In practice the Senate of Northern Ireland possessed little power and even less influence. While intended as a revising chamber, in practice, debates and votes typically simply replicated those in the Commons.[1]
Location
Chamber of the Senate when at Assembly's College, in 1921
From 1932, when the building was completed, until 1972, the Senate of Northern Ireland met in the Senate Chamber of Parliament Buildings in Stormont on the eastern outskirts of Belfast. To make parallels with the British House of Lords, members of the Senate sat on red benches.
The Senate consisted of 26 members. Twenty-four members elected by the House of Commons of Northern Ireland using the Single Transferable Vote (STV), elected in blocks of twelve with each senator's term lasting for two parliaments (i.e. two terms of the House of Commons) and two ex-officio members: the Lord Mayor of Belfast and Mayor of Londonderry. Convention held that, in the event of a by-election, only members of the Commons from the same county would vote on their replacement.[2] The election system was maintained even after the abolition of STV for the House of Commons.[3]
In 1925, at the end of the first parliament, the senators to retire were selected by lot.[4] At the subsequent election, voting papers from the Nationalist MPs and George Henderson were deemed to have been submitted late, and were not considered. All these members had given a high preference to the Nationalist candidate, Vincent Devoto, and a subsequent analysis of the transfers showed that these would otherwise have been sufficient to elect him.[5]
Office-holders
The key offices in the Senate were:
Speaker
2 Deputy Speakers
Leader of the House
Deputy Leader of the House (abolished in 1961).
Political composition
During its history 142 people sat in the upper house. With the addition of the Unionist Lord Mayor of Belfast Corporation and Mayor of Londonderry Corporation, together with boycotts of the Commons at various times by nationalist parties and fragmentation of the opposition into some parties too small to elect a Senator alone, the upper house proved to be even more heavily Unionist than the lower house. However a Nationalist, Thomas Stanislaus McAllister, served two periods as deputy speaker.[6]
The table below shows the political composition of the twenty-four elected members of the Senate, after each election. It does not show subsequent changes of party allegiance, nor changes resulting from by-elections. Following the 1969 election, there was one vacant seat.[7] Other than Hugh O'Doherty, Mayor of Londonderry until 1923, all the ex officio members were Ulster Unionists.
^Norton, Christopher (2014). The politics of constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland, 1932-70 between grievance and reconciliation. Manchester New York: Manchester University Press, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-0-7190-5903-2.
.svg)
