Qualla: Derry City Council

Derry City Council: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) NorthernCounties at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. The coat of arms granted to Derry's corporation in 1613 by Daniel Molyneux, Ulster King of Arms, includes a human skeleton sitting on a mossy stone, watched over by a triple-towered castle on a black field. The figure is reputed to be a Norman knight named De Burgh who was starved to death in a castle dungeon in 1332 on the orders of his cousin the Earl of Ulster. As civic symbols go, it is unusually candid about its origins. The local authority that inherited that bony heraldry, Derry City Council, ran the city through forty-two years that took it from gerrymandered unionist control to nationalist majority and on into reform. It was dissolved in April 2015 when it merged with Strabane District Council to form the present Derry and Strabane District Council. The skeleton survives. So does the harp.

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Image: User: (WT-shared) NorthernCounties at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Derry City Council: From Corporation to Commission

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) NorthernCounties at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. From 1613 until 1969, Derry was run by Londonderry Corporation under a charter granted by James I. The city's medieval walls had been built only a few years earlier, by the same City of London livery companies, to garrison a Protestant settlement against the Catholic Gaelic hinte...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) NorthernCounties at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Derry City Council: The Single Transferable Vote

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NorthernCounties, CC BY-SA 3.0. Reform arrived in 1973 with the Local Government (Boundaries) Act and the Local Government Act of 1972. The old county borough was merged with the surrounding rural district to form a single Londonderry district, and elections were conducted under the single transferable vote, th...

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Image: NorthernCounties | CC BY-SA 3.0

Derry City Council: The Argument About a Name

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1984 the council voted to rename itself from Londonderry City Council to Derry City Council. This was, technically, only a name change applying to the council, not to the city itself, which legally remains Londonderry under its 1613 charter. The renamed council also rechristen...

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Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Derry City Council: The Guildhall

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The council met in the Guildhall, the red sandstone hall on the riverside built in 1890, gutted by an IRA bomb in 1972, and restored. In the same building, between 2000 and 2004, the Saville Inquiry heard nine hundred witnesses give evidence about Bloody Sunday. The Inquiry's cha...

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Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Derry City Council: What the Merger Changed

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit yeowatzup, CC BY 2.0. The 2015 reform of Northern Ireland's councils reduced the number of district councils from twenty-six to eleven. Derry City Council merged with Strabane District Council to form Derry and Strabane District Council, covering nearly the whole north-west corner of Northern Ireland....

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Image: yeowatzup | CC BY 2.0