In the 1983 general election, Powell had to face a DUP candidate in his constituency and Ian Paisley denounced Powell as " a foreigner and an Anglo-Catholic ".

Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ) councillor and former Police Federation chairman Jimmy Spratt said if the report " had had one shred of credible evidence then we could have expected charges against former Police Officers.

However, the public money that had been allocated was frozen as a disagreement developed about the relationship between the private developer Seymour Sweeney and the DUP.

Hain's remarks had previously been strongly criticised by the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Sir Declan Morgan though the decision to charge Hain with “ scandalising the court ”, using a law already obsolete in 1899 drew ridicule in Westminster and strong criticism from senior DUP ministers.

On 18 December 2003 Donaldson, Norah Beare MLA and Arlene Foster announced their resignation from the UUP and on 5 January 2004 they announced that they had joined the Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ).

Molyneaux also endorsed Donaldson, his successor as MP for Lagan Valley, even though Donaldson had now defected to the DUP.

Robinson was selected as DUP candidate for Belfast East during the 1979 general election, a seat which previously had a big Ulster Unionist Party ( UUP ) majority.

His vote declined from 21, 000 to 4, 000, and he was beaten into fourth place behind Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party ( SDLP )-although this was also partly because there had been no DUP candidate in the previous general election.

( One of their former councillors had defected to the DUP and was re-elected as a DUP candidate.

In 1983, he had stood as a DUP candidate in the Westminster election for East Antrim.

The decline was evident even before the local government elections of 1981 as 4 of the 12 UUUP councillors elected in 1977 had defected to other Unionist parties ( 2 to UUP, 1 to DUP and 1 to the Ulster Popular Unionist Party ).

When the seat was created it was nominally held by the Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ), based on mapping the 1992 general election results onto the new boundaries, but this was because the Ulster Unionist Party ( UUP ) had not contested the equivalent area.

In elections at all levels, the DUP have frequently had their highest share of the vote in North Antrim and have rarely been seriously challenged.

Seawright had been expelled from the DUP and stood in the election, reviving the Protestant Unionist Party label, but was unsuccessful.

However he was unsuccessful in the Single Transferable Vote constituency for the entire province and had the personal humiliations of seeing rival DUP leader Ian Paisley top the poll, fellow Ulster Unionist John Taylor win one of the seats and former Ulster Unionist member James Kilfedder performing better than West to become runner up.

On 10 December 2004, he announced that he had joined the DUP Parliamentary Group in the House of Commons, the first Member of Parliament for a seat in Great Britain to represent a party based in Ireland since T. P.

On July 4, 2005 it was announced that Berry had been suspended from the DUP following an internal disciplinary panel meeting.

He then left the DUP and unsuccessfully contested the 2003 Assembly Election as an independent Unionist.

In the 2001 general election the DUP contested the seat for the first time since 1983, with their candidate Nigel Dodds campaigning heavily on both their opposition to the Good Friday Agreement and Walker's record.

In 1979 she contested the Belfast North constituency in the Westminster election, polling 10 % of the vote, the best performance by a UPNI candidate in Northern Ireland, however her intervention was sufficient to split the moderate Unionist vote resulting in the seat being gained by the DUP.

In the 2010 general election, Empey contested the South Antrim seat, but was defeated by the incumbent William McCrea for the DUP.

In 2004 Paisley was replaced as the DUP MEP by Jim Allister, who resigned from the party in 2007 while retaining his seat.

This has long been a safe unionist seat and the current MP is David Simpson of the DUP.

He won the seat with a 19. 9 % swing to the DUP and a majority of 64, with Alliance Party leader Oliver Napier 928 votes behind, unseating the MP former Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party leader and UUP candidate William Craig on 3 May 1979.

He was re-elected to the House of Commons in 1983, 1986 ( along with UUP and DUP MPs he resigned his seat in protest at the Anglo Irish Agreement on 17 December 1985 and was re-elected in the by-election the next year ), 1987, 1992, 2001 and 2005.

Following his defection to the DUP he retained the seat in 2005.

However, he lost his own seat to Nigel Dodds of the DUP in the 2001 general election, following a disastrous televised debate at Crumlin Road Courthouse in his constituency, in which he stumbled over some of the most rudimentary questions.

