District Electoral Division - Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

After the partition of Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland, the new Unionist Government proceeded to redraw district electoral division boundaries in the six counties making up the new state. The Unionist Government and its supporters claimed that this redrawing was necessary because population changes had caused discrepancies in the population of DEDs and it was necessary to change the boundaries to equalise electorates. Irish nationalists, on the other hand, claimed that the boundaries were being redrawn so as to gerrymander local councils, producing unionist-majority councils in areas where the majority of the population was nationalist. Certainly, the effect of the redrawing of boundaries was to dramatically reduce the number of local councils under nationalist control, and examination of the archives of the Northern Ireland Government has shown that the Ministry of Home Affairs (responsible for the boundary redrawing) worked closely with local Unionist associations to produce favourable results for the Unionist Party.

With the reform of local government in Northern Ireland in 1973, both county councils and urban and rural district councils were abolished and replaced by a smaller set of district councils. These councils were divided into wards, each ward containing a number of townlands or parts of townlands. As a result, district electoral divisions no longer exist in Northern Ireland and the groups of wards used for single transferable vote are known as "district electoral areas".