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Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes

What sort of support do the three minors mentioned have nationally? Enough to get them a seat or two under a PR system?

Also, are any of them organised in the Republic? I'd probably guess SF! but if so do they have any better success in the south?
Labour and the Liberals have about 25% combined, and the PUP about 5% although it used to be higher.

Labour are a thing in the Republic, obviously, while the various minor Republicans have local government representatives on both sides of the border and SF! have never had more than half a dozen TDs.
 
Labour and the Liberals have about 25% combined, and the PUP about 5% although it used to be higher.

Labour are a thing in the Republic, obviously, while the various minor Republicans have local government representatives on both sides of the border and SF! have never had more than half a dozen TDs.

What support do the three Republican parties mentioned have nationally, would PR actually help them or are they too minor even for that?
 
My Belfast boundaries were annoying me, so I couldn't sleep until I'd laid the issue to rest.

Problems being: Falls Rd and Shankill being in the same constituency; the top left Nat Dem constituency is stupid and barely internally contiguous; Ormeau crosses the river in the centre of the city rather than further upstream; the northwestern UUP seats were both a bit of a mishmash.

So here you go. On the left, Falls and Shankill are segregated, but the red seat is a bit silly. On the right, everything else basically makes sense but Falls and Shankill are cheek by jowl. So you can choose your own adventure according to how optimistic you are about the idea that everything would have been fine as long as Based O'Neill had a bit longer in power.


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Would the Paisleys really be in that North Antrim seat? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like it has Ballymena in it.
Bear in mind that Paisley spent as little time in Ballymena as humanly possible. He is eventually defeated in Bannside, but cuts a deal with the UUP to stand in North Antrim as the UUP want nothing to do with the Glens.
 
Surviving Stormont 2: The Unnecessary Sequel!

The long-running debate within Sinn Fein over the policy of abstentionism was brought to a head in 1970, when a minority faction led by Ruari O Bradaigh walked out of the Ard Fheis after a majority of the delegates voted to drop the policy. The minority faction, backed by the more militaristic Provisional IRA, was variously known as Sinn Fein (Kevin Street), Provisional Sinn Fein and the Provisional Alliance. However, as the majority faction was more prominent from the get-go and militarism was not seen as a realistic means of uniting Ireland, the majority faction soon became synonymous with the name 'Sinn Fein' and the Provisionals eventually landed on the name Eire Nua.

The majority faction, the anti-abstentionists led by people like Sean Garland and Tomas MacGiolla, had been well and truly infiltrated by the Communist Party of Ireland, and gradually moved towards a position of non-violent (the Official IRA almost immediately came to a ceasefire) Republicanism, theorising that the only way to unite Ireland was to help both the Protestant and the Catholic proletariat to throw off the shackles of sectarianism and unite to fight for a Republican, Socialist Ireland. This has tended to limit their electoral success in the North, and indeed they have only won the occasional seat at Stormont (Eamonn Melaugh in Foyle in 1976, Seamus Lynch in Belfast Central from 1980 to 1992, and David Kettyles briefly after the South Fermanagh by-election of 1983).

However, renamed 'Sinn Fein - the Workers' Party' in 1977, they began to win seats in Dail Eireann - the STV electoral system was much more conducive to success in the South. Access to political influence had a moderating effect on the Sinn Fein membership as well as their representatives, especially as more and more young Republicans were joining up and beginning to outnumber the CPI entryists. Matters came to a head in 1992, when a special Ard Fheis resolved to move from their former Soviet line to that of Eurocommunism. Again, a minority faction broke off, this time under Tomas MacGiolla, but it has not had any electoral success whatsoever. The remainder of Sinn Fein, now led by Proinsias De Rossa, moderated and replaced the dash in their name with an exclamation mark in 1994, in an attempt to appeal to the youth vote.

SF!TWP have not yet been called to join a coalition in the South, although come election time, the pundits always argue over whether their Republicanism would make them natural Fianna Fail partners or whether they should just merge with Labour already. The latter course has been seriously considered on numerous occasions, but the appeal of becoming a party of government is not very appealing to Sinn Fein, who remain, at heart, abstentionists. But this could change under their new leader, Catherine Murphy, who is leading the party to a social-democratic position to the right of Labour - much to the disquiet of some of the older members.

In the North, SF!TWP were outpolled for the first time last year by Eire Nua, the abstentionist, centrist-Republican splitters who began to contest elections in the early 1990s - but this doesn't tell the whole story, as Sinn Fein stood a smaller number of candidates this time due to an electoral alliance with the Republican Labour Party (the former party of Gerry Fitt, which was subsequently taken over by Trotskyists - the most prominent of whom at the moment are Gerry Carroll and Eamonn McCann, who both came second in their respective constituencies). Eire Nua reached 2%, mostly on the back of Francie Molloy's quixotic tilt at East Tyrone, amidst a curious period of quiet law-abiding from the Provisional IRA gangsters.

