Martin Smyth

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Reverend William Martin Smyth (born June 15, 1931) is a Northern Ireland unionist politician, and was Ulster Unionist Party Member of Parliament for Belfast South from 1982-2005. He was a Vice-President of the Conservative Monday Club.

He is also an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and was minister of Raffrey, County Down from 1957 to 1963 and of Alexandra Church, Belfast 1963-1982.

Smyth used to be Grand Master of the Orange Order. In the 1970s, he was also a member of the Vanguard movement which had emerged as a faction within the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). However, when this faction split from the UUP to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, Smyth chose to remain with the UUP. His name was linked in the Belfast Telegraph with the UUP candidacy for the Belfast North constituency in 1974. However, he did not stand there, and the following year, he was elected to the Constitutional Convention for Belfast South, performing strongly by polling double the electoral quota.

He was selected to fill the vacancy caused by the murder of Robert Bradford. Smyth was consequently elected Member of Parliament in a 1982 by-election, receiving 17,123 votes. Later the same year, he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly, again polling double the electoral quota. He was one of the MPs to resign their seats in 1985 in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and subsequently joined the Western Goals Institute as a Vice-President, although how active he was is not clear.

At the October 1988 Conservative Party Conference, Western Goals (UK) held a fringe meeting on the subject of "International Terrorism - how the West can fight back". Rev. Martyn Smyth, MP, Andrew Hunter, MP, Sir Alfred Sherman and Harvey Ward, were the speakers. Andrew Hunter gave considerable detail to the meeting concerning top-level links between the IRA and ANC.

Rev. Smyth ran for the leadership of the UUP in 1995 after James Molyneaux stood down, but lost to David Trimble. He is opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, but not as much as some, and was in 1993 condemned by the Democratic Unionist Party for suggesting that talks with Sinn Féin might be possible. He challenged David Trimble for the party leadership in 2000, but lost. In 2001 he was elected to the position of President of the party. In 2003, he, along with David Burnside and Jeffrey Donaldson, resigned the party whip. He attempted to dissuade Donaldson from resigning from the party entirely. In January 2004, Smyth and Burnside retook the UUP whip. Later that year he lost the party Presidency in the annual election at the Ulster Unionist Council, polling 329 votes to Lord Rogan who won with 407 votes. The same meeting saw an unsuccessful challenge to Trimble's leadership

In January 2005, he announced he would be stepping down from Parliament at the next election so as to spend more time with his wife. He ended his House of Commons career in May 2005. During the election Smyth courted controversy when he and former Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux publicly endorsed the Democratic Unionist Party candidate Jimmy Spratt instead of the Ulster Unionist candidate Michael McGimpsey in Belfast South. In the event neither man won, with the seat being taken by the Social Democratic and Labour Party's Alasdair McDonnell amidst a split in the vote between the two Unionist parties.