[3] William Walker stood as the Labour candidate in the Belfast North by-election in 1905 coming a close second with 47% of the vote.
[5] It initially declined to take a position on the "Border Question" and instead sought to offer itself as an alternative to both nationalism and unionism.
A mainly Protestant organisation, It had about 150 members in the Shankill and Newtownards Road districts of Belfast, and included Winifred Carney, Jack Macgougan, secretary from 1935 onwards, and Victor Halley.
[10] The NILP had a Westminster Member of Parliament on only one occasion, when Jack Beattie won the 1943 Belfast West by-election, retained the seat in 1945, but lost it in 1950.
[14] In 1949, following the declaration of a Republic in the south, the Northern Ireland Labour Party's conference voted in favour of the Union with Great Britain.
When the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was formed in 1967, NILP members were prominent in the organisation with Paddy Devlin elected to its Executive.
[18] In 1969 the situation in Northern Ireland worsened as the violent response by the RUC and loyalists to the civil rights marches led to the Battle of the Bogside in Derry and sectarian clashes in working class areas of Belfast.
[19] The growing sectarian polarisation in working class areas in the late 1960s damaged the NILP’s project of building a Labour alternative to Unionism.
Any hopes of keeping the cross-community Labour coalition together were damaged by the NILP publicly distancing itself from Paddy Devlin’s lobbying for action to protect Catholic working class communities.
[20] [21] The NILP also expelled Eamonn McCann, who was chairman of Derry Labour Party, for supporting Bernadette Devlin who had recently been elected as an MP.
However, the following year the Stormont Parliament was suspended when it resisted the London government request to take over responsibility for public order.
Alan Carr became its leading figure from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s,[25] by which point it had only about 200 members, and just a single councillor was elected for the party in 1981.