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When the four seats elected by graduates of Queen's University of Belfast were abolished ahead of the 1969 as part of the O'Neill reforms to end plural voting, it was generally assumed that the Ulster Liberal Party would follow them to the grave. Their only existing Stormont MP was Sheelagh Murnaghan, a barrister and international hockey player who had been first elected in a by-election in 1961 and gone on to campaign against the death penalty. In no other constituency, it was reckoned, did the Liberals have a chance of winning.

They reckoned without Claude Wilton, a Protestant civil rights activist who rode a wave of discontent to win the City of Londonderry seat from the UUP. Wilton, just as much as the Nationalists, brought the civil rights fight to Stormont, but as a Protestant he was a more acceptable figure to the O'Neillites and the sizeable moderate Protestant population. As such, the Liberals achieved something of a surge, aided by the defection of the Independent Unionist MP for North Down, Bertie McConnell. The pair were joined by Hugh Wilson at the next election, when he unseated William Craig in a shock upset in Larne.

During the 1970s and 80s, the Liberals became a repository of votes for modernising Unionists who were not keen on the socialism (such as it was) of Labour or the radical loyalist minority faction of the Official Unionists. They only stood against MPs of the latter persuasion and frequently worked with O'Neill and his successors on mutual policy interests.

Over the early 1980s, all three of the existing MPs retired or lost their seats, and the UUP - who had occasionally stood aside in their favour during the previous decade - were unwilling to give their nominated successors a clear run, meaning that all three seats were regained by the Unionists. However, in 1984, years of patient campaigning by Oliver Napier bore fruit and both he and John Cushnahan were elected in East Belfast seats. Cushnahan soon decided that politics was too expensive for him, and stood down at the next election to be replaced by John Alderdice, who lost his seat in 1993 before replacing Napier in 1996. In any case, this new blood in Belfast enabled an Indian Summer for the Ulster Liberals, winning Carrick in 1989 with Sean Neeson.

But this did not survive the return of David Bleakley as Labour leader, and the 90s were a tough time for the Liberals, especially after the Liberal Democrats stopped contributing to the ULP campaign fund as part of the Beith cutbacks. Finally, in 2004, both David Ford in Larne and John Alderdice in the new seat of Belfast Castlereagh (where the UUP Constituency Association were unwilling to continue to stand aside for him) were defeated - Alderdice went on to be President of the Liberal International, Ford a Lib Dem MP. The Ulster Liberals appeared to have finally given up the ghost. However, experienced Councillor Naomi Long was elected in the following election and the party has remained active under her leadership - although solely in the Greater Belfast area, of course.

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Do you have any plans to use this as a setting for a story? It could be somewhat Zonen-like but with the differences a little more obvious (though not necessarily to people who don't know much about NI in OTL, of course).
The thought has crossed my mind, but I think I'll have lost interest by the weekend.

Last one of these, I promise - Foyle, which covers everywhere west of the Foyle until 2004, when the urban bits are split off to become Foyleside and take their Labour MP with them.

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When William Long retired as Prime Minister in 1987, after just over a decade in power, the hard, loyalist right of the Ulster Unionist Party saw this as their best opportunity to put a stop to the more liberal elements in the party leadership - but they had very few options for leadership, with Harry West being seen as too old and William Craig as too unstable - fortunately for them, the leadership contest took place in the aftermath of the 1987 Westminster election, in which Enoch Powell lost his South Down seat. Brian Faulkner resigned from his East Down constituency at Stormont to make room for him, and Powell was soon adopted as the loyalist candidate.

The result was a victory for Stratton Mills, who continued as Prime Minister until 1995, but he was cowed by the strength and fervour of the support for Powell, and gave way on more issues than his supporters had hoped. Meanwhile, Powell felt that his views had been given a vote of confidence, and he therefore did nothing to dissuade hard-liners from discussing a new party to take them back to the old days when everyone had it good apart from the Catholics, the EEC weren't poking their noses into harmless Ulster agricultural nefariousness, and there weren't as many immigrants in Belfast asking silly questions about why there had to be a sectarian divide at all.

The party that Powell eventually founded was not the party many of these men had wanted: he launched it together with PUP MP Clifford Smythe, and Conor Cruise O'Brien, the National Democrat MP for Belfast Falls, and its main policy seemed to be that Stormont ought to be abolished, along with the very idea of Northern Irish law, and Ulster's political parties should be pushed out by those of the mainland. Naturally, Stormont MPs from the Ulster Unionist Party were not in favour of these ideas, and even less in favour of the Southern socialist he was consorting with.

