Our People

Peter Emerson - North Belfast Greens – Elections

Peter Emerson is one of the longest serving Green Party members in Northern Ireland and is the Party’s North Belfast representative. Peter’s political career with the Greens began in the May 1981 local election, where he stood under the Ecology label. In 1985 Ecology Parties throughout Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Wales & Scotland changed their name to the Green Party. Since then Peter has stood in 14 different elections representing the Green Party. Peter has been working on several issues which seriously affect the North Belfast area, including plans to build an incinerator on the North Foreshore. “North Belfast has been severely neglected by its political representatives over the years. It is certainly an area which would benefit from Green political policy. In particular I’m very concerned about plans to build an incinerator at the North Foreshore.”

As a young man Peter served as a First Lieutenant in the submarine service. However the extreme poverty which he witnessed spurred him to resign his commission to take up a voluntary teaching position in Nairobi, Kenya.

Three years later, he cycled 10,000 kilometers in a figure-of-eight across Central Africa, and hence his first book, Inflation? Try a Bicycle.  Peter has been a strong advocate of the bicycle ever since.

“I have cycled to many different places including the iron curtain in 1986; from Moscow to the Urals in ’89; from Moscow to Tirana in ’90; and across Bosnia, twice, in winter and in war, in 1993. I believe more needs to be done to make Belfast a cycle friendly zone.”

Peter has been an active member of the North Belfast community and has worked at the Cairn Lodge Youth Club on Belfast’s Crumlin Road, as Community Development Officer in the Alliance Avenue Resource Centre, as a farm manager in Farset City Farm, and as Environmental Officer in a landscaping scheme for the Ligoniel Improvement Association.

In 1978, he helped set up a NORTHERN IRELAND branch of Friends of the Earth, and three years later, was a key player in the Northern Ireland CAMPAIGN FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT.

As a member of the Greens and of the New Ireland Group, and as director of the de Borda Institute, Peter has been a long term campaigner for the preferendum voting system or Modified Borda Count. He also invented the matrix vote. His work in this area has resulted in several publications, his latest being, Designing an All-Inclusive Democracy, was published by Springer in 2007. His work on electoral and voting systems has resulted in invitations from across Central and Eastern Europe where he has acted as an observer and supervisor of upwards of 20 elections.

“The democratic process, which is after all a major part of the peace process, should itself be ‘peace-ful’. Instead, therefore, of taking decisions by a win-or-lose majority vote, politicians should best resolve all controversial disputes in a win-win voting procedure, the preferendum, a points system where the winner is the option with the most points, i.e., the best one for everybody (and not just for a majority). Like the matrix vote, the preferendum works without any ‘designations’.”

If you need to get in touch with Peter you can contact him:

on 028 90 711795, 07837717979

or pemerson@deborda.org

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