The Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC) was a minor political party in Northern Ireland. It was founded in 1996 by Catholic academic Monica McWilliams and Protestant social worker Pearl Sagar to contest the elections to the Northern Ireland Forum, the body for all-party talks which led to the Belfast Agreement. The party did not espouse a particular ideology and campaigned principally around the fact that it was led by women rather than men. It declined to take any position on whether Northern Ireland should be part of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, but strongly opposed sectarian violence from both sides. It attracted support from former supporters of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, but also the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Ulster Unionist Party.
In the 1996 Forum elections McWilliams, Sagar and eight other Coalition candidates secured 7,731 votes (1.03% of the total) and did not win any constituency seats, but under a 'top-up' mechanism to ensure the representation of minor parties they were awarded two seats as Members of the Northern Ireland Forum, taken by McWilliams and Sagar. They attended the negotiations dominated by the other 108 representatives and supported (but did not, as often reported, sign) the ensuing intergovernmental Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. The party claimed credit for the inclusion of a commitment to integrated education in the agreement, as did the much larger Alliance Party.
In the Northern Ireland Assembly election, 1998, the NIWC secured 13,018 votes (1.6%) and McWilliams, representing South Belfast, and Jane Morrice, representing North Down, were elected to the inaugural Northern Ireland Assembly. The party secured 3,301 votes (0.4%) and one council seat in the Northern Ireland local elections, 2001; McWilliams also stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in the United Kingdom general election, 2001, securing 2,968 votes (0.4% of the Northern Ireland total).
Both its MLAs lost their seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly Elections, 2003, when the party's vote fell to 5,785 (0.8%), and its last remaining elected representative lost her seat on North Down Borough Council in 2005 when the NIWC secured 0.1% of the Northern Ireland vote. The party never contested another election and on May 11, 2006 the Women's Coalition was formally wound up at a function held in Belfast.
Famous quotes containing the words northern ireland, northern, ireland and/or women:
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“There exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government. On the broaching of this question, as general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?—We ask triumphantly.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)