Irish Partition – Present and Future Gerry OShea
In his
famous tragedy Macbeth Shakespeare issues a clear warning to
power-hungry leaders about the consequences of their devious actions. “Things
bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”
The partition
of Ireland got off to a very poor start because not even one nationalist leader
was consulted at any stage about truncating the island. The other community,
unionists, led by James Craig and Edward Carson, had veto power over the
negotiations in Westminster, but the minority Catholic population in Ulster had
no say in the deliberations about the future governance of their province.
The
sectarian dividing line created by the passage of the Government of Ireland Act
in Westminster in December, 1920 impacted both communities living in all parts
of the island. Protestants outside of Ulster worried how their rights would be
protected in the promised nationalist parliament in Dublin where they would be
a minority, cut off from their northern co-religionists.
Originally, the Loyalists demanded a statelet
that would include all nine counties of Ulster. However, they realized this
would leave them vulnerable with only a small voting advantage over
nationalists in the whole province, and Catholics all over Europe had bigger
families than Protestants so, looking ahead, William Craig feared that they
might lose their control. Thus, the reduction to an area encompassing just six
counties.
English
leaders would have far preferred one parliament in Dublin along the lines of
the 1914 Home Rule Bill which passed all stages in the House of Commons. Viewed
from their colonial perspective, it would be awkward for Westminster to oversee
two governments in a small island. It would also invite calls from Welsh and,
especially, Scottish nationalists for radical changes in their territories.
Edward
Carson believed that the British leaders were being far too generous in their
negotiations with the Sinn Fein representatives during the Treaty deliberations
in London in the fall of 1921. He also resented some of the British
negotiators’ persistent prompting that the autonomous Belfast parliament should
consider switching its allegiance from Westminster to Dublin. That would have
been a real coup for nationalists but Carson’s vehement veto ensured that the
idea never caught on.
The leaders in London saw Edward Carson as
someone with steadfast loyalty to the Crown who was certainly preferable to
nationalist leaders, driven by achieving some kind of independence for Ireland.
Among his own loyalist people, he was hailed as King Carson, the patriarch of
Northern Ireland, and an imposing statue of him still greets visitors to the
Stormont Buildings.
He ranted
against “the invasion of Sinn Fein” and his many tribal speeches inflamed his own
community. The sectarian violence was stoked by leaders like Carson; almost 500
people, mostly law-abiding Catholics, were killed during the first two years of
partition.
In the
Treaty negotiations the Irish delegates placed a great deal of emphasis on the
Boundary Commission which would decide where the lines would be finally drawn
between the two jurisdictions. Michael Collins believed that Tyrone and
Fermanagh, which have nationalist majorities, would be transferred in the
negotiations to southern control.
The Boundary
Commission turned out to be a damp squib. Emotions ran high when areas with
Catholic or Protestant majorities were considered for movement to the other’s
jurisdiction. The mood in unionist Belfast could be summed up succinctly as
“not an inch. What we have we hold.”
Towards the
finish of the deliberations, Eoin MacNeill, the Dublin representative on the
Commission, resigned in frustration and by December of 1925 the Commission
ended its work without geographical changes but with the Irish prime minister,
William Cosgrave, having managed to get liberated from burdensome public debt
and war pensions payments agreed in the 1921 Treaty.
Historians
speculate about how the Boundary negotiations would have developed if Michael
Collins had lived. Unquestionably, he was very concerned about the pogroms in
Catholic areas in the North, and he continued sending gunmen and money to
Belfast when he headed the new Irish government in 1922. Would he somehow have
succeeded in prising Tyrone and Fermanagh away from the northern statelet? Even
if he did, that would leave the nationalists in the remaining four counties
even more vulnerable.
Partition recently passed the 100-year marker,
and even unionists concede that it has led to all kinds of instability. The
minority nationalist community faced blatant prejudice in employment, housing
and policing. As the late unionist leader David Trimble put it when accepting
the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo with John Hume in December 1998: “Ulster
unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it
was a cold house for Catholics.”
The core
issue separating the two communities remains the maintenance of the
Westminster connection. A recent opinion poll, the LucidTalk survey for the
Sunday Times, reveals that 48% of those questioned favor maintaining the status quo while 41% want a united Ireland with the remaining 11% marking the unsure box.
Interestingly, 57% of 18 to 24-year-olds would
vote for Irish unity today with just 35% of this group favoring the current
arrangement. It is fair to conclude that we are very likely living in the
closing years of a partitioned country.
In the
coming negotiations, republicans and nationalists show no desire to follow the
not-an-inch example of unionists in 1920. The late Seamus Mallon, considered
the hardline nationalist voice in the Social Democratic and Labor Party,
suggested that no new arrangements should be attempted on the constitutional
issue until two-thirds of the northern population wants it. A number of
nationalist thinkers stress that 50.1% voting for unity should not be viewed as
a mandate for a new constitution.
They
certainly have a point about using simple majoritarianism as a springboard for
change. However, realpolitik indicates that if any number over 50% opts for
unity in a referendum, the game will be seen as over by both sides.
A spirit of magnanimity was evident in a
speech a few months ago by the Sinn Fein leader, Mary Lou McDonald, who said
that she would like to see a public holiday on the 12th of July when
Protestants celebrate in jubilant and often sectarian fashion the victory of
William over James in the Battle of the Boyne.
Involving
broad swathes of nationalist and unionist opinion in a wide-ranging discussion
about the principles that should undergird a new government for the whole
island seems to be a sensible way forward.
Gerry
OShea blogs in wemustbetalking.com
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