No Northern Ireland Parliament

In OTL Northern Ireland was given a Parliament in 1921. It is not clear that there had been much of a demand for one.

WI Northern Ireland had been treated in the same was as England Scotland and Wales.

It is likely that Northern Ireland would have had more seats than the 12 it had from 1922 to 1983 (+ the unversity seat up to 1945) That might just have changed the UK general election results in 1950 and 1964.and the two in 74

On the hand there had been an 'orange' tradition in Scotland (especially Glasgow) and Liverpool which had given Conservatives many working class votes.

That declined rapidly from 1959 to 1970.

In OTL Labour nearly won Belfast East in 1966.

I wonder if Northern Ireland might have ended up with more 'normal' politics.

Any thoughts?
 
Probably not in that there would have been strong nationalist feeling in Fermanagh, Tyrone and parts of Londonderry and South Down that would have come out in county council elections i.e nationalist county councils not providing statistics in the 50's.

What may have happened however would have been no whipping up sectarianism by the Unionists to stay in power at Stormont to ensure not that the Nationalists were kept out as they were in the minority but there were no other takers i.e Labour. It would have come out at Westminster and local councils would have been gerrymandered. Possibly Britain may have been able to make some border adjustments placing some of the Nationalist areas in the Free State. I can't say that there would be a rush of takers for Northern Ireland secretary and the RUC would still hqave a siege mentality as there would be factions of whatever group claimed to be the real IRA taking pot shots

Ratepayer franchise may well have been abandoned in the late 1940's as on mainland Britain removing one grievance. When direct rule did come in it didn't bring about normal politics but turned Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley into credible political forces
 
It is true that direct rule did not cause 'normal' politics in Northern Ireland. However it was clear that devolution was desired by the time Direct rule took place and there had been several years of growing violence.

I wonder whether a Labour Secretary for Northern Ireland (on the lines of the Welsh and Scottish Secretaries in OTL) might have done something about the outragous gerrymandering of local government which Stormont imposed in OTL.
 
Following the recent Ireland threads I was going to start a new thread on this topic but then I discovered this one! So I thought I'd create a zombie instead!!

To follow on from the previous contributions there was no demand at all in Ulster for it's own parliament. The Unionists were opposed to home rule in any form, they effectively had it forced on them by the British Government which seemed to want to have as little to do with Ireland as it could. Unionist leaders like Carson and Craig felt that partition would deny Ulster's industries access to their biggest markets in the south and they believed that the proposed NI wasn't viable.

So let's assume partition happens as in OTL but the Northern Ireland Parliament is never created, the first implication is that NI would have a higher representation in Westminster, pre-partition NI elected something like 33 MP's to Westminster, IOTL this was reduced to 12 as most matters passed to Stormont. Without devolution there would have been a case for retaining these seats. The second implication is that instead of having 50 years as a one party state, NI gets the same changes of government that Britain does, as the Unionists still have their links to the Tories Craig and people like Jack Andrews and Basil Brooke serve as ministers in inter war Tory administrations.

The big difference will be post 1945, as mentioned above the property vote which Unionists used to help keep control of places like Derry will be abolished in the late 1940's. This may not have had an immediate impact as it's only in the last 30 years that Nationalists, especially Republicans have begun to vote in significant numbers as they saw voting as an effective acceptance of British rule, but eventually Nationalists would have won control of Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone. In addition instead of being a "semi-detached" part of British politics, NI issues would have been discussed at Westminster. When Gerry Fitt tried to speak on NI issues at Westminster he was blocked because of "the convention," a piece of parliamentary etiquette that Westminster didn't comment on matters that were in Stormont's jurisdiction. With no Stormont this would never have existed so Fitt, and as NI would have had more MP's including more Nationalists, would have been able to raise Nationalist grievances about discrimination on the floor of the Commons. I can see the Wilson Government being very sympathetic to what eventually became the agenda of the Civil Rights Movement, the Macmillan Government may also have been.

So under this best case scenario, the grievances which led to the Civil Rights Movement and thanks to Stormont's heavy handed response The Troubles, are addressed before the situation spins out of control in 1969. You would still have had an IRA Border Campaign in 1956 and you would have had Paisley and other Unionist hardliners claiming that they were about to be sold out to Dublin. There would still be sectarian violence mainly killings and riots but people don't turn to the paramilitaries as they did in OTL so The Troubles don't erupt, at least on the scale that they did.
 
Considering that there was almost no demand for a separate Northern Irish parliament back in the 1910s such a scenario is all in all quite likely to happen with very limited changes.

What happens greatly depends on the political forces at work but it seems very likely to me that the Unionist movement won't be as strong or rather not as united as it was OTL. If the movement is divided along a class line with a strong Labour supporting element, it might eventually coalesce into the British Labour Party in the long run and this will have very interesting implications. Gerrymandering and outright discriminations against the catholic population will only be possible on a local level. Sooner or later this is bound to reach Westminster and the wider British sphere, something which only happened too late OTL. In the best case scenario gerrymandering along with rate grievances are no more by the late 1940s.

This along with a more "conventional" political alignment could very well butterfly the Troubles away and even push an even higher proportion of catholics than is already the case in supporting the statu quo. Hard core Loyalism would remain but like in Scotland it would mainbly be confined to working class communities. Irish nationalism we severly weakened as more and more catholics become an integral part of a discrimination free Northern Irish society. I suspect that it would remains as a force, but a very weak one which might prompt the nationalist leaders to refocus their movement along cultural lines and to reach out to the "other side".

The effects on Eire would be very interesting too, if anything partition will become a matter of fact. Also, if a large proportion of catholics in the north come to see themselves as Irish AND British. Then this could potentially even give rise to some serious questioning in the south and may even lead to some kind of southern unionism revival, obviously based along different lines.
 
No Westminister MP was allowed to question in Westminister anything ocurring in the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormount. It comes across as having been a sectarian redneck insult to the minority community and that's being kind! Originally in the treaty terms there PR was supposed to be the voting system for it as it still is in the Republic and in a form is for the Northern Irish Assembly of equals today, however this move designed to protect the minority community was soon got rid of! Also there was supposed to be an upper house- a senate which could have a catholic majority in it to oversee legislation, but I don't think this was ever allowed to happen!
 
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