The partition of Ireland: chaos, secrecy and confusion

Opinion: the division of the island of Ireland occurred at a time of violence and instability which has largely been overlooked since

By Stephen O'Neill, University of Notre Dame

In the Belfast Telegraph edition that carried the announcement of the Provisional IRA's ceasefire in 1994, an article entitled 'Seeds of conflict were sown in the past’ was included as a way of contextualising the ‘armed struggle’. This anonymous piece began with a brief summary of events in Ireland from 1921 to 1968:

"Many historians believe the seeds of the violence of the past 25 years were sown back in 1921. It was then that a million Protestants persuaded the British government they should be excluded from Irish independence. The new Dublin government reluctantly agreed that the six north-eastern counties of the island should remain under the British flag. Unionists set up their own Government at Stormont and for more than 40 years the province was virtually left to its own devices…"

The factual inaccuracies in this potted history of Ireland's partitioning should certainly have dissatisfied the unnamed historians that were listed by the Telegraph as a source. The references to Stormont (opened in 1932) and 'a million Protestants’ (c. 850,000 in the 1926 census) aside, the given impression was that the island’s division was a matter of persuasion rather than coercion, with the complication of northern nationalists temporarily written out of the story entirely.

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From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show, Darach MacDonald and Patrick Mulroe talk about the history of the border, from partition to present day.

In ignoring the complication of the Boundary Commission, this excerpt framed the division of the island as a reluctant agreement between new neighbours, a gentle ‘parting of the ways’. However anodyne, this version of Ireland's territorial division has had an incredibly popular appeal in the context of the peace process. More recently, it has enjoyed a recurrence in the context of Brexit and moves towards Scottish and Irish independence.

Partition was not headline news in August 1994, but things were hardly clearer as it was being established in the early 1920s. Many of the details of the ongoing bureaucratic and diplomatic process – the conferences, cabinet meetings, treaty negotiations – were hidden from the public eye. As Robert Lynch writes, Ireland's partitioning was "a chaotic, confused process". It was surrounded in violence and population displacement, a story "far removed from the "natural" conferral of statehood" which was then popularized by historians and politicians.

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From Century Ireland, Prof. Alvin Jackson from the University of Edinburgh on how Edward Carson's attitude towards partition changed between 1910 and 1918

Confusion has dominated all subsequent attempts to describe exactly how and why Ireland came to be divided into two states on May 3rd 1921. The Belfast Telegraph's 1994 narrative serves merely as one example. As a bureaucratic solution devised in the Committee Rooms of Whitehall and Westminster during a revolution in Ireland, partition was deeply imbricated in the colonial governance of Ireland by Britain.

Reducing this prolonged, traumatic and often clandestine process to individual events is a profoundly inadequate way of narrating the separation of north from south. This problem extends towards trying to accurately define the date, place, and time in which and on which partition actually began, with the mundane administrative realities of the island’s separation often divorced from the violence that had then engulfed Belfast, Derry, and the rest of the island.

From British Pathé, report on the opening of the Northern Ireland parliament in June 1921

For example, choosing the ceremonial opening of the six-county parliament on June 22nd 1921 as the start date means the turbulent creation of the northern state is transformed to a happy occasion of pomp and splendor. This served a purpose for northern unionists in particular, in seeing the necessary establishment of the state as representative of what one periodical called a "resistance which is deep-rooted in the history and emotions of the past". This came hand-in-hand with ignoring the violence and displacement which surrounded the partitioning of the island.

But the problem of recognising a date or time for partition is also found in studies of the process. Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson's history of the northern state claims that 'Northern Ireland' was founded ‘in 1921 – or, more precisely, between that date and 1925, when the report of the Boundary Commission left the border as it was’. However much it had threatened the permanence of the new northern state, the Boundary Commission, famously, did not leave the border ‘as it was’, but remained unpublished for what all sides interpreted as its failure.

From RTÉ Archives, speakers at an Anti-Partition Week event in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin in April 1950 including Cork solicitor and activist Eoin O'Mahony, Ithel Davies of the Welsh Republican Party and Scottish nationalist Robert Blair Wilkie

Instead, the Tripartite Agreement signed on December 3rd 1925 between the three governments formed the final ‘settlement’ of the boundary. The secrecy of this agreement is key to understanding the widespread inability to define or locate partition or the foundation of the northern state since it happened. It also reveals how much was actually hidden from public view in these years.

In the discussions which led to this Tripartite agreement, which scrapped the findings of the Boundary Commission, the first Northern Ireland prime minister, James Craig, had explicitly expressed his desire that the report would be buried. "He himself had not seen the map of the proposed new Boundary… he preferred to be able to say that he did not know the terms of the proposed Award. It would be better that no-one should ever know accurately what their position would have been'. With all sides agreeing, the Boundary Commission report remained unpublished until 1969.

The suppression of these alternatives meant that all sides could quickly move on from the inglorious failure of the Commission, and restate the 1920 border as the only practical solution. Silence and confusion have lingered in the accounts of partition that followed from this failure. Not the story of good fences making good neighbours, the division of the island occurred in a time of violence and instability which has largely been overlooked since. This should not be forgotten when marking and remembering the ‘centenary’ of partition.

Dr Stephen O'Neill is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a former Irish Research Council awardee.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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