He continued as a member of the European Parliament following his resignation from the DUP, and his subsequent establishment of the TUV, but failed to retain his seat at the 2009 European parliamentary elections.

According to the European election result in North Antrim, Allister stood a good chance of winning the seat, which would have been a tremendous loss to the DUP-historically the DUP's safest seat in the land and the seat of DUP founder and former party leader Ian Paisley.

In the 1996 Forum elections the UUP outpolled the DUP and it was agreed that the DUP would not contest the seat.

The UUP and DUP, however, ran opposing candidates and in the event Gildernew held her seat.

While the SDLP sprung a surprise in 1998 by overtaking a DUP candidate to win the final seat due to Ulster Unionist transfers-the first time that any nationalist candidate has benefited in this way.

As part of a pact to oppose the Anglo-Irish Agreement the DUP did not contest the seat until 1992 but they still failed to come close, though in the 1996 elections to the Northern Ireland Forum they were only slightly behind the UUP.

The DUP remained eager to take the Westminster seat and in the 2005 general election they did so.

However the DUP were eager to regain the seat and in the 2003 Assembly election they outpolled the UUP by 298 votes.

In 1983, Cecil Walker regained the seat for the UUP, beating Scotsman George Seawright of the DUP.

However in the event the DUP came third, behind the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the UUP's candidate, Martin Smyth won the seat, holding it until 2005.

In the event, the DUP and UUP both fielded candidates which split the vote, while the nationalist vote mainly went for the SDLP over Sinn Féin, with the result that the SDLP took the seat despite a majority of votes cast for unionist candidates.

In the 2001 general election there was a strong rumour that the DUP leader Ian Paisley would contest the seat himself, in the hope of unseating Trimble, but in the event he stayed in his North Antrim constituency and the DUP instead nominated David Simpson.

The DUP took two seats in the multi-party power-sharing executive ( Paisley, like the leaders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Féin chose not to become a minister ) but those DUP members serving as ministers ( Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds ) refused to attend meetings of the Executive Committee ( cabinet ) in protest at Sinn Féin's participation.

On 17 April, Peter Robinson was elected unopposed as leader of the DUP and succeeded Paisley as First Minister at a special sitting of the assembly on 5 June 2008.

The leader of the second largest parliamentary opposition party, the Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ), Nigel Dodds, usually asks one question later in the session: if he does not, at least one MP from either the DUP or another smaller party such as the Scottish National Party will ask a question.

The DUP is the largest party in Northern Ireland, currently holding eight seats at Westminster and 38 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Robinson served as Paisley ’ s Parliamentary Assistant at Westminster prior to assuming the role of the General Secretary of the DUP in 1975, a position of which he held until 1979 and which afforded him the opportunity to exert unprecedented influence within the fledgling unionist party.

In April 2001, he provoked a direct political attack from the DUP over him being the only Unionist to vote against a motion condemning the display of lillies commemorating the 1916 Easter Uprising at Parliament Buildings.

In July 1972, they called for a rent and rate strike, a proposal which put them at odds with other unionist parties and which was criticised by the DUP.

* Wednesday 16 July 1997: The DUP and the UKUP left the Stormont talks in protest at what they claimed was a lack of clarification by the British government on decommissioning.

Allister joined the DUP at its founding in 1971.

In 1982 he was elected as a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont for North Antrim and served as the DUP Assembly Chief Whip.

The 2001 election was seen at a province wide level as a battle over the Belfast Agreement with the DUP opposed to it and most of the UUP in favour, however ironically this situation was seemingly reversed in East Londonderry, where the sitting Ulster Unionist MP, William Ross, was completely opposed to all involvement with the Agreement and its institutions, whilst the DUP candidate, Gregory Campbell, was a minister in the Executive set up by the Agreement.

The by-election was extremely significant at the time in that it was the first at which the DUP tide ebbed.

The DUP selected Jimmy Spratt and offered an electoral pact to the UUP that would give each party a free run at one out of South Belfast and Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Since then, he has been re-elected from North Down at each election for the DUP.

Hunter stepped down from the House of Commons at the 2005 general election and suggested he would move to Northern Ireland to become more involved with DUP politics.

He joined the Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ) at the age of 16, the same age at which he began gospel singing in churches in the North Armagh and Banbridge areas.