Apart from enacting the Special Powers Act, early Northern Irish parliaments and administrations also dealt with another matter that would be at the core of the nationalist grievances that erupted in the 1960s: electoral systems and processes. The first two Northern Irish parliaments were elected on the basis of proportional representation. The results of the first election have already been alluded to. The 1921 election using proportional representation resulted in the Ulster Unionist Party obtaining 66.95% of the popular vote which translated into 76.92% of the seats in Parliament. Thus the system rewarded the Ulster Unionists with a ‗bonus‘
of 10% more seats than they got votes. The non-Unionist vote was split between Sinn Féin and the Nationalist Party. Sinn Féin obtained 20% of the vote but only 11.5% of the seats. However, the Nationalist Party‘s results were almost perfectly proportional 11.8% of the vote returning 11.5% of the seats.
The 1925 elections (the last held under the proportional representation system) saw a decline in the Ulster Unionist Party‘s vote with 55% of the popular vote translating into 61% of the Stormont seats. This decline may be ascribed to the presence of Independent Unionist candidates who obtained 9% of the votes and 7.6% of the seats. In the absence of Sinn Féin, the Nationalists polled 23.7% of the vote and obtained 19.2% of seats. This breakdown of the results indicates that the main differences in performance were attributable to whether or not the unionist and nationalist vote was split or not. Nevertheless, a bias in favour of the Ulster Unionists is evident even under the proportional representation system with the party obtaining more seats than votes in both elections. This must have been due to the way in which electoral boundaries were drawn and also partly due to the existence of a University vote and a second vote for owners of business premises.
In 1928 the Northern Irish parliament voted to change the voting system to the first-past-the-post model used for Westminster elections. It has been a common nationalist complaint that this change was intended to work against the nationalist community. However, studies quoted by John Whyte in his balanced and scrupulous examination of discrimination in electoral practices98 show that this particular complaint was exaggerated. In fact, the 1929 elections resulted in the Ulster Unionists gaining 71% of the seats although they only obtained 50.8% of the vote: a difference in their favour of just over 20%. At the same time the Nationalist Party obtained 21.5% of the seats although it gathered 11.6% of the vote: a difference in their favour of just under 10%. The main losers under the new system were the Independent Unionists, the Ulster Liberals and the Labour Party. The former had only 5.7% of the seats although it had polled 14%
98John Whyte, ―How Much Discrimination Was There under the Unionist Regime, 1921-68?,‖ in Contemporary Irish Studies, ed. Tom Gallagher and James O‘Connell (Manchester University Press, 1983).
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of the vote while Labour with 8% of the popular vote had 1.9% of the seats. The Ulster Liberals obtained no seats notwithstanding having won over 6% of the vote.
This loss by the minor parties is highlighted by Whyte:
Osborne, Pringle and Buckland focus their criticisms, not on what the 1929 reapportionment did to nationalists, but on its other effects. The abolition of PR generally weakens small parties, and the main losers in Northern Ireland were Labour, independent unionists, and other groups, who fell from eight seats in 1925 to four in 1929, although their share of the vote increased99.
All told it seems that the system adopted by the Northern Ireland parliament for its elections as from 1929 onwards did not unduly discriminate against nationalists although it did benefit considerably the governing party. The reasons for the change do not appear to have been discriminatory in their intent although self-serving motives of the governing party are evident.
The Northern Irish Prime Minister addressing the issue in the Northern Ireland Parliament claimed that his interest was that of creating a parliament where it was clear who was in favour of the union with Great Britain and who was against with no parties that entertained other issues apart from the constitutional one:
What I want to get in this House, and what I believe we will get very much better in this House under the old-fashioned plain and simple system, are men who are for the Union on the one hand or who are against it and want to go into a Dublin Parliament on the other.100
He also claimed that the first-past-the-post system created strong and stable government. This, given the circumstances of Northern Ireland, meant strong Unionist government. Apart from a desire to strengthen the Unionist Party‘s position at the expense of the smaller parties (though perhaps not the nationalists per se), a further consideration that is relevant in this context is that it brought the electoral system for Northern Ireland‘s party in line with the electoral system of the United Kingdom parliament, which served to further emphasise the union between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom.101 The parliamentary debates in the Northern Irish House of Commons however, do reflect a significant concern by the nationalist party representatives that the abolition of proportional representation would be prejudicial to the minorities. The leader of the Nationalist Party at Stormont Joe Devlin expressed this concern in one of the debates on proportional representation:
I think this [abolition of proportional representation] is a mean, contemptible and a callous attempt by the majority which you now rob the minority not of the safeguard which they asked for but of the safeguard which was incorporated in this Measure by a Tory British government, who thought it an essential feature
99Ibid.
