Gerrymandering and Unrest in Derry

The cannons along the 17th century Derry Walls, built to defend English and Scottish settlers from the Irish natives.

"(In the 1920's) an ingenious new arrangement (was) designed to ensure that around 7,500 Unionist voters returned twelve councillors while 10,000 nationalist voters returned only eight." -- from McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles.

One feature of troubled democracies is gerrymandering, where political districts are carved out in illogical shapes in order to disenfranchise one group of voters and empower another group of voters. In the United States, we have recently seen this system favor Republican representation in both Michigan and Pennsylvania despite the fact that both states have more Democratic voters than Republicans. More sinisterly, it has recently been shown that voting districts in Virginia, Alabama and North Carolina pack black voters together into oblong districts in order to limit the political power of an entire race in their state. Just this week, in a 5-4 decision where Justice Thomas uncharacteristically voted with the "liberal" wing, the Supreme Court struck down two districts in North Carolina for precisely this reason. 

I have taught my Civics students to look at voting maps in America for several years. And yet, when teaching about unrest in Northern Ireland's second largest city, I had overlooked this key piece of the puzzle. We in the U.S. tend to think of Northern Ireland as a majority Protestant country, carved out of the island in the 1920's partition for precisely this reason. But Derry--the city of the Derry Walls and The Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday--is a majority Catholic/Nationalist city that was carefully gerrymandered to secure a permanent Protestant/Unionist majority.

The lesson of Derry is that long-term gerrymandering, while securing political power for a few, leads to the sort of frustration, division and unrest that can cause rioting, bloodshed and disorder. When looking at the way that politicians "pack" and "crack" our own district maps in order to suppress democracy in their favor, the history of Derry should make us rightfully nervous.