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The 1920 "Partition"
Act
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The 1920 Government of Ireland Act set up two political entities, Northern
Ireland and Southern Ireland each with their own House of Commons and
Senate.
The procedure for their coming into being was the same. The northern state
came into being the southern state did not.
Not one Irish person voted for Partition
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It should be remembered that Edward Carson opposed partition and the
Protestant people did not seek it. The Unionists abstained from voting for
the 1920 Act in the British House of commons and of course Sinn Fein were
not there, therefore the Act that partitioned Ireland did not receive one
single Irish vote either Catholic or Protestant, unionist or nationalist.
A general election was held on both parts of Ireland in May 1921 to elect
members to the two new Houses of Commons not to Westminster.
Once it was forced upon them the unionists took the position that the
existence of a Northern Ireland Parliament would at least guarantee
partition and keep the north in the union. ‘Northern Ireland without a
Parliament of her own would be a standing temptation to certain British
politicians to make another bid for a final settlement with the Irish
Republic’ said the Ulster Unionist Council Report in 1936.
The South used the Act to have their
own election
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Sinn Féin used the British elections of May 1921 to the “House of Commons
of Southern Ireland” to re-elect the Dáil. The new membership called
itself the Second Dáil.
In the Treaty the British accepted that the Second Dail should, as a
practical matter, “approve” (not ratify) the Treaty. But so as not to
recognize that body the “House of Commons of Southern Ireland” would do
the ratifying, in British constitutional theory the only parliament
legally empowered to ratify the Treaty.
The general election of May 1921 returned 128 MPs to the new “House of
Commons of Southern Ireland” or the Dail depending on your point of view,
124 of who were Sinn Fein (largely elected unopposed) and the other 4 were
all unionists, representing the Irish Universities.
The 4 unionists and the 15 appointed senators, also all unionists, met in
June 1921 in the Royal College of Science in Dublin, now Government
buildings, and suspended the parliament they were supposed to institute.
The Second Dáil formally “approved” the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December
1921 by a majority of 64 to 60 and set up a de facto republican
administration under Arthur Griffith as “President of Dail Eireann” (a
little less republican than the office resigned by De Valera in protest of
the Treaty, that of President of the Irish Republic) and Michael Collins
as his Minister for Finance.
The Southern
Assembly ratifies The Treaty
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Sinn Fein called the suspended “House of Commons of Southern Ireland” back
into existence in January 1922 to ratify the Treaty and to put in place a
de jure Provisional Government under Michael Collins, theoretically
answerable to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland.
None of the anti-Treaty TDs turned up, but all 4 unionist MPs did! The
Lord Lieutenant then legally installed Collins as President of the
Provisional Government. Collins cleverly combined the lowering of the
Union Jack in Dublin Castle, as called for in the Treaty, with the
“kissing of hands” ceremony. Merely meeting with the Lord Lieutenant, Lord
Fitzalan, would install him as a Minister of the Crown. (Fitzalan was the
first Roman Catholic Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and its last.)
Collins remained as Minister for Finance in the de facto republican
administration of Arthur Griffith.
The
Free State is founded in the South
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These versatile assemblies of 64 MPs/TDs out of the 124 went on to
constitute itself in December 1922 according to the terms of the Treaty as
the “Constituent Assembly ” which formally constituted the Irish Free
State and then called itself the Third Dáil. The “House of Commons of
Southern Ireland” was no more. By then both Collins and Griffith were
dead. It was a remarkable episode in any country’s history and was both
brilliantly and tragically executed.
The South split over
the Oath of Allegiance
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The Second Dail did not split on Partition they split on the Oath of
Allegiance because it was widely believed at the time that the Boundary
Commission as provided for in Article 12 of The Treaty, would reduce
Northern Ireland to such a size as to be unviable. Reneging on the
Boundary Commission thus became the key to Britain’s hidden intention of
making Partition permanent.
The Oath of Allegiance, which caused all the problems, was primarily to
the Constitution of the Irish Free State, which, absent the additional
fidelity (not allegiance) to the British Crown, not in his role as British
King but as head of the British Commonwealth, was in many ways similar to
the Pledge of Allegiance in America.
“I ... do solemnly swear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of
the Irish Free State as by law established, and that I will be faithful to
H.M. King George V, his heirs and successors by law in virtue of the
common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and
membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of
nations.”
The fact that any oath or declaration of fidelity to a British King, no
matter how mildly written, caused such deep resentment in the minds of so
many Irish people at the time, is testament to the total lack of trust for
any form of British involvement in Ireland. Memory of the black-and-tan
terror was too fresh.
