Derry City Council - Local Politics

Local Politics

Prior to 1969, elections to the Londonderry county borough council were based on block voting. The electoral wards had been drawn and redrawn to ensure a unionist majority on the council even though more voters supported nationalist and republican parties. With local government reorganisation in 1973, the old county borough was merged with the surrounding Londonderry Rural District to form the new local government district of Londonderry. In addition, a system of STV was introduced which has resulted in a majority of councillors from nationalist and republican parties being elected, with the SDLP consistently being the largest party. Curiously, in 1973 (although not in later years) this was despite the fact that unionists (who had an electoral pact in that year) and the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland won a majority of votes between them. This was in part because the strong nationalist majority within the old county borough area was diluted by the narrow unionist majority within the surrounding rural district.

The Derry/Londonderry name dispute affected the council, notably in 1984 when it decided to rename itself from 'Londonderry City Council' to 'Derry City Council'; this was purely a name change and its powers remained that of a district council. At the same time it changed the name of the municipally-owned airport from 'Londonderry Eglinton Airport' to 'City of Derry Airport'. At that time it did not seek to change the name of the city from 'Londonderry' in its charter. The name change led to a temporary unionist boycott of the council which was broken by two UUP councillors, Jim Guy and David Davis. They were expelled from their party for this but successfully contested the subsequent elections as Independent Unionists. Unionists also called for the establishment of a separate "Waterside" council covering the East Bank and rural areas, but this was rejected by the Local Government Boundary Commission in 1991. In 1993, David Davis lost his seat with the result that there were no unionist councillors from the West Bank, and in 2005 for the first time, no unionist stood for election in the West Bank.

The Derry City Council area is largely coterminous with both the Foyle UK Parliament constituency (first used in 1983) and the Foyle Northern Ireland Assembly Constituency (first used 1996). The MP is Mark Durkan, who was first elected in 2005 most recently returned in the 2010 General Election. He is also a former leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) (2001–10) and was a MLA for the constituency from 1998 to 2010. In the 2011 election, the constituency's voters returned 3 SDLP, 2 Sinn Féin and 1 DUP members of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Boundary changes for the 2010 Parliamentary elections transferred two wards in the east of the district from the Foyle constituency to the East Londonderry constituency, whose current MP is the DUP's Gregory Campbell.