| |
|
|
|
Sunday March 23, 2025
|
The 1982-86 Northern Ireland Assembly was set up as yet another attempt to shift the political deadlock that had lasted since the fall of the power-sharing Executive in 1974 (see the White Paper on which the legislation was based). The Assembly had powers of scrutiny over the government ministers, but the ministers themselves remained appointees of the Westminster government. The scrutiny aspect worked well and in my view could be usefully adopted in other parts of the world.
There was provision for the Assembly to have power devolved to it if there was sufficient evidence that it could be sustainable, but with the SDLP and Sinn F�in boycotting from the start, and the UUP participating only intermittently, that did not happen. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in November 1985 the Assembly became a forum for Unionists to bash government policy and it was Alliance's turn to boycott it for the last few months of its existence.
The Assembly elections on 20 October 1982 definitively established the five-party system which has endured since. Sinn F�in, in their first electoral contest, established themselves as representatives of a key section of the electorate. The Workers Party and UUUP failed to make the breakthrough that would have made them serious players. And the UUP re-established a dominant position in the Unionist community, winning more than half of all Unionist votes for the first time since the fall of Stormont.
These elections were the last full elections held on the boundaries that had been set at the end of 1970, and which had not been originally intended for multi-seat elections. The electorate of some constituencies had changed dramatically in the meantime, and so West Belfast lost two seats, North and South Belfast lost one each, North Antrim and North Down gained one seat each and South Antrim gained two. There were three by-elections for the Assembly during its term, all won by the UUP. The Speaker of the Assembly was North Down MP and Assembly member James Kilfedder.
See spreadsheet archive.
| UUP | 188,277 votes | 29.7% | +3.9% | 26 seats | +7 |
| DUP | 145,528 votes | 23.0% | +8.2% | 21 seats | +9 |
| SDLP | 118,891 votes |
18.8%
|
-4.9% | 14 seats | -3 |
| SF | 64,191 votes | 10.1% | +10.1% | 5 seats | +5 |
| Alliance | 58,851 votes | 9.3% | -0.5% | 10 seats | +2 |
| WP | 17,216 votes | 2.7% | +0.5% | ||
| UPUP | 14,916 votes | 2.3% | 1 seat | +1 | |
| UUUP | 11,550 votes | 1.8% | (-10.9%) | (-14) | |
| Oth U's | 9,567 votes | 1.5% | 1 seat | (-6) | |
| Ind SDLP | 1,180 votes | 0.2% | |||
| Independent | 745 votes | 0.1% | |||
| Ecology | 707 votes | 0.1% | |||
| Labour | 560 votes | 0.1% | (-1.3%) | (-1) | |
| People's Democracy | 442 votes | 0.1% | |||
| Communists | 415 votes | 0.1% | (n.c.) | ||
| Liberal | 65 votes | 0.01% | |||
| Peace | 19 votes | 0.003% |
Comparisons are with the Constitutional
Convention election
in 1975.
NB1: UUUP votes and seats in 1982 are compared with Vanguard
in 1975 - former Vanguard leader Bill Craig also stood as
"Vanguard" in
East Belfast in 1982, getting 2,274 votes, 0.4% of the Northern
Ireland
total, but he is tallied with Other Unionists here.
NB2: UPNI seats in 1975 are tallied with Other Unionists
here.
NB3: "Labour" in 1982 refers to Newtownabbey Labour candidate
in South Antrim, but to NILP in 1975. The sole Independent
candidate in
1982 was also a former NILP Stormont MP.
The closest results were:
The UUP had a good election. They had one near miss in
South Antrim
but two lucky strikes in North Down and South Belfast. More
importantly,
they had the votes they needed, an important morale boost after
the failures
of the European election in 1979 and the local council elections
in 1981.
Their seven gains came from three seats won by UPNI in 1975 and
four won
by Vanguard - two seats were lost and two gained from the changes
in constituency
sizes.
The DUP may have hoped for better, given those same recent
elections,
but still achieved the best seat bonus of any party, with 23.0% of
the
votes getting them 26.9% of the seats. They made eight gains from
Vanguard
and one from the UPNI.
The SDLP lost a further three seats compared to 1975, and
were
in fact the only one of the major parties to lose seats. They
promptly
lost another one after the election when S�amus Mallon was
unseated
because he had been a member of the Irish Senate at the time of
the election.
Sinn F�in scored the propaganda coup of Gerry Adams being
the first candidate to be declared elected to the Assembly, but
did not
do well at translating seats into votes, with two narrow misses to
Alliance
in North and West Belfast and another to the DUP in
Fermanagh-South Tyrone.
