Irish local elections, 1920
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All 1806 councillors across Ireland |
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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.
The 1920 Irish local elections were held in two stages:
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. Because many seats won by Sinn Féin were uncontested, and the elections used the "first past the post" system, Sinn Féin in all contested seats gained slightly less than 50% of the vote. This electoral success 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.
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