Partition of Ireland

I

Introduction

Partition of Ireland, political division of Ireland between an independent Irish state, the Republic of Ireland, and the north-east of the island, Northern Ireland (sometimes called Ulster), where a Protestant majority has preferred to remain within the United Kingdom. This partition had its roots in the 17th-century Ulster Plantation, which introduced Protestant settlers from England and Scotland into an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, establishing a Protestant ascendancy of the settlers over the native population in politics and society.

II

Home Rule and the Division of Ireland

A movement for the partition of Ireland first arose during the Irish Home Rule crisis of the 1880s, brought about by a tightly organized Irish parliamentary party under the skilled leadership of a Southern Irish Protestant, Charles Stewart Parnell. In this crisis, Ulster unionists began to see their interests as diverging from those of unionists in the rest of the island, where less than 10 per cent of the population was Protestant—for they had the option of seeking the exclusion of Ulster from Home Rule and of remaining under direct Westminster rule. The case for such an arrangement appeared strengthened by economic considerations: by the 1880s the concentration of linen and associated textile and clothing industries in Ulster had been supplemented by the emergence in Belfast of shipbuilding and associated engineering activities; by contrast, the rest of the island had remained predominantly agricultural. The overwhelmingly Protestant and unionist business interests in Ulster consequently feared that an all-Ireland Home Rule Parliament might seek to introduce tariffs in order to develop industry in the rest of the island, thus risking retaliation in the external markets to which Ulster industry exported. At the same time, the overwhelmingly Protestant skilled workforce feared the loss of its virtual monopoly of the skilled trades under Home Rule. It was in these circumstances that, during the 1886 Home Rule crisis, Ulster unionist leaders, supported by British Conservatives, organized demonstrations throughout the province in conjunction with the Protestant Orange Order. At the same time, sectarian rioting in Belfast cost the lives of dozens of people.

The 1886 Home Rule Bill was foiled by a split in the Liberal Party which precipitated an election and a change of government, and a further Home Rule initiative in 1893 was defeated by the House of Lords. In 1904, fears that a Conservative government was contemplating some limited form of devolution falling short of Home Rule led to the formal establishment of a separate Unionist organization in Ulster.

When the third Home Rule Bill was introduced in April 1912, a new Conservative Party leader, Andrew Bonar Law, the Canadian-born son of an Ulster Presbyterian minister and deeply committed to the support of Ulster Unionism, warned the House of Commons that Ulster would resist Home Rule by force, and that the British army would not obey orders to take action against the province. Meanwhile in Ulster, where at the end of 1910 secret negotiations had been initiated by Unionists for the importation of arms, a Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule was signed in September 1912 by almost half a million people. In early 1913 the Ulster Unionist Council began to make preparations for the establishment of a provisional government of Ulster, and a paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force was formed to back up Unionist action with arms if necessary.

In early 1914 the Irish Party leader, John Redmond, accepted a proposal for individual Ulster counties to opt out of Home Rule for a short period. He was persuaded by a warning from the British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith that otherwise an election might be precipitated by a revival of a pre-Victorian royal prerogative under which the King might dismiss the Liberal government and install a minority Conservative administration, delaying Home Rule for years. This concession was, however, rejected by the Unionists, and a government move to pre-empt an attempt by the Ulster Volunteer Force to seize Ulster and establish a provisional government was aborted when, in response to the threatened resignation of 60 army officers, the Army Minister—without authority—gave a written assurance that the government did not intend to crush opposition in Ulster.

The Home Rule Bill, with its temporary-county-option provision, was passed by the Commons in May 1914, and following an attempt by the House of Lords to amend it to provide for the permanent exclusion of the nine counties of Ulster, a conference was called at Buckingham Palace to seek an agreed solution. It failed to reach agreement, but with the outbreak of World War I it was decided, with Unionist and Nationalist agreement, to suspend the operation of the Home Rule Act until after the war—and an assurance was given that Ulster would not be coerced.

After the 1916 Easter Rising by a section of the Irish Volunteers (formed in 1913 in response to the Ulster Volunteers), abortive attempts were made to find a way of advancing the introduction of Home Rule. These efforts failed because of a combination of the unwillingness of Ulster Unionists to accept anything short of the permanent exclusion of the whole of Ulster from Home Rule—which was rejected by nationalists and Southern Unionists alike—and the collapse of support for the Irish Party as a result of the swing of popular support to the separatist Sinn Féin following the Easter Rising. In the December 1918 election, 24 of the 39 Ulster seats were won by Unionists, with separatist Sinn Féin securing 10 of the 15 seats won by nationalists. In the rest of the island, Sinn Féin won 63 of the 66 seats, thus effectively wiping out the Irish Party despite its retention of 30 per cent of the nationalist vote. The newly elected Sinn Féin members constituted themselves as an Irish Parliament, Dáil Éireann, electing their own executive. The Irish Volunteers, reconstituted after 1916 and soon known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), initiated a guerrilla campaign against the British army and the Royal Irish Constabulary, in Ulster as well as in the rest of the country.

III

The Establishment of Northern Ireland

In December 1920 Westminster enacted the Government of Ireland Act, establishing two Home Rule parliaments, one for six of the nine Ulster counties (an area within which there was a 2-to-1 Protestant majority, although Catholics outnumbered Protestants in the two western counties), and the other for the rest of the island. There was also provision for a Council of Ireland, to which the two Home Rule parliaments might by agreement delegate powers.

