1969 Northern Ireland parliamentary election

[obsie]

Mar 6, 2019 22:57:41 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Very easy to remember the difference between the Cote d'Ivoire flag and the Ireland flag - the Ireland flag has green on the hoist side, Cote d'Ivoire has orange.

All looks the same on top of a bonfire.

I'm old enough to remember the weather forecasts on UTV (when it was run by the Hendersons) showing the west coasts of Tyrone and Fermanagh being washed by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. This would have been the mid-70s (we live close enough to the border to pick up signals from Brougher Mountain with a normal aerial and until the Cairnhill transmitter began operations in the late 70s it was a better signal than from Teilifís ÉireannRTÉ). Those happy days when everyone just got along and themmuns knew their place.

[obsie]

Mar 6, 2019 22:38:46 GMT therealriga said:

Interesting as well that they chose to call the nationalist west bank constituency "Foyle" rather than "Londonderry West" or something like that.

I think the idea was to keep the name "City of Londonderry" for a constituency that Unionists would win. The Catholic vote-sink in the county was called "Mid Londonderry" after all. Historically, I suppose it could have been called "Liberties of Londonderry".

[YL]

Mar 6, 2019 16:55:09 GMT therealriga said:

Mar 1, 2019 0:00:11 GMT obsie said:

At a guess, it would have run the risk of upsetting too many apple-carts west of the Bann. Given practice in GB, it would have required a boundary commission with a set of public guidelines and many of the more creative efforts of Dawson Bates might have been hard to justify:



I don't think there was a single rural district that was not split under those boundaries and it might have been difficult to publicly justify, say, putting the Glenelly valley into Mid Tyrone with which it has few road links rather than into North Tyrone, or putting Keady in with Crossmaglen rather than Armagh, or the split of the Magherafelt Rural District, at least while keeping a straight face.

Great map, where did you find it? I'm assuming that it came from a nationalist source, due to the use of "6 counties" and "Derry." I wonder what the motivation behind those boundaries was, anyway? There doesn't seem to have been a concerted attempt at gerrymandering (which wasn't necessary in any case) but some of the boundaries don't make a lot of sense either then or now. In Belfast, I remember reading that they were drawn to have as many of them as possible stretching to the edge of the city to cover future suburban expansion, and that looks plausible since at least 12 of 16 manage to reach the boundary with another council. 

Some of the names always bothered me as well. Why have Lisnaskea, rather than East Fermanagh, especially when numerous larger towns weren't mentioned in constituency titles? Conversely, the County Armagh ones should have been named after towns. Having 2 in the middle of the county and calling one Mid-Armagh and the other Central Armagh is just awful. Lurgan, Portadown and Armagh were all large enough population centres and would have done just fine.

I got the impression that they were trying to maintain all the Unionist seats from the previous STV election. That would explain the Fermanagh gerrymander: Fermanagh and Tyrone had formed an 8-seater which had elected 4 Unionists, and with only two Unionist seats in Tyrone they needed two in Fermanagh as well. But it doesn't explain Armagh.

Were they also trying to avoid competitive elections? Other than Belfast Dock, there seem to have been no genuine Unionist/Nationalist marginals.

[timrollpickering]

Mar 7, 2019 10:28:11 GMT YL said:

I got the impression that they were trying to maintain all the Unionist seats from the previous STV election. That would explain the Fermanagh gerrymander: Fermanagh and Tyrone had formed an 8-seater which had elected 4 Unionists, and with only two Unionist seats in Tyrone they needed two in Fermanagh as well. But it doesn't explain Armagh.

Were they also trying to avoid competitive elections? Other than Belfast Dock, there seem to have been no genuine Unionist/Nationalist marginals.

Here's John Whyte's summary from 1984:
cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/discrimination/whyte.htm

(a) Gerrymandering of parliamentary constituencies.
The first two general elections to the Northern Ireland House of Commons, in 1921 and 1925, were held under proportional representation, the forty-eight non-university seats being distributed between nine constituencies, with between four and eight seats each. (There was also a constituency for Queen's University graduates, with four seats.) In 1929 the Northern Ireland government carried an Act abolishing PR, except for the university constituency, and establishing forty-eight single-member constituencies, whose boundaries were laid down in the legislation. This rearrangement was attacked, at the time and since, as being unfair to the minority (e.g. Harrison, 1938: 80-1; Gallagher, 1957: 255-63).