100Northern Ireland House of Commons, The Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, October 25, 1927, col. 2276 http://stormontpapers.ahds.ac.uk/stormontpapers/pageview.html?volumeno=8&pageno=2239.
101 The Prime Minister, Viscount Craigavon, said in Parliament in 1927 ―what is good enough for her [Great Britain]
is good enough for us here in Ulster‖. Ibid.,col.2273.
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of their Measure in the task of national pacification that Proportional Representation should be introduced.102
The debates also demonstrate that ‗rights-language‘ was also used to attack the abolition of the proportional system. Sam Kyle, a Northern Ireland Labour Party MP, in the same debate quoted above, stated that:
I would warn those sections of the citizens whose rights are protected and governed by the Act of 1920 that a change of the character announced by the Prime Minister [i.e. abolition of proportional representation]...is very dangerous to their rights103.
Numerous similar concerns were expressed in a number of debates in the House of Commons which dealt with this matter. Whatever the ultimate net effect of the change from the proportional system to the first-past-the-post system, it is clear from the parliamentary debates that nationalists (as well as smaller parties) perceived the change negatively and as prejudicial to their interests and –as evidenced above- their rights. This perception would doubtless have been shared by the nationalist community as a whole and served to further their sense of grievance against the Unionist government.
The nationalist complaints concerning electoral practices concerned, even more acutely, the electoral practices adopted for local authority elections. The electoral system for local elections was changed from proportional representation to first-past-the-post early on in the history of the Northern Ireland Parliament. The changes in electoral practices for local and municipal elections were also severely criticised by the Nationalist community for being based on gerrymandered boundaries that delivered distorted results. Although at the time of the abolition of proportional representation for local elections the nationalist members of parliament were not taking their seats in Stormont their sense of grievance at this decision was expressed in later debates. In his criticism of the effects of the abolition of proportional representation for the House of Commons, Joe Devlin referred specifically to the effect that the same change had had in local government:
The Nationalists constitute roughly a good third of the population, and therefore should control the same proportion of public bodies. They did so before the setting up of the Northern Parliament. But no sooner did the members of the Government feel themselves secure in Parliamentary power than they began to put into operation a well-thought-out plan to gerrymander the local government electoral areas for the specific purpose of controlling the public bodies... There are in Northern Ireland two Corporations, Belfast and Derry; six county councils, 32 urban district councils, and 32 rural district councils, or 72 in all. To those are to be added at least a dozen other public bodies with various responsibilities, making a total of 84 in the Six Counties. But out of the 84 the Nationalists control only two. Proportional Representation was abolished in the rural areas of the Province and the result was that those of us who constitute forty per cent, of the population of the Province rule four of the councils out of 84.104
102Ibid., col. 2280.
103Ibid., col. 2254.
104Ibid., col. 2282.
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In the previously cited work by Whyte, the evidence provided shows a case of abuse in the local elections, thus substantiating the nationalist viewpoint in this regard. Of particular weight in this context are references to official papers quoted by Buckland, where cooperation (some would say collusion) between Unionist activists and government officials in drawing local authority boundaries is evidenced. Whyte concludes that whereas most nationalist complaints over electoral practices are exaggerated or unfounded, ―when it comes to gerrymandering of local government boundaries, criticism is much more firmly based. Nationalists were manipulated out of control in a number of councils where they had a majority of electors. This is one of the clearest areas of discrimination in the whole field of controversy.‖105
The Unionist viewpoint on the issue of local government gerrymandering revolves largely around the economic argument that since unionists, in general, paid more rates they were entitled to more representation. This argument finds little support in contemporary human rights and democratic principles and was largely being discarded at the time. In fact, the trend in the United Kingdom ever since the Great Reform Act of 1832 was to move away from such notions of franchise to a more egalitarian notion.
In conclusion, one may argue that the electoral practices as developed in the early life on Northern Ireland certainly created a sense in the minority nationalist population of electoral discrimination both at the parliamentary level (where the balance of probability seems against such discrimination having occurred) and especially at the local government level. In the latter case, the perception of discrimination appears borne out in fact as well. The Unionist led 1922 alteration of the local government voting system and boundary delineation may partly have been motivated by a wish to redress Unionist grievance since as has been claimed ―[m]aybe it was the pre-1920 situation that was unfair [to the Unionists].‖ This motivation loses validity when the effects of the local government electoral practices post-1922 are viewed in the round. One may contend that the Unionist experience in this sphere was, as in the case of the Special Powers Act, derived from a desire to preserve the Union and the rights and liberties they perceived the Union to provide them with, at all costs. Even at the cost of discriminating against the minority population in terms of electoral fairness. One also notices that even in the pre-human rights era examined here, the language of rights and liberties figures considerably in the arguments put forward by the leaders of both communities. Once again though, as with the Special Powers Act, the two communities had divergent views of what these rights and liberties were and to whom they appertained.