← 1914 January & June, 1920 550 394 | January & June, 1920 1925 → 394 355 | |
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The 1920 Irish local elections were held in January & June 1920 for the various county & district councils of Ireland. The elections provide an interesting barometer of opinion in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), and were the last elections to be held on an all-Irish basis, with the Government of Ireland Act 1920 being passed at the end of the year, legislating for the partition of Ireland. The next local elections in Ireland were held in Northern Ireland in 1924, with the Irish Free State holding local elections in 1925.
Contents
The 1920 Irish local elections were held in two stages:
Background
In the 1918 general elections the newly reformed Sinn Féin party had secured a large majority of Irish seats in the Parliament of the United Kingdom with slightly less than 50% of the vote because of the "first past the post" electoral system. This provided a propaganda coup for Sinn Féin, and so the British Government introduced the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1919, which allowed for parliamentary elections by proportional representation in all of Ireland for the first time, by the system of the single transferable vote for multi-member electoral areas. The government hoped that the new system would reveal less-than-monolithic support for Sinn Féin, and it was first tested in the 1920 local elections.
The electoral method introduced by the 1919 Act is still used in elections in the Republic of Ireland and most elections in Northern Ireland today.
January 1920
The 1919 act mandated elections for all urban councils except Sligo Corporation, which had been reconstituted and elected in 1919. The cumulative first preference votes in the 1920 urban elections were:
Excluding the more unionist province of Ulster, the urban results were:
The 15 January elections saw Sinn Féin, Labour, and other nationalists winning control of 172 of Ireland's 206 borough and urban district councils. The subsequent mayoral elections on 30 January saw a Unionist elected for Belfast, a Nationalist in Londonderry, Labour in Wexford, and Sinn Féin in eight boroughs.
June 1920
The rural elections showed a much greater level of support for Sinn Féin in its core support area. It took control of 338 out of 393 local government bodies, county councils, boards of guardians and rural district councils across the whole island. It should be noted however that the county and rural district elections saw virtually no contests outside of Ulster.
Sinn Féin's success allowed them to seize control of virtually every county council and rural district council outside of Ulster. Sinn Féin success in the 12 June rural and county elections extended even to Ulster, with the party winning control of 36 of Ulsters 55 rural districts.