This topic has recently been re-examined by three academics- two geographers (Osborne, 1979; Pringle, 1980) and a historian (Buckland, 1979). They find some grounds for criticising the effect on nationalist representation. Osborne, whose treatment is the most comprehensive, examines three counties where complaints of gerrymandering were made. He concludes that they were unfounded in Antrim, but possible in Armagh and definite in Fermanagh, where the nationalist majority gained only one seat out of three (Osborne, 1979: 48-53).

These authors agree, however, that such complaints can be exaggerated. Osborne (ibid.: 53) states that 'it is hardly possible to call the 1929 redistribution a general exercise in gerrymandering'. Even under PR, nationalists of all hues had gained only twelve seats; under the new scheme they continued to gain eleven. Indeed, Buckland, who has had the advantage of going through the government files on the redistribution scheme, finds that the nationalists were not intended to lose at all. The parliamentary draftsman imagined that he had left them with twelve seats, losses of one seat each in Antrim and Armagh being compensated by a gain of two seats in Belfast (Buckland, 1979: 241). A weakness in his calculations led to them making only one gain in Belfast.

Osborne, Pringle and Buckland focus their criticisms, not on what the 1929 reapportionment did to nationalists, but on its other effects. The abolition of PR generally weakens small parties, and the main losers in Northern Ireland were Labour, independent unionists, and other groups, who fell from eight seats in 1925 to four in 1929, although their share of the vote increased (Elliott, 1973: 89-90). The result was, in Buckland's words, 'to fossilise and stereotype attitudes and alliances in Northern Ireland' (1979: 226); or as Osborne puts it, the new constituencies 'coralled electors into neat areas of Nationalist or Unionist dominance', providing 'a structural prop to the communal divisions of Northern Ireland' (1979: 54-5). Uncontested elections became frequent, and, as Pringle shows (1980: 202), power within the unionist party shifted to a narrower and more affluent circle. In these ways, rather than by directly attacking the nationalists, the changes of 1929 harmed political life in Northern Ireland.[3]

It seems that Dock was meant to be a Nationalist seat but was an error.

[therealriga]

Mar 6, 2019 22:57:41 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Very easy to remember the difference between the Cote d'Ivoire flag and the Ireland flag - the Ireland flag has green on the hoist side, Cote d'Ivoire has orange.

There are a lot of things which should be very easy to remember. For example, that it's = it is, whereas "its" is a possessive form. Or that plural forms (except for individual letters) don't require apostrophes, yet I see quite a number of the (well-educated) members of this forum writing eyesores like "Labour and it's MP's need to reconsider." Consequently, it's not a huge surprise that a lot of people don't know the difference between the flag of Ireland and the flag of a distant African country which is hardly top of people's travel lists.

I've heard stories of people on the way to G.A.A. games being attacked because they have a flag of the province of Ulster. You would think that the different colours on that and the Ulster banner used during the Stormont era would make people pause to think, but it often doesn't work that way.

[therealriga]

Mar 6, 2019 23:47:13 GMT obsie said:

Mar 6, 2019 22:38:46 GMT therealriga said:

Interesting as well that they chose to call the nationalist west bank constituency "Foyle" rather than "Londonderry West" or something like that.

I think the idea was to keep the name "City of Londonderry" for a constituency that Unionists would win. The Catholic vote-sink in the county was called "Mid Londonderry" after all. Historically, I suppose it could have been called "Liberties of Londonderry".

I read somewhere, I think in a late 1990s edition of Parliamentary Affairs, that the local UUP association didn't want any nationalist MPs. To achieve this, they proposed having a "Londonderry boroughs" constituency which would be non-contiguous and consist of the west bank, Waterside, Limavady and Coleraine and would elect 2 or 3 members by block vote. This was apparently rejected for being too blatant. Looking at the figures, Fermanagh probably only deserved 2 seats in 1929.

[Arthur Figgis]

Mar 7, 2019 14:58:39 GMT therealriga said:

I've heard stories of people on the way to G.A.A. games being attacked because they have a flag of the province of Ulster. You would think that the different colours on that and the Ulster banner used during the Stormont era would make people pause to think, but it often doesn't work that way.

Very easy to forget that lots of people are fucking morons. I had a discussion in a pub once where someone was adamant that any sports club using the red flag or using the suffix 'Rangers' could only possibly be sectarian and Loyalist. Apparently Tyrone GAA and Crossmaglen Rangers were not good enough counter-examples.

[carlton43]

Mar 7, 2019 15:27:36 GMT Arthur Figgis said:

Mar 7, 2019 14:58:39 GMT therealriga said:

I've heard stories of people on the way to G.A.A. games being attacked because they have a flag of the province of Ulster. You would think that the different colours on that and the Ulster banner used during the Stormont era would make people pause to think, but it often doesn't work that way.