The first
Southern Government
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Cosgrave's government played a crucial role in evolving the British Empire
into the British Commonwealth. Peacefully and skillfully they successfully
led Canada, Australia and New Zealand in fundamentally changing the role
of the Crown, the governor-generalships and the British Government with
the Commonwealth.
In establishment the institutions of the Irish state his performance was
“magnificent” according to none other than Eamon De Valera in a remark
made to his son Vivion, weeks after taking power in 1932, having read the
files of Cosgrave's 10 year government.
In an era when democratic governments, formed in the aftermath of the
First World War, were moving away from democracy and towards
dictatorships, the Free State under Cosgrave remained unambiguously
democratic, a fact shown by his handing over of power to his one-time
friend then rival Eamon de Valera, when Fianna Fáil won the 1932 general
election. He killed off talk within the Irish Army of staging a coup to
keep Cosgrave in power and de Valera out.
De Valera, close to his own death, when asked in an interview what was his
biggest mistake, said without a pause, "not accepting the Treaty".
The North immediately gets down
to business
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In Northern Ireland the 1921 election was explicitly fought on the issue
of partition, effectively a referendum on partition. 52 MPs were elected
to the House of Commons of Northern Ireland in May 1921 a majority of whom
was willing to accept what was on offer from the British provided they
could make it permanent.
A Senate was appointed which remained totally irrelevant as it exactly
mirrored the House of Commons.
The new Parliament met in Belfast City Hall and King George V himself came
over to open Parliament in June 1921.
The new Government quickly purchased 235 acres of land at a place called
Stormont (a windy place on a hill) on the eastern outskirts of Belfast. It
included a Castle and a House, respectively called Stormont Castle and
Stormont House. Together they would become Parliament Buildings of the new
Northern Ireland state.
On September 20th 1921 Parliament resolved that '"Stormont Castle demesne
shall be the place where the new Parliament House and Ministerial
Buildings shall be erected, and as the place to be determined as the seat
of the Government of Northern Ireland as and when suitable provision has
been made therefore."
One of the very first Acts of the new Northern Ireland Government was the
“Special Powers” Act, an Act so repressive that it became the envy of many
subsequent repressive regimes such as the white South African Government.
But first
some ethnic cleansing
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Between June 1920 and June 1922, 428 people were killed in political
conflict there; 8,750 Catholics were driven from their jobs; 23,000
Catholics were driven from their homes.
The Northern
State consolidated its powers
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The new Northern Ireland Government adopted all the tedious procedures of
and mimicked the British House of commons in every way, not so much out of
homage for the mother of parliaments but because the British system gave
absolute power to the party in power.
The system worked reasonably well in Britain because it had a two party
system where governments could and did fall regularly. This however could
never happen in Northern Ireland’s one party system and in fact never did
in the 51 years of its existence.
The small Nationalist party didn’t even bother to participate until 1965
when a new day seemed to have dawned under Prime Minister Terence O’Neill.
The gentlemanly O’Neill believed that if you treated Catholics with a
modicum of respect, in time they would start to behave like good
Protestants. But even this was too much for many unionists. It heralded
the rise of Ian Paisley who was and still remains determined to protect
Protestants from the stain of popery and anything Irish.
The Government of Ireland Act of 1922 had established PR, the single
transferable vote, as the instrument of franchise. The unionists quickly
got rid of it in favor of the “first past the post” system which together
with massive gerrymandering ensured their one party rule. The Unionist
Party itself drew all constituency boundaries. County Fermanagh for
example, with a clear nationalist majority, always returned two Unionist
MPs and one Nationalist.
All elections were a foregone conclusion. Two constituencies, accounting
for 11 of the 52 seats, did not vote in the 1925 general election because
they had the same number of candidates as seats. In 1933 only 19 of the
seats actually had contests.
The timing of elections was entirely at the discretion of the Northern
Ireland Government who either fomented fear of the south or took advantage
of events such as the1938 adoption of the new Free State Constitution and
again in 1949 when the Free State declared itself a Republic. Such events
guaranteed to get the tribal drums beating in unionist Northern Ireland
and was always a good time to pull an election.
Stormont
became a symbol of preserving the Empire
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It was not until 1932 that the building now universally known as
“Stormont” was completed. Built to a design by Sir Arnold Thornley,
Parliament Buildings are in the Greek classical style with the exterior
faced in Portland stone. No Commonwealth country has a capital building
displaying such power and majesty. All the crowned heads of Europe
contributed something of great value to add to its grandeur. It was meant
to be the citadel of the old world.
