Belfast Victoria (UK Parliament constituency)

Belfast Victoria
Former Borough constituency
for the House of Commons
19181922
Number of members one
Replaced by Belfast East
Created from Belfast East

Victoria, a division of Belfast, was a UK parliamentary constituency in Ireland. It returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 1918 to 1922, using the first past the post electoral system. .

Boundaries and Boundary Changes

This constituency comprised the north-eastern half of East Belfast, and contained the then Dock and Victoria wards of Belfast City Council.[1]

Prior to the 1918 general elections and after the dissolution of Parliament in 1922 the area was part of the Belfast East constituency.

Politics

The constituency was strongly unionist, but with significant labour support. The unionists ran a candidate from the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, a group affiliated with the Unionist Party, as a Labour Unionist. He easily won the seat. A Belfast Labour Party candidate was in second place. Sinn Féin demonstrated republican weakness in the seat by receiving only 539 votes, in the 1918 election.

The First Dáil

Sinn Féin contested the general election of 1918 on the platform that instead of taking up any seats they won in the United Kingdom Parliament, they would establish a revolutionary assembly in Dublin. In republican theory every MP elected in Ireland was a potential Deputy to this assembly. In practice only the Sinn Féin members accepted the offer.

The revolutionary First Dáil assembled on 21 January 1919 and last met on 10 May 1921. The First Dáil, according to a resolution passed on 10 May 1921, was formally dissolved on the assembling of the Second Dáil. This took place on 16 August 1921.

In 1921 Sinn Féin decided to use the UK authorised elections for the Northern Ireland House of Commons and the House of Commons of Southern Ireland as a poll for the Irish Republic's Second Dáil. This constituency was, in republican theory, incorporated in a four-member Dáil constituency of Belfast East.

Members of Parliament

ElectionMemberParty
1918 Thompson Donald Labour Unionist
1922 constituency abolished

Election

General Election 1918: Belfast Victoria
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Labour Unionist Thompson Donald 9,309 69.90 N/A
Belfast Labour Robert Waugh 3,469 26.05 N/A
Sinn Féin Winifred Carney 539 4.05 N/A
Majority 5,840 43.85 N/A
Turnout 19,494 68.31 N/A
Labour Unionist gain from new seat Swing N/A

References

  1. Redistribution of Seats (Ireland) Act 1918, Second Schedule, Part I

External links

See also

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, March 20, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.