The British Unionist Party filled an Integrationist gap in the market on the Unionist side - with the UUP firmly in favour of the devolution which lined their pockets, and the fundamentalist oddballs of Paisley's party embarking down a path of Ulster nationalism, the BUP were reasonably confident that they had a constituency. As it turned out, they did, and it was called East Down. Clifford Smythe and Conor Cruise O'Brien predictably lost their seats in 1989, leaving Powell alone and very aware that his seven candidates had only made an impact in the most English areas of County Down.

One of these candidates was Robert McCartney, one of the few UUP men to follow Powell into his new outfit. He had come second in North Down, and had previously been a barrister and a prominent member of the Campaign for Equal Citizenship, an Integrationist organisation which had been integrated into the BUP - a hotly contested decision, as the CEC was deeply infiltrated by the British and Irish Communist Organisation. Indeed, Jeff Dudgeon, a BUP candidate and later Belfast City Councillor, was a member of BICO.

Having won a seat in the Commons, the BUP now had to enter the Senate. The Stormont Senate is elected indirectly by the members of the Commons, by a system of STV. Having only one vote, Enoch Powell was unlikely to be able to elect a Senator on his own, but a deal with members of the Ulster Liberals and NI Labour Party procured a favourable result - Robert McCartney was elected for two terms, and much was made of the fact that he was now a Senator, while Ian Paisley had been unable to keep his wife in the upper house.

The next election was three years later. The novelty had now worn off the BUP, and the UUP were keen to get rid of their most direct competitors: they piled all their resources into East Down to unseat Enoch Powell. This strategy saw mixed results. Powell's career was finished (a long way from where it started) but North Down, ignored by the Official Unionists, voted for McCartney.

As a member of the Commons, McCartney of course could no longer be a Senator (Senators serve for two Commons terms) so his resignation triggered a Senatorial by-election. By convention, but not by law, these are voted on under the AV system by the MPs of the same County as the outgoing Senator. The vast majority of County Down MPs were Ulster Unionists, so George Green defeated Enoch Powell on the first count, as expected.

McCartney's tenure in the Commons was just as undistinguished as his tenure in the Senate, and resulted in his defeat by the UUP in the very next election, when the UUP were under the refreshing new leadership of John Taylor - the Right of the UUP had finally taken back control, eight years after the Enoch Powell embarrassment.

The BUP continued under the leadership of Robert McCartney for a few more years, still with half a dozen Councillors at that point, but his manner in internal party affairs was alienating and diminished the electability of the party. In 2000, another Powell convert from the UUP, Jeffrey Donaldson, putsched him and he returned to the obscurity from whence he came.

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Hell0 guise welcome back to! my series of Council election maps. This week Belfast!! Also, update: I have figured out how to use that button that looks like a paint can,, so my update schedule will hopefully become more regular as previously I was just colouring every individual pixel and this was quite laborious at times.

2014 saw one of the best ever Labour results in Belfast, despite the doldrums of the Irish and UK Labour Parties at the time. Naturally, they didn't turn this local success into momentum for more important elections, probably because they went into coalition with the UUP after this election and this alienated a lot of their Nationalist voters. Dawn Purvis, the leader of the Labour contingent on the Council, said it was the Liberals fault for refusing to work with nationalists but I think liberals are quite good at working together in coalitions and anyway apparently Purvis is a loyalist so I think she is probably biased against the NAt Dems as well. In any case the Liberals got more counsellors here than in the rest of northern Ireland so.

Anyway the National Democrats had a bad time because of the strong Labou performance and the good result for Sinn Fein! The Workers' Party who are more Republican than them and seem to be really breaking through they came second in both the Belfast West DEAs but they didn't put up enough candidates so they only got one seat in each probably because they haven't got more than one member! in each DEA.

In terms of the other minor parties, Gerry Carroll and Patricia Lewsley both held their seats for Republican Labour and in Black Mountain there is a Cllr called Gerry Adams for Eire Nua who apparently used to be a Provincial IRA gangster but everyone is fine with this for some reason, apparently he nearly won a seat in a proper election back in the 90ies. On the unionist Side, the Protestant Unionists won a seat in Court DEA in the west, which is where all the Presbyterians live. He is called Frank McCoubrey and he is a nationalist but not a Nationalist. Also there is Jeff Dudgeon who used to be a Communist but is now a Councillor for the British Unionist Party, which was founded by Enoch Powell so I don't think he is a Communist any more but he is gay instead.

Ireland is weird, next time i am doing exeter.

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