Elections by proportional representation to the two parliaments took place in June 1921. In the north a Unionist government was immediately installed. Meanwhile, sectarian violence was claiming many lives in the north, especially in Catholic areas, which were subjected to Protestant attacks. An Ulster Special Constabulary established to assist the British army against the IRA was largely manned by members of the former Ulster Volunteers.

A truce agreed between the underground Dáil government and the British authorities in July 1921 led to negotiations in October-December and the signing of an agreement—commonly known as the Anglo-Irish Treaty—on December 6, 1921. This agreement provided that within one month of the establishment of an all-Ireland Dominion of the British Commonwealth, to be known as the Irish Free State, which was to take place on the first anniversary of the signing of the treaty (i.e. December 6, 1922), the Northern Ireland parliament could vote to exclude the six Ulster counties under its control—which in the event it did on December 7, 1922, the day following the establishment of the Irish Free State. The Treaty also provided for the establishment of a Boundary Commission of three members to be appointed by the Irish and Northern Ireland governments with a British-appointed chairman, to determine “in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographical conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland”.

On the Irish side there was a belief that the Commission would award most of the south and west of Northern Ireland, where nationalists were in a majority, to the Irish Free State, and that the transfer of such extensive areas would render the residue non-viable, thus leading to Irish reunification. However, although it was the Unionist leader, Sir James Craig who, in December 1919, during discussions on the Government of Ireland Bill, had first proposed such a body, his government refused to appoint a member to the Commission established under the Treaty, which consequently had to be amended to enable the British government to appoint a Northern Commissioner.

Delays, partly owing to the Irish Civil War in the Free State, postponed the Commission’s establishment until December 1924. The secrecy of its proceedings was breached in November 1925 by a leak disclosing that, because of its chairman’s restrictive interpretation of the Treaty qualifying clause “so far as may be compatible with economic and geographical conditions”, its proposals for boundary adjustments were both minimal and also involved some transfers of territory from the Irish Free State to Northern Ireland, which the Irish side had never anticipated. Faced with such an unpalatable award, the Irish government agreed to the suppression of the Commission’s report, acceptance of the existing boundary, and the transfer to the Northern Ireland government of the Council of Ireland’s powers in relation to Northern Ireland, in return for the cancellation of some Irish debt liabilities.

Later, in negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938 which returned to Ireland British naval bases along its coasts, the issue of partition was raised, to no effect. However, in July 1940 an offer of Irish unity was made, without the knowledge of the Northern Ireland government, by the newly installed administration of Winston Churchill, in return for Irish participation in World War II and/or for the admission of British troops to help repel a possible German invasion, but this was turned down by the Irish government under Eamon De Valera.

IV

Partition Since 1925

The Irish decision to declare a republic in 1949 led to a British decision to guarantee Northern Ireland’s participation in the United Kingdom so long as this was the wish of the Northern Ireland parliament. To this the Irish Republic responded with an anti-partition campaign at home and abroad, pressing for the return of Northern Ireland to Irish sovereignty.

Between 1954 and 1962 the IRA organized a campaign of cross-border raids which was met by the re-introduction of internment (detention without trial)—previously used during World War II—in both parts of the island. In 1965 there was a thawing of relations with an exchange of visits by the prime ministers of the Republic and Northern Ireland. However, the persistence of discrimination against the Catholic Nationalist minority in Northern Ireland in relation to housing, employment, and the local government franchise provoked in the second half of the 1960s a civil rights campaign; and a hard-line response to this by the Northern Ireland government eventually led to rioting, to attacks on nationalist areas in Belfast, and to the introduction of the British army to restore order. This in turn led to a revival of the dormant IRA and to 25 years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, as well as to the abolition in 1972 of the Northern Ireland parliament and government and to their replacement by direct rule from Westminster under a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (see The Troubles).

In 1993 secret discussions involving the Northern constitutional nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, the two governments, and the IRA-linked Sinn Féin Party led to a joint Anglo-Irish Downing Street Statement in December 1993 and to the announcement of a cessation of violence in August 1994. In February 1995 a Framework Document was published by the two governments setting out proposals for a North-South settlement based on the principles of Irish self-determination, with reunification subject to the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland, a form of power-sharing government in the North, and the creation of new institutional arrangements for North-South co-operation and for relations between Ireland and Britain. Nevertheless, elections were held in May, without Sinn Féin, to choose 110 representatives of 10 parties, who were to participate in a Forum and to provide a basis for selection of representatives for all-party negotiations to begin in June. In February 1996, however, the IRA cessation of violence ended with a bomb in London.

Following another IRA ceasefire in July 1997, Sinn Féin was invited by the British government to join the Ulster talks. In April 1998 the Ulster political parties and the British and Irish governments reached a historic agreement on radical new arrangements for an Ulster assembly, a council of ministers linking Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and limited cross-border bodies to facilitate joint decision-making. A British-Irish council linking devolved assemblies in the United Kingdom and the London and Dublin governments was also proposed. It was agreed that all terrorist prisoners linked to the IRA and mainstream loyalist groups would be released within two years. The so-called Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on May 22. The “Yes” vote in the north was 70 per cent of the poll.