The Boundary Commission 1924 Gerry OShea
In the late
19th and early 20th centuries, a vibrant Irish Parliamentary Party represented
Irish nationalist aspirations and demands in Westminster. Charles Parnell first
provided able and strong leadership, and John Redmond took over at the helm
after his demise.
The Third
Home Rule Bill passed in 1913 was greeted by massive celebrations in Dublin.
Finally, the country would have its own legislature for the first time since
Grattan’s Parliament was prorogued in 1800, and that gathering excluded
Catholics from serving.
Patrick
Pearse, one of the leaders of the Republican Fenian tradition, welcomed Home
Rule while warning presciently that if the British reneged on its implementation,
there would be “hell to pay.”
A few months
before the celebrations in Dublin, Sir Edward Carson, who, along with James
Craig, provided the main leadership in the Loyalist community in Northern
Ireland, spoke in Craigavon, outside Belfast, before more than 100,000
followers. He left no doubt about his community’s opinion on Home Rule: “the
most nefarious conspiracy ever hatched against a free people.”
In response
to Unionists' stern opposition to being ruled by any kind of Dublin
legislature, the British parliament passed The Government of Ireland in 1920, creating
a new parliament in Belfast with the right to pass laws for a bloc of six
counties in the northeast. Significantly, no nationalist leader or Catholic
prelate was even consulted about this legislation.
John Redmond
asserted clearly that nationalists were unalterably opposed to any political
division of the island: “The two-nations theory involves the mutilation of the
Irish nation, and to us, that is an abomination and a blasphemy.”
When Michael
Collins and Arthur Griffith led the Irish negotiating team to London in October
1921, the nascent six-county statelet already existed. However, the Irish
negotiators still argued vainly for a united country.
The best
they could achieve on this, the thorniest of all the issues they faced, was an
agreement to set up a Boundary Commission which would “determine in
accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants so far as may be compatible with
economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and
the rest of Ireland.”
Collins, the
most respected Republican in the delegation, was wildly off the mark in his
assessment of the partition issue. He expected the Boundary Commission to slice
off the North-Eastern counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh, as well as parts of Derry,
Armagh and Down. This land area constituted almost half of the Northern Ireland
territory governed by Stormont and would, in this wishful thinking, be ceded to
the Free State.
Griffith
joined him in imagining that the resulting much smaller territory would become
non-viable, leading to a united government for the whole island within a dozen
or so years. Lloyd George, known for good reason as the ‘Welsh Wizard,’ indicated
to the Irish negotiators that this new Commission would recommend significant
territorial changes that would benefit nationalists. He was simultaneously
telling James Craig that he would have an effective veto on any proposed
territorial alterations.
The Anglo-Irish
Treaty was ratified in the Dail in early January 1922. Collins, especially, was
very concerned about the savage nightly attacks on Catholics in Belfast and the
vicinity of the city. In the summer of 1922, 232 people, nearly all Catholics,
were killed in rioting in the north.
Craig and
Collins tried to avoid a Boundary commission by working on proposals that they
hoped would advance their mutual agendas. This was a great idea, except Craig’s
‘not an inch’ guiding principle doomed the effort.
The Treaty
mandated that the Commission consist of three people: one appointed by each of
the two governments in Dublin and Belfast and the third, who would act as
chairman, appointed by the British Government.
Craig’s
repeated declarations that he would not cede an inch of land, not to mind whole
counties, was a serious embarrassment to the Dublin Government whose leaders
had promised during the heated debates on the Treaty that the Boundary
Commission would lead to significant transfer of territory to the south.
James
Craig’s government reneged on its obligation to appoint one of the three
commissioners. This decision required new legislation in Westminster and Dublin
to allow the British prime minister to appoint someone to represent the Unionist
position.
Josep
Fisher, a distinguished barrister was chosen to represent Northern Ireland, and
Justice Richard Feetham, a South African-based judge, was drafted in to chair the
committee.
In July
1924, 100 years ago, the Free State government appointed the Minister for
Education, Eoin MacNeill, as its Commissioner. The committee got down to
dealing with its formal mandate on November 7th of that year. It was
clear from an early stage that Feedham, supported by Fisher, wanted to maintain
the border agreed in the Government of Ireland Act (1920) which created the
six-county statelet.
Nationalists
were gravely disappointed when the deliberations' results, which recommended no
territorial change favoring the South, were leaked to the press in November
1925. In response to the angry reaction among nationalists all over the island,
MacNeill resigned from the cabinet while challenging the content of the final
report and making it clear that it did not have his approval.
The Boundary
Report caused a full-blown crisis in the Free State. Prime Minister Cosgrave went
to London to try to salvage something from the debris in a meeting with Prime
Minister Stanley Baldwin. The effort failed completely. The Minister for
External Affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, made a similar trip to Westminster.
O'Higgins wanted to internationalize the crisis by involving the League of
Nations, which was also rejected.
After
failing to make any progress with the British authorities, Dublin called for
the Boundary Commission report to be shelved. That was agreed on all sides, and
it finally saw the light of day forty-four years later, in 1969.
Gerry
OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com
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