Parliament of Northern Ireland

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This article is about the pre-1972 Parliament of Northern Ireland. For the current devolved legislature, see Northern Ireland Assembly.

Parliament of Northern Ireland
Devolved Parliament
Bicameral
Houses
History
Established7 June 1921
Disbanded30 March 1972
Preceded by
Speaker of the House
Ivan Neill (last)
Elections
Elected by the Commons via STV
Meeting place
Parliament Buildings, Stormont, Belfast
(1921–72)
Politics of Northern Ireland
The Ulster Banner
Government
Parliament
1933
1953
1969
Senate
Elections
1921, 1925, 1929, 1933
1938, 1945, 1949, 1953
1958, 1962, 1965, 1969
By-elections
See also

The Parliament of Northern Ireland was the

Direct Rule. It was abolished under the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973
.

The Parliament of Northern Ireland was

Sovereign was represented by the Governor (initially by the Lord Lieutenant), who granted royal assent to Acts of Parliament in Northern Ireland, but executive power rested with the Prime Minister
, the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons.

House of Commons

Main article: House of Commons of Northern Ireland

The House of Commons had 52 members, of which 48 were for territorial seats, and four were for graduates of

first-past-the-post
for all territorial constituencies, though STV was retained for the university seats.

In the 1925 election, however, Republicans also lost four seats and a substantial proportion of votes. Nationalists gained the same number of seats that Republicans had lost, but had only gained a small percentage of votes. It had been felt by some[

UK
.

By the time the first-past-the-post system was implemented for the 1929 election, the Republicans had few or no candidates and pro-separatist electors were represented almost solely by the Nationalist Party. Despite the change in the electoral system and accusations of gerrymandering, the Nationalist Party lost 9.5% share of the vote, but still gained a seat. The more moderate Northern Ireland Labour Party and Ulster Liberal Party both gained in vote share but lost seats.

The boundary changes for 1929 were not made by an impartial boundary commission but by the Unionist government, for which it was accused of gerrymandering. The charges that the Stormont seats (as opposed to local council wards) were gerrymandered against Nationalists is disputed by historians[2] (since the number of Nationalists elected under the two systems barely changed), though it is agreed that losses under the change to single-member constituency boundaries were suffered by independent unionists, the Liberals and the Northern Ireland Labour Party.[citation needed] Population movements were so small that these boundaries were used almost everywhere until the Parliament was dissolved in 1972. In 1968 the government abolished the Queen's University constituency (university constituencies had been abolished at Westminster with effect from 1950) and created four new constituencies in the outskirts of Belfast where populations had grown. This change helped the Unionists, as they held only two of the university seats but won all four of the newly created seats. There had, however, long been calls from outside Unionism to abolish the graduate franchise (and other anomalies) and to have "one person one vote".

Senate

Main article: Senate of Northern Ireland

The Senate was a last-minute addition to the Parliament, after the original plans for a single Senate covering both the Stormont and Dublin Parliaments were overtaken by events.

Twenty-four senators were elected by the House of Commons using the single transferable vote. The elections were carried out after each general election, with 12 members elected for two parliaments each time.[

Mayor of Derry
. The Senate generally had the same party balance as the House of Commons, though abstaining parties and very small parties were not represented. Because of this, and its dependence on the House of Commons for election, it had virtually no political impact.

The Crown

The

Southern Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. However, the replacement of Southern Ireland by the Irish Free State led to the abolition of the post of Lord Lieutenant. Instead, a new office – Governor of Northern Ireland
– was created on 12 December 1922.

Location

Initially the Parliament met in Belfast's

Stormont, on the eastern outskirts of the city. "Stormont" came to be a synecdoche
referring both to the Parliament itself and to the Northern Ireland government.

Legislation

Stormont was given power to legislate over almost all aspects of Northern Ireland life, with only a few matters excluded from its remit, the most important of which are: succession to the Crown, making of peace or war, armed forces, honours, naturalisation, some central taxes and postal services (a full list is in section 4 of the

which?] which abolished proportional representation in local government elections; the issue was referred to London and royal assent was eventually given. The output of legislation was high for a devolved Parliament, though some of the Acts were adaptations of recently passed acts by the United Kingdom parliament.[citation needed] It was nominally prohibited by section 16 of the Schedule to the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act 1922 from making any law which directly or indirectly discriminated against a religion, although this provision had little effect.[citation needed
]

Brief history

Robinson and Cleaver Department Store in Belfast, decorated for the State Opening of the first Northern Ireland parliament. 22 June 1921.
George V and Queen Mary during the opening of the Parliament of Northern Ireland (1921)

The

Nationalists.[citation needed
]

The 1925 general election was called to tie in with the expected report of the Boundary Commission required by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922. The Boundary Commission was expected to recommend the transfer of many border areas to the Irish Free State, and the Unionist election slogan was "Not an Inch!". They lost eight seats in Belfast and County Antrim, where the issue of the border had far less resonance. Sinn Féin had fought in 1921, but by 1925 was suffering the effects of its split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Éamon de Valera's Sinn Féin fought as Republicans but won only two seats. The border was never changed.

