Unionist newspaper decries Proportional Representation as ‘freak’ election system
Belfast, 31 August 1923 - A leading Belfast unionist newspaper has described the Proportional Representation used in the recent Free State general election as a ‘freak system’ and has congratulated Northern Ireland on having ‘got rid of it.’
In an article written by a ‘special correspondent’ in Dublin, and published on the 31st of August the Belfast News Letter has alleged that 95 per cent of voters in the Free State had ‘not grasped the rudiments of proportional representation.’ Apparent proof of the ignorance of the electorate was to be found in the fact that ‘in nearly all constituencies hundreds, and in some cases thousands of ballot papers revealed a first preference vote case for the leading Government candidate and the second for the leading Republican candidate, or vice versa.’
The only conclusion the News Letter’s special correspondent could draw from this was that this was either done deliberately ‘in which case the moral is that the people of Southern Ireland are still Republican at heart and refuse to recognise the Government party as anything but Republicans at heart also, or else the voters conceived the idea - and there is no doubt that many of them did so - that they should put a “1” against the name of the man they favoured, and a “2” against the name of the man they wished to defeat.’
The New Letter suggests that had the Free State given pause to reflect on the American experience, whose electorate, it asserts, ‘is fifty times more intelligent politically than the Free State electorate’, and who had tried almost every conceivable constitutional machinery and had yet drawn a line at PR, then they too might have decided against use of the system.
In his analysis of the election outcome, the New Letter’s correspondent in Dublin summarises that ‘anybody who has been made a hero by the Free State people for killing a policeman or assassinating a Loyalist has received a more or less overwhelming vote.’
The English papers that had moved quickly to declare the early results a sweeping victory for the Free State Government had made no allowance, the News Letter claims, for the peculiarities of the PR system.
Indeed, the News Letter’s correspondent goes so far as to declare the election outcome to be such as to entitle anti-Treaty Republicans to claim a ‘moral victory’ and speculates that, in different circumstances, they might even have secured an actual victory. For what, he asks, would the outcome have been had the Free State Government not kept the ‘cream of Sinn Féin locked up’ and had the ‘15,000 stalwarts now in jail ...been stumping and organising the country.’
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