Very easy to forget that lots of people are fucking morons. I had a discussion in a pub once where someone was adamant that any sports club using the red flag or using the suffix 'Rangers' could only possibly be sectarian and Loyalist. Apparently Tyrone GAA and Crossmaglen Rangers were not good enough counter-examples.

No!  It is all too easy Arthur.

From about the age of 6-I have always known (not believed) and predicated my life on the certain truth that at least two thirds of the population of the world are just that. Once accepted it simplifies so much and makes everything much easier to understand and to negotiate.

[J.G.Harston]

Mar 7, 2019 14:58:39 GMT therealriga said:

Mar 6, 2019 22:57:41 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Very easy to remember the difference between the Cote d'Ivoire flag and the Ireland flag - the Ireland flag has green on the hoist side, Cote d'Ivoire has orange.

There are a lot of things which should be very easy to remember. For example, that it's = it is, whereas "its" is a possessive form. Or that plural forms (except for individual letters) don't require apostrophes, yet I see quite a number of the (well-educated) members of this forum writing eyesores like "Labour and it's MP's need to reconsider." Consequently, it's not a huge surprise that a lot of people don't know the difference between the flag of Ireland and the flag of a distant African country which is hardly top of people's travel lists.

I've heard stories of people on the way to G.A.A. games being attacked because they have a flag of the province of Ulster. You would think that the different colours on that and the Ulster banner used during the Stormont era would make people pause to think, but it often doesn't work that way.

Just fixed that for you.

[therealriga]

Mar 7, 2019 18:24:50 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Mar 7, 2019 14:58:39 GMT therealriga said:

There are a lot of things which should be very easy to remember. For example, that it's = it is, whereas "its" is a possessive form. Or that plural forms (except for individual letters) don't require apostrophes, yet I see quite a number of the (well-educated) members of this forum writing eyesores like "Labour and it's MP's need to reconsider." Consequently, it's not a huge surprise that a lot of people don't know the difference between the flag of Ireland and the flag of a distant African country which is hardly top of people's travel lists.

I've heard stories of people on the way to G.A.A. games being attacked because they have a flag of the province of Ulster. You would think that the different colours on that and the Ulster banner used during the Stormont era would make people pause to think, but it often doesn't work that way.

Just fixed that for you.

Haha! Could be Muphry's law in action? Or maybe I need to mind my p's and q's?

[J.G.Harston]

Mar 7, 2019 19:47:25 GMT therealriga said:

Mar 7, 2019 18:24:50 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Just fixed that for you.

Haha! Could be Muphry's law in action? Or maybe I need to mind my p's and q's?

Ps and Qs. As, Bs and Cs. In my 'O' levels I got two As, three Bs and three Cs. There are two Ts in palette but two Ls in pallet, and only one L and one T in palate.

[therealriga]

Mar 7, 2019 22:05:52 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Mar 7, 2019 19:47:25 GMT therealriga said:

Haha! Could be Muphry's law in action? Or maybe I need to mind my p's and q's?

Ps and Qs. As, Bs and Cs. In my 'O' levels I got two As, three Bs and three Cs. There are two Ts in palette but two Ls in pallet, and only one L and one T in palate.

Ah, but times have changed since the good old 'O' levels. Most style guides, universities and the Oxford dictionary recommend you mind your P's and Q's and that you put your A's, B's and C's to good use. I'm not a fan, but that's the peril of pesky English and its lack of a central commission to regulate these things.

[J.G.Harston]

Mar 7, 2019 22:49:22 GMT therealriga said:

Mar 7, 2019 22:05:52 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Ps and Qs. As, Bs and Cs. In my 'O' levels I got two As, three Bs and three Cs. There are two Ts in palette but two Ls in pallet, and only one L and one T in palate.

Ah, but times have changed since the good old 'O' levels. Most style guides, universities and the Oxford dictionary recommend you mind your P's and Q's and that you put your A's, B's and C's to good use. I'm not a fan, but that's the peril of pesky English and its lack of a central commission to regulate these things.

The more exceptions you put into something, the more complicated it gets, and the more people complain about the exceptions. "Oh, English is nonsesnse, there's so many exceptions!" - no, people *think* there's loads of exceptions because illiterate morons doing the teaching don't teach the actual rules properly, so when somebody sees something that doesn't fit the mis-taught rules they think "oh god, another exception".

Plurals take (e)s, possessions and contractions take 's, full stop, no exceptions, pure and simple. It's the throwing in of exception after exception that confuses the issue.