A minor row erupted in 1925 when the elections to the Senate took place. Eleven Unionists and one Labour Senator were elected, despite there being a block of three composed of two non-abstaining Nationalists and a dissident Unionist. The latter three had mailed their votes, but due to a public holiday and the practices of the postal service, they arrived an hour after the election. Requests for a recount were denied. (It is doubtful whether the three votes would have been sufficient to elect a Senator under the election system, since they would not have achieved a complete single transferable vote quota alone and the Unionist votes were likely to transfer so heavily to each other that the Nationalist candidate would not reach quota throughout the rounds of counting.)[citation needed] From later in 1925 to 1927, the Nationalist Party members took their seats for the first time.

For the

Irish government declared itself a republic
.

During the

British government consistently refused, remembering how a similar attempt in 1918 had backfired dramatically, as nationalist
opposition made it unworkable. Much of the population of serving age were either in essential jobs or had already joined up voluntarily, making the potential yield of conscription low.

1965 saw a significant change, in that the Nationalists accepted office as the

Catholics and normalise relations with the Republic. However, the Unionists split over O'Neill's tentative reforms at the 1969 general election and Ian Paisley's Protestant Unionist Party began to win by-elections. The new nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, withdrew from Stormont in July 1971 over the refusal of an inquiry into Royal Ulster Constabulary actions in Derry
.

Stormont was abolished and

Gerard Newe
had been appointed as a junior minister at Stormont, in an attempt to improve community relations. Fifty years after it came into existence, Newe was the first Catholic to serve in a Northern Ireland government, but because he was neither an MP nor a Senator, his appointment could last only six months.

The influence of the

Orange Order in the governance of Northern Ireland was far-reaching. All of the six prime ministers of Northern Ireland were members of the Order, as were all but three cabinet ministers until 1969. Three of the ministers later left the Order, one because his daughter married a Catholic, one to become Minister of Community Relations in 1970, and the third was expelled for attending a Catholic religious ceremony. Of the 95 Stormont MPs who did not become cabinet ministers, 87 were Orangemen. Every unionist senator, with one exception, between 1921 and 1969 was an Orangeman. One of these senators, James Gyle, was suspended from the Order for seven years for visiting nationalist MP Joe Devlin
on his deathbed.

A fully digitised copy of the Commons' debates (187,000 printed pages of Parliamentary Debates) is available online.[5]

General elections and composition

Key

  •    - Anti-Partition of Ireland League
  •    - Commonwealth Labour Party
  •    - Fianna Fáil
  •    - Independent
  •    - Independent Labour
  •    - Independent Labour Group
  •    - Independent Nationalist
  •    - Independent Unionist
  •    - Independent Unionist Association
  •    - Irish Labour Party
  •    - National Democratic Party
  •    - Nationalist Party (Northern Ireland)
  •    - Northern Ireland Labour Party
  •    - Republican (1923)
  •    - Republican Labour Party
  •    - Sinn Féin
  •    - Socialist Republican Party
  •    - Ulster Liberal Party
  •    - Ulster Unionist Party
  •    - Unbought Tenants Association

See also

References

  1. ^ Parliamentary Debates of Northern Ireland (accessed 7 August 2012), Volume 1 (1921) / Page 1, 7 June 1921.
  2. ^ "Northern Ireland elections site". Ark.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 6 December 2008. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
  3. ^ Parliamentary Debates of Northern Ireland (accessed 7 August 2012), Volume 16 (1934) / Page 1095, 24 April 1934.
  4. ^ "BBC iPlayer – TV – Factual – History". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 26 May 2013.[permanent dead link]
  5. ^ "The Stormont Papers – Home". ahds.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2 January 2007. Retrieved 23 October 2018.

Further reading

  • Costello, Frank. "King George V's Speech at Stormont (1921): Prelude to the Anglo-Irish Truce," Eire-Ireland, (1987), pp. 43–57.
  • Follis, Bryan A. A state under siege: the establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920-1925 (1995).
  • Officer, David. "In search of order, permanence and stability: building Stormont, 1921–32." in Richard English and Graham Walker, eds. Unionism in Modern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1996), pp 130–147.

External links

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