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Homes meant votes
Rates and the vote
In local elections you could vote only if you paid local rates. That meant owning a house, renting one, or being the husband or wife of someone who did. Catholics were poorer and more likely to live in extended families or with their parents, so lots of them could not vote at all. In places with a Catholic majority, such as the city of Derry, County Tyrone, and County Fermanagh, unionists stayed in control because more of them owned their own homes.
Housing as power
Control brought public jobs and, above all, housing. The housing stock was Victorian and crumbling, and one in three houses either had no running water or no flushing toilet. Young couples wanted out of their parents' terraces and into homes of their own. But a home for a young couple meant two more votes, so unionist councils did not like giving homes to Catholics and did not like building in Catholic areas. The chairman of Enniskillen's housing committee in 1963 promised the right people would be put in the houses and refused to apologize for it. Nationalist councils such as Newry built lots of houses in the early 1960s and gave only a tiny handful to Protestants.
Derry
Derry shows how far it went. In 1965 or so it was a two-to-one Catholic city, with 36,000 Catholics and 18,000 Protestants, yet Protestants had always controlled it by redrawing the ward boundaries to keep a council majority. Almost every Protestant family that wanted a house got one, while 2,000 Catholic families sat on the waiting list.
How did ward boundaries decide Derry's council?
Wards were drawn so that most Catholic voters were packed into a single ward. That ward elected a handful of councillors while several smaller Protestant wards elected the rest. As a result Derry's council had twelve unionist and eight nationalist members in the 1960s despite a Catholic majority in the city. The 1969 Cameron Report, an official inquiry into the unrest, described the arrangement as a gerrymander.
How did one council house spark protest?
In June 1968 nationalist MP Austin Currie squatted in a council house in Caledon, County Tyrone. The house had been allocated to a single 19-year-old Protestant woman while Catholic families with children waited. The protest led directly to the first civil rights march, from Coalisland to Dungannon in August 1968. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association had been founded in January 1967.
When did one person, one vote arrive?
Britain had ended the ratepayer and business vote for local elections in 1945, but Northern Ireland kept it. O'Neill's government promised to reform the local franchise in November 1968 after the first marches and the rioting in Derry. Local elections on a full adult franchise were held for the first time in May 1973, after the councils were reorganized.
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