Desmond Norman Orr Boal (8 August 1928 – 23 April 2015) was a unionist politician and barrister from Northern Ireland.

He was the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for the Shankill constituency between 1960 and 1972.

He was very critical of the leadership under Captain Terence O'Neill, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

Boal opposed the manner, if not the substance, of O'Neill's attempts at improving relations with both the Irish government and the Roman Catholic/Irish nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, along with many backbenchers.

[3] Discontented with James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner who came to government after O'Neill's 1969 fall from power, Boal resigned from the UUP in 1971 and joined Ian Paisley in establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to provide dissident unionist opinion with a viable political alternative.