The old castle, which has served as the headquarters of the Northern
Ireland Cabinet is still called Stormont Castle. Stormont House became the
residence of the Speaker of the House of Commons of Northern Ireland.
Initially there was a Lord Lieutenant of Northern Ireland who opened and
closed Parliament. They changed the office to Governor of Northern Ireland
and it was held successively by such distinguished members of the British
ruling class as James Hamilton, 3rd Duke of Abercorn between 1922 and
1945, William Spencer Leveson-Gower, 4th Earl of Granville 1945 – 1952,
Lord Wakehurst 1952 – 1964, Lord Erskine of Rerrick 1964 – 1967 and Baron
Grey of Naunton 1967 – 1973 to whom fell the job of finally proroguing the
Northern Ireland Parliament.
The Boundary Commission
- the ultimate British trick
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The Irish negotiators fought hard to redress the unilateralist 1920
Government of Ireland Act that partitioned Ireland without the vote of a
single Irish person either in Parliament or by plebiscite. A Boundary
Commission was set up under Article 12 of the 1921 Treaty to correct this.
The only way the boundary question could have been properly resolved was
through a plebiscite but the British would not concede that. The Irish
again had to trust the untrustworthy.
The Treaty gave the British the right to appoint two of the three persons
on the Commission and having done so had no obligation to seek the votes
of the people in the boundary areas.
The British appointed a white South African judge, steeped in the culture
of the British Empire, to chair it. The unionists refused to nominate
anybody so the British appointed a leading unionist newspaper editor. The
Irish nominated Dr. Eoin McNeill, a university professor.
In a statement to the Dail on November 25th 1925 on the occasion of his
resignation from the Boundary Commission, Dr. Eoin McNeill stated: “The
Chairman's point of view, as clearly indicated at an early stage in a
question addressed by him to at least one witness, imported, to my mind, a
new governing and dominant condition into Article 12, a political
condition, a political consideration which was made a dominant
consideration, which was proposed as a dominant consideration, and which
did not appear at all within the terms of the Article and could be only
read into it by a kind of constructional effort, namely, that if the
wishes of the inhabitants were found to indicate a desire on the part of
the inhabitants of certain districts to be included under the Free State
jurisdiction, and if that inclusion would have the effect of seriously
reducing the extent of territory under the jurisdiction of Northern
Ireland, so as to produce a political effect on the Government of Northern
Ireland, and so as to place the Government of Northern Ireland in a
distinctly less advantageous position than it occupied under the Act of
1920, then the political consideration was to override the wishes of the
inhabitants. To that position I need not say I never assented. It was not
in the Article, I say it was not in the Treaty, and that it was only by
what I call a constructional effort it could be brought into play at all.”
Kevin O’Higgins, to his credit, on the same day in the Dail, argued that a
plebiscite was unnecessary to divine the wishes of the population. It was,
he said, no secret that almost 100% of Catholics wished to be included in
the Free State and almost 100% of Protestants wished to be included in
Northern Ireland. And there was the most recent Census, which asked that
question, and could be used as a basis for a decision and he added that
the Census would be every bit as reliable as a plebiscite. Of course he
made this argument primarily to absolve his Government, of which he was
the deputy leader to W.T. Cosgrave, and their predecessors who negotiated
the Treaty, of any guilt in not having insisted upon a plebiscite.
The message was clear from the moment the Commission sat that they
intended to make a mockery of Article 12. They even started by
interviewing Protestants in Monaghan and Cavan as to their preferences of
jurisdictions, even though the British had no intention of taking on any
more than the six counties they had chosen.
The British had encouraged the belief among the Irish that they would be
able to reduce the Northern Ireland state to a size that made it
unworkable and made Irish unity inevitable. Of course they had no
intention of allowing that to happen.
They proceeded to break the confidentiality agreements and manipulated
leaks to the press all designed to frustrate the purpose of the
Commission.
Its Chairman, Justice Richard Feetham of the Supreme Court of South
Africa, met with British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Winston
Churchill at the House of Commons on December 3, 1925, six days before
signing the Report, a Report that was supposed to be confidential,
impartial and presented to all three Governments at the same time.
Cosgrave finally met with Craig and Baldwin in London and agreed to
suppress the report. It was not published until 1969. The border remained
unchanged.
We now know that similarly, in the wake of the partition of India in 1947,
Radcliffe, chairman of the Radcliffe Commission on the boundaries of the
Punjab and Bengal, met with Mountbatten and altered his Report behind the
back of the Secretary of the Commission, Christopher Beaumont, who exposed
the deceit in 1992.
© Pat Flannery 2004
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