Politics
The constituency electorate was predominantly Tory/Conservative during most of this period.
Catholics were excluded from qualifying as voters until 1793 and taking seats in Parliament until 1829 and there was a restrictive property based franchise. It was not until the electoral reforms which took effect in 1885 that most adult males became voters. See Catholic emancipation for further details.
In these circumstances most Members of Parliament came from a limited number of Protestant aristocratic and gentry families. There were few contested elections.
It was only in 1880, at the end of the period when this constituency existed, that the Liberals first won a seat from the area.
Read more about this topic: Tyrone (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement, and meanwhile the debt accumulates.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)