A total of nine women[fn 1] were elected to the Commons in its 51-year existence,[3] serving for an average of eight and a half years. On average the Commons had two women MPs at any one time, falling to one from 1925 to 1933 and after 1969, and peaking from 1949 to 1958 at four MPs (7.7% of the House's 52 MPs).
Four of the nine women were elected by the Queen's University of Belfast constituency, including the lawyer Sheelagh Murnaghan (1961–1969). She was the only woman elected at a contested by-election[4] (in November 1961[5][6]), and also the only member of the Ulster Liberal Party ever elected to the Northern Ireland House of Commons.[7] Two of the women (Irene Calvert and Eileen M. Hickey) were independent politicians, both elected by Queen's.
The remaining six were all members of the Ulster Unionist Party,[8] which had a majority of seats throughout the Parliament's existence. Women had played an important role in Ulster unionist resistance to Irish Home rule, but after achieving Northern Ireland's continued place in the United Kingdom, the new province was predominantly governed by men.[9] (A similar process happened in the southern part of the newly-partitioned Ireland. Women had played a crucial part in the struggle for independence, but the politics of the new Irish Free State were male-dominated.[10][11])
No explicitly nationalist women were elected to Stormont,[12] although Eileen Hickey is sometimes labelled as a nationalist.[13][14] The abolition of STV in 1929 had, as intended, made it harder for any nationalist to win a seat in most of Northern Ireland;[12] but after the death in 1934 of Joseph Devlin, a lack of unity among nationalists compounded their difficulties.[12] Nationalist women were further hindered by the decline in the 1930s of Cumann na mBan, which collapsed in the early 1940s leaving nationalist and republican women with little effective organisation.[12]Bernadette Devlin's candidacy at the 1969 general election in South Londonderry was the closest any nationalist woman came to winning a seat, when she won nearly 40% of the votes[15] in a seat which had been contested only once (in 1949) since its creation in 1929.[16]
Prime Minister James Craig was explicit about the main purpose of abolishing STV: to prevent the emergence of non-sectarian class politics, and force voters to make a binary choice between supporters and opponents of the union with Great Britain.[18] This was largely successful: the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), which had won three seats in 1925, never made a breakthrough. Even in 1962, when NILP won 26% of the votes, it won only four seats.[19] Under STV in 1925, a 4.7% vote share had won NILP three seats.[19] NILP had established a women's section in 1924, but it collapsed in the early 1930s.[12] No women were elected as NILP MPs.
Impact of women MPs
In the first Parliament, unionist Julia McMordie (1921–1925) was notable for her support of women officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. She did not advocate equal pay for women, but did support equal allowances and provisions.[20]
In the 1940s and 1950s, the independent Irene Calvert (1945–1953) secured reforms to education and child welfare laws.[21] In the 1950s, the Unionist Dinah McNabb (1945–1969) campaigned against greyhound racing on Sundays. In the 1960s, McNabb was a strident opponent of the development in her constituency of the new town of Craigavon, and of the compensation rates for farmers whose land was compulsorily purchased.[22]
The Liberal Sheelagh Murnaghan's time in Stormont was notable for her introduction in 1964 of a Human Rights Bill which would have outlawed discrimination on grounds of religion or gender, and established a commission to enforce the ban.[7][23] The bill was defeated, as were her three further attempts with modified versions of the bill in 1965 and twice in 1967.[24][23] In the 1999 the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission was established as a component of the Good Friday Agreement which brought an end to The Troubles; the Commission's first Chief Commissioner Brice Dickson described Murnaghan as having "planted a seed".[25]
By far the most significant woman[12] in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland was its longest-serving woman MP, the unionist Dehra Parker (1921–1929, 1933–1960), with a total of 35 years of service.[12] Known as Dehra Chichester until her second marriage in 1928, she and Julia McMordie were the only women returned in the first Parliament in 1921.[26] Parker stood down at the 1929 general election, when her son-in-law James Lenox-Conyngham Chichester-Clark won a seat, and went to live in England with her new husband. On James's death in 1933, she was elected unopposed in his place, and held the seat until her resignation in 1960, when her grandson (James Chichester-Clark) was elected unopposed to succeed her. James was later Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, succeeding another of Dehra's grandsons, Terence O'Neill.[27]
^Technically, Anne Dickson and the other members of the Parliament of Northern Ireland remained members after the Parliament was suspended on 30 March 1972. However, the suspension was never revoked before the Parliament was abolished in 1973, so the de facto end of Dickson's term was in 1972.
Walker, Brian M, ed. (1992). Parliamentary election results in Ireland, 1918–92. A New History of Ireland; Ancillary Publications. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. ISBN978-0-901714-96-1. ISSN0332-0286.
