Realistically no other unionist candidate was likely to take the seat, she continued, implicitly dismissing UUP Louis West's chances. She also observed that the PUP was not running a candidate at all on this occasion. The only possible fly in the ointment was turnout, and unionists in the Shankill and West Belfast generally did not have a good record when it came to that, she said. However, "I can hold it", she insists.

The SDLP's Alex Attwood ought to be feeling delicate too, with Sinn Féin chasing five of the six seats in West Belfast where they currently hold four. But he is talking, not just of holding onto his seat, but of the party securing two quotas in West Belfast between himself and fellow party candidate Margaret Walsh.

There, as throughout Northern Ireland, the SDLP was finding that "people were browned off at politics being stuck for the past four years and direct rule, misrule on issues like water charges and domestic rates", he said.

There were also "rumblings over policing. Not that Sinn Féin got it wrong, but that it took them so long to get it right". There was "confusion as to why they waited so long. People were saying to him "you played it straight. You took the hit electorally and acted in the interest something bigger than the party".

The voters were being "more hard- headed" in this campaign and "were not buying the usual lines", he said.

Still, "you have to work for every vote" in West Belfast, he said, and people had to be motivated to turn out.

Overall in Northern Ireland he believed the SDLP was going to gain in both vote share and seat numbers on March 7th.

Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams disputed a media perception of the election campaign generally as being "flat". In his view "people are up for it." He did however feel there was a degree of apathy among younger people.

He would not speculate on how Sinn Féin would perform overall but was confident the party could take five of the six seats in West Belfast. They already had four and securing the fifth was a matter of vote management, he said.

It was his "strong view that the DUP was going to come on board" where a new powersharing executive was concerned, but he wished "they would do so in a more graceful way. In fairness, they do not have much choice. Either they come into the Assembly or there is no Assembly. Their electorate is ahead of them and if you want to sustain a political class you must keep people involved.

"Some time they will be up for it" so why not now, he suggested.

Where policing and republican paramilitaries were concerned he said he has been "very diligently trying to engage with various armed groups and will continue to persevere" on the matter, with a view to persuading them their current route was not the way forward.

He had written to Ruarí Ó Bradaigh, president of Republican Sinn Féin, but he had refused to meet him, and he had been trying to engage with the 32 County Sovereignty Movement "on a daily basis".