Gerrymandering - National Examples of Gerrymandering - Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

Gerrymandering (Irish: Claonroinnt) is widely considered to have been introduced after the establishment of Home Rule in Northern Ireland in 1921, favouring Unionists who tended to be Protestant, to the detriment of Nationalists who were mostly Catholic. However Stephen Gwynn had noted as early as 1911 that since the introduction of the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898:

"In Armagh there are 68,000 Protestants, 56,000 Catholics. The County Council has twenty-two Protestants and eight Catholics. In Tyrone, Catholics are a majority of the population, 82,000 against 68,000; but the electoral districts have been so arranged that Unionists return sixteen as against thirteen Nationalists (one a Protestant). This Council gives to the Unionists two to one majority on its Committees, and out of fifty-two officials employs only five Catholics. In Antrim, which has the largest Protestant majority (196,000 to 40,000), twenty-six Unionists and three Catholics are returned. Sixty officers out of sixty-five are good Unionists and Protestants."

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Ulster Unionist Party created new electoral boundaries for the Londonderry County Borough Council to ensure election of a Unionist council in a city where Nationalists had a large majority and had won previous elections. Initially local parties drew the boundaries, but in the 1930s the province-wide government redrew them to reinforce the gerrymander. Some critics and supporters spoke at the time of "A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People".

In 1929, the Parliament of Northern Ireland passed a bill shifting the Parliament's electoral system from the relatively proportional single transferable vote (STV) to the less proportional first past the post or plurality voting system. The only exception was for the election of four Stormont MPs to represent the Queen's University of Belfast. Many scholars believe that the boundaries were gerrymandered to underrepresent Nationalists. Some geographers and historians, for instance Professor John H. Whyte, disagree. They have argued that the electoral boundaries for the Parliament of Northern Ireland were not gerrymandered to a greater level than that produced by any single-winner election system, and that the actual number of Nationalist MPs barely changed under the revised system (it went from 12 to 11 and later went back up to 12). Most observers have acknowledged that the change to a single-winner system was a key factor, however, in stifling the growth of smaller political parties, such as the Northern Ireland Labour Party and Independent Unionists.

The United Kingdom suspended the Parliament of Northern Ireland and its government in 1972. It restored the single transferable vote (STV) for elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in the following year, using the same definitions of constituencies as for the Westminster Parliament. Currently in Northern Ireland, all elections use the STV except those for positions in the Westminster Parliament, which follow the pattern in the rest of the United Kingdom by using "first past the post."