In two of those three cases better balancing between the SF
candidates
would probably have secured an extra seat. All five of the Sinn
F�in
seats had been won by the SDLP in 1973, though two had been lost
to Unionists
in 1975.
Alliance was very lucky to get ten seats; a shift of fewer
than
900 votes would have put the party level with SF on seven seats
each with
one extra for the UUP. The Alliance gains were from UPNI and NILP
compared
with 1975, with one seat lost and another gained through the
changes in
constituency sizes.
Luck ran the other way for the Workers Party. In their two
strongest
seats they were just a few hundred votes behind Alliance
candidates who
got elected effectively with WP transfers.
The UUUP were not unlucky in terms of votes translating
to seats;
they simply didn't have enough votes in the first place, and none
of their
candidates came within a thousand votes of getting elected.
William Craig,
standing as Vanguard, came closer in East Belfast, but was
still
short of the mark.
Of the Other Unionists, Frank Millar Sr held his 1975 seat
in
North Belfast largely due to lousy balancing by the UUP and DUP,
whose
second runners came within 300 and 500 votes respectively of
knocking him
out. Jim Kilfedder managed to score a resounding 2.3 quotas for
the UPUP
in North Down, but this was a personal not a party vote; his
running mate
failed (just) to get elected. Kilfedder's seat was effectively the
new
one in North Down. Hughie Smyth, standing for the UVF-linked Progressive
Unionist
Party in West Belfast, got a little more than a third of his
first preferences from 1975 and in any case was hampered by the
constituency
being reduced from six seats to four, with a consequent loss of
two Unionist
seats.
None of the Sinn F�in, People's Democracy, Ecology, Communist, Liberal or Peace candidates had stood in 1975.
Only three women (3.8% of the total membership) were elected to the Assembly in 1982, Muriel Simpson (UUP, Armagh), Dorothy Dunlop (UUP, East Belfast) and Mary McSorley (SDLP, Mid Ulster). Only nine of the 184 candidates (4.9%) were women; the six unsuccessful female candidates were Ethel Smyth (DUP, South Down), Hazel Bradford (UUP, North Down), Joan Tomlin (Alliance, South Antrim), Ita Breen (Alliance, Londonderry), Mary McMahon (WP, West Belfast), and Mary Muldoon (SDLP, West Belfast). The constituency with the highest first preference vote share for female candidates was the only one with two women standing, West Belfast (3,509 - 10.1%) though Mary McSorley got more votes in a larger constituency (4,169 - 6.7%). The percentage of women candidates by party is as follows: Alliance 10.0%, WP 8.3%, UUP 7.1%, SDLP 6.9%, DUP 2.9%, and a big zero for Sinn F�in, UUUP, UPUP, Ecology, People's Democracy and the Communist Party.
East Belfast (6 seats): 2 DUP, 2 UUP, 2
Alliance
North Belfast (5 seats): 1 UUP, 1 DUP, 1
SDLP,
1 Alliance, 1 Ind U
South Belfast (5 seats): 3 UUP, 1 Alliance,
1
DUP
West Belfast (4 seats): 1 SF, 1 SDLP, 1 UUP,
1 Alliance
North Antrim (8 seats): 4 DUP, 2 UUP, 1
SDLP,
1 Alliance
South Antrim (10 seats): 4 UUP, 3 DUP, 2
Alliance,
1 SDLP
Armagh (7 seats): 3 UUP, 2 SDLP, 1 SF, 1
DUP
North Down (8 seats): 3 UUP, 2 DUP, 2
Alliance,
1 UPUP
South Down (7 seats): 3 SDLP, 2 UUP, 2 DUP
Fermanagh & South Tyrone (5 seats): 2
UUP,
1 SF, 1 SDLP, 1 DUP
Londonderry (7 seats): 2 SDLP, 2 UUP, 2
DUP,
1 SF
Mid-Ulster (6 seats): 2 SDLP, 2 DUP, 1 SF, 1
UUP
See also:
Results from 1973 to 1982 for each seat: East Belfast | North Belfast | South Belfast | West Belfast | North Antrim | South Antrim | Armagh | North Down | South Down | Fermanagh and South Tyrone | Londonderry | Mid Ulster
Other sites based at ARK: ORB (Online Research Bank) | CAIN (Conflict Archive on the INternet) | Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey
Your comments, please! Send an email to me at nicholas.whyte@gmail.com.
Nicholas Whyte, 25 March 2003.
|
Disclaimer:� Nicholas Whyte 1998-2004 Last
Updated on
Wednesday, 12-Jan-2005
12:12
|
