More than one in every seven councillors in Northern Ireland are unelected.
Some 65 of the 462 councillors across the region's 11 local authorities have been co-opted, meaning they were appointed by their party to replace someone else. The growing tally follows a raft of new faces being appointed in recent weeks to succeed councillors who were elected to the Stormont Assembly last month.
Sinn Féin has the most co-opted councillors with 18, followed by the Alliance Party with 17 and the DUP with 16. Five of the SDLP's councillors, three for the Ulster Unionist Party and six others were co-opted since the last local government election in 2019.
