To continue the discussion Keith - some details about what a 'strange place; Northern Ireland could be too leading up the the 70s

VOTING RIGHTS

In the late 1960s for a population of some 1.5 million there were some 73 local authorities across Northern Ireland
However, the electoral franchise for local government elections continued to be based on certain practices abandoned in the rest of the United Kingdom by 1946 but actually retained and even strengthened in Northern Ireland

The right to vote in the six counties was based on the 'ratepayer suffrage' and the 'company vote.'

Ratepayer suffrage meant that, with some exceptions, only those who were owners or tenants of a dwelling (or their spouses) were entitled to vote in local government elections; as a result adults living in the parental home or as lodgers did not receive a vote

It has been estimated that in 1961 over a quarter of the parliamentary electorate were disfranchised at local elections

The company vote resulted in the existence of property plural voting for both Parliament and local government for approximately one and a half percent of the population

In May 1973 the franchise was finally widened to embrace universal adult suffrage.

GERRYMANDERING

While there is little evidence that gerrymandering seriously affected the vote in Parliamentary elections as much as the abolition of PR almost certainly did; the manipulation of local government boundaries is much more firmly based - there are instances of Nationalists losing control in a number of councils where they had a majority of electors.

This control of local councils had other effects

EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS

The Cameron Commission examined employment practices in five unionist-controlled areas, and concluded -

"We are satisfied that all these Unionist controlled councils have used and use their power to make appointments in a way which benefited Protestants.
In the figures available for October 1968 only thirty per cent of Londonderry Corporation's administrative, clerical and technical employees were Catholic.
In Dungannon Urban District none of the Council's administrative, clerical and technical employees was a Catholic.
In County Fermanagh no senior council posts (and relatively few others) were held by Catholics. . .
Armagh Urban District employed very few Catholics in salaried posts, but did not appear to discriminate at lower levels.
Omagh Urban District showed no clearcut pattern of discrimination, though we have seen what would appear to be undoubted evidence of employment discrimination by Tyrone County Council"

Somewhat similar patterns can be found for the Northern Ireland civil service and there was a similar imbalance in the judiciary

Catholics were also under-represented on statutory bodies, and among the higher ranks of the employees of such bodies.
In the publicly owned gas, electricity and water industries the imbalance against Catholics seems to have reached down through all levels.
The census of 1971 shows that of 8,122 people employed in these industries, only 1,952, or 154 per cent, recorded themselves as Catholics.

There was a consistent pattern - at manual labour levels, Catholics generally received their proportionate share of public employment.
But, at any level above that, they were seriously under-represented, and the higher one went, the greater the shortfall

The suspicion that discrimination was relatively important was fortified by boasts openly made, and incitements given, by prominent unionists

In September 1946: the Derry People reported
'At a meeting in Derry to select candidates for the Corporation Mr. H. McLaughlin said that for the past forty-eight years since the foundation of his firm there had been only one Roman Catholic employed - and that was a case of mistaken identity'

As late as 1961 during the Belfast municipal elections, a pamphlet issued by the St George's Ward Unionist Association stated that its three candidates
'employ over 70 people, and have NEVER employed a ROMAN CATHOLIC'

ACCESS TO PUBLIC HOUSING

After 1945 a large-scale public housing drive was launched in Northern Ireland and by 1961, 21 per cent of all housing in the province was public-rented;; ten years later the proportion had risen to 35 per cent

the Northern Ireland Housing Trust funded by the Northern Ireland government
, was set up in 1945 to supplement the efforts of local authorities and had a reputation for developing attractively designed and well managed estates

It selected tenants, not just on the basis of need, but on their ability to pay which meant hat it creamed off the tenants in the better paid employment

While this may not be deliberate discrimination the provision of public housing by local authorities was another matter

In 1950 Omagh Rural District council allocated forty new houses at Coneywarren to forty unionists 'a majority of whom were either not married at all or were married and without children, or had but one child', although the nationalist minority on the council submitted 'the names of 22 desperately badly-housed families'
The Cameron Commission concluded

'There have been many cases where councils have withheld planning permission, or caused needless delays, where they believed a housing project would be to their electoral disadvantage. . . . We have no doubt also, in the light of the mass of evidence put before us, that in these Unionist-controlled areas it was fairly frequent for housing policy to be operated so that houses allocated to Catholics tended, as in Dungannon Urban District, to go to rehouse slum dwellers, whereas Protestant allocations tended to go more frequently to new families. Thus the total numbers allocated were in rough correspondence to the proportion of Protestants and Catholics in the community; the principal criterion however in such cases was not actual need but maintenance of the current political preponderance in the local government area."


The civil rights agitation of 1968 was sparked off by the allocation of a house at Caledon, in Dungannon Rural District, to an unmarried Protestant girl who, as the Cameron report said (1969: para. 28), could 'by no stretch of the imagination . . . be regarded as a priority tenant' when there were Catholic families in the area badly in need of housing.


"Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics"
Davis Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland.