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Birth of the Border. Cormac Moore
Читать онлайн.Название Birth of the Border
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isbn 9781785372957
Автор произведения Cormac Moore
Издательство Ingram
prepared a plan to tempt Ulster into devolved Irish government, whereby Ulster would be left out of home rule but an all-Ireland council with representatives of a home rule Parliament and Ulster MPs at Westminster would consider legislative proposals for the whole of Ireland and ‘frame a procedure by which if agreement was reached they could be enacted simultaneously in Dublin and the excluded counties’. The British government was open to this and Carson was willing to try to sell it to his party, but it was shelved in favour of the Irish Convention.46
With the ever-growing Sinn Féin boycotting the conference and Ulster unionists present in body but not in spirit, the convention was doomed from the start, ‘a gigantic irrelevancy’ in the words of F.S.L. Lyons.47 The conference saw the cooperation of the Irish Parliamentary Party with southern unionists, who felt they were abandoned by their northern counterparts. According to Lyons, the Irish Convention ‘finally disposed the myth that any settlement was possible … on the basis of an Ireland which would be at once united and self-governing’.48 R.B. McDowell, in his study of the convention, considered it ‘one of the most striking failures in Irish history … the gaps were too wide, or, to put it another way, the main groups clung too tightly to their prepared positions. Moreover, the majority of the convention’s members were constitutional nationalists who were rapidly losing the confidence of the sections they were supposed to represent.’49 The convention limped on until April 1918. By this time, Redmond was dead, and the Irish Parliamentary Party was months away from a humiliating defeat in the 1918 general election. By the time the First World War ended in November 1918, the Irish question had been fundamentally transformed. The psychological partition between unionists and nationalists had widened significantly, with entrenched Ulster unionists pitted against a brand of nationalism that espoused a severance from all British ties.50
The December 1918 general election, the first since December 1910, was one of the most decisive in Irish history. Sinn Féin obliterated the Irish Parliamentary Party by winning seventy-three of the 105 seats available in Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party won just six seats. However, Sinn Féin decided to abstain from taking seats in Westminster, meaning that there would be just a handful of Irish nationalist voices heard in the House of Commons as the future of Ireland was decided.51 Sinn Féin had campaigned on an abstentionist policy, claiming that the British could not be trusted to deliver a solution to the Irish question. It repudiated Westminster and Home Rule, seeking a complete severance of ties with Britain instead, through an Irish republic. The election was also a spectacular success for Ulster unionists. Of the thirty-seven seats available in the province of Ulster, unionists won twenty-two. In the six counties that would form Northern Ireland, the unionists won twenty-two of the twenty-nine seats available, with Sinn Féin winning just three seats.52 ‘In the whole of Ulster the Unionists won 265,111 votes to a combined Nationalist total of 177,557; while in the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone they had a majority of slightly over two to one: 255,819 votes to 116,888.’53 Whilst three Irish provinces had shown their support for full separation from Britain, it was clear that Ulster was the polar opposite. Remarkably, the nationalists had held more seats in Ulster than the unionists as recently as 1913, with seventeen seats in comparison to the unionists’ sixteen.54 By 1918, the electorate of Ulster had moved decisively in favour of remaining within the union. Unionists were also bolstered by the success of their allies in Britain, the Conservative Party. Lloyd George’s national coalition was easily re-elected. Most of the seats in the coalition were won by the Conservatives, winning 339 seats, with Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals winning 136 seats.55 Afterwards, Lloyd George ‘was sensitive to his own vulnerability in the House and felt himself on occasion to be a prisoner of the Coalition’.56 This greatly influenced his subsequent decisions regarding Ireland. The Irish question barely featured in the election in Britain. The Conservative Party manifesto ruled out two options in relation to Ireland: ‘the one leading to a complete severance of Ireland from the British Empire, and the other the forcible submission of the six counties of Ulster to a Home Rule parliament against their will’.57 With the Conservatives and the unionists winning the vast majority of seats and with no strong nationalist voice remaining in Westminster, the ‘Tory stranglehold on Irish policy tightened immeasurably’.58 According to Michael Laffan, the 1918 general election saw ‘a shift in the Irish balance of power from southern nationalists to northern unionists’.59 This shift became even more apparent when the decisive Government of Ireland Act was introduced in 1920.
CHAPTER TWO
The Government of Ireland Act 1920
The genesis of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 came in the latter half of 1919, once Lloyd George was no longer constrained with the Paris Peace Conference, which lasted for most of the first six months of 1919. Home Rule was still on the statute book and had been since 1914; it could no longer be postponed.1 It was ‘scheduled to come into operation automatically when hostilities were formally concluded with the signature of the last of the peace treaties’.2 To stop the third Home Rule Bill from coming into effect by default, Lloyd George set up a committee chaired by Walter Long to draft the fourth Home Rule Bill, known as the Government of Ireland Bill.
Walter Long had a relationship with Ireland spanning his entire life. Born in Bath in 1854, his mother, Charlotte Anna, was the fourth daughter of Wentworth Fitzwilliam Dick of Humewood, County Wicklow, who had served as MP from 1852 to 1880.3 Long was a regular visitor to Ireland for fox hunting and other social events.4 He was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland in 1905 and subsequently became very popular amongst Irish unionists due to his trenchant unionist outlook. After losing his parliamentary seat in 1906, he became leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance and chairman of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1907.5 By 1918, as liaison officer between the war cabinet and the Irish administration, Long was the ‘most influential member of the government on Irish affairs’.6 He then favoured a settlement of the Irish question based on a federal solution for the entire United Kingdom. The federalism approach of the entire United Kingdom was seen by some within British political circles as a way of retaining the unity of the British Empire whilst recognising the differences within its boundaries. After the 1918 general election, Lloyd George appointed him first Lord of the Admiralty. Suffering from ill-health for prolonged periods of his life due to spinal arthritis, he was forced to delegate much of his work to his parliamentary secretary, James Craig, the leading Ulster unionist.7 Long wanted to resign from the Ulster Unionist Council but was convinced to stay on, and ‘thus remained an important linchpin between the cabinet and both the northern Unionists and the executive in Dublin’.8
Long was a staunch unionist and rabidly anti-Sinn Féin. As republican violence escalated in Ireland throughout 1919, it was Long who proposed the hiring of ex-servicemen to assist the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), a measure that would be adopted in 1920 with the recruitment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to serve in Ireland. ‘Ruthless men, he contended, could be countered only by ruthless policies, and by September [1919] he was prepared to recommend that Ireland be governed as a crown colony until such time as home rule became feasible.’9 Unsurprisingly, the make-up of Long’s committee was unionist in outlook. There was no nationalist representation whatsoever, nor were nationalists even consulted about the Government of Ireland Bill. James Craig and his associates were the only Irishmen consulted during the drafting of the bill.10 The first meeting of Long’s committee ‘was held on 15 October when a decision was made to create distinct legislatures for Ulster and the southern provinces linked by a common council, comprising representatives from both’.11 According to Nicholas Mansergh, ‘the starting point for a settlement was no longer unity, but division. This was to be the new departure.’12 This was the first time that a separate parliament was proposed for Ulster, as unionists to date had shown nothing but unyielding advocacy for remaining within Westminster. The reason given by Long’s committee for abandoning Ulster to remain fully integrated with the rest of the United Kingdom was that ‘Exclusion, whether of the entire province of Ulster or of the six north-eastern counties, would leave large nationalist majorities under British rule, which would clearly infringe the principle of self determination … British rule in the domestic affairs of Ireland has been the root of the Home