Tutorial 6: Partition
Why were both Ireland and Ulster partitioned in 1920-1921? Explain the violence of 1921-1922 and why Northern Ireland survived.

The immediate context and results of partition were examined this week, and an attempt made to explain the violence that accompanied it. The combination of good fortune and clever exploitation of circumstance that enabled Northern Ireland to survive were also explored.

The onset of war
In 1914, the onset of European war postponed, but left unresolved, the Ulster crisis that had built up over the previous years. Home Rule, now placed on the statute book, was not due to come into operation until the war's end. Unless agreement could be reached in the interim between nationalists and unionists, the conflicting ambitions of the two groups would, given time, inevitably resurface. A short war was expected however, and Redmond took the political gamble of advising the Irish Volunteers to fight wherever the front extended. Partially as a demonstration of the fitness of Irish nationalism to play a responsible contributary role in the wider Empire, Redmond's gamble partially depended on building up British goodwill, and cost him the loss of some 10,000-12,000 Volunteers, who disagreed with his stand. Nonetheless, the bulk (some 170,000) of the Volunteer movement stayed, for now, with the Redmondite cause, redesignating themselves the National Volunteers. Like the Ulster Volunteer Force, many National Volunteers went to the front. Also like their protestant counterparts, many catholics did not return. Unlike the Ulster Volunteers however, Irish nationalists were not given their own army formation (the Ulster Volunteers were organised into the 36th (Ulster) Division).

The decline of the Home Rule Party
The absence of any swift end to the Great War - and consequently, the lack of any form of Home Rule for Ireland - can have done Redmond's cause no good. Nonetheless, his party's decline was by no means 'inevitable'. The 1916 Easter Rising was at first frowned upon by many nationalists. It was the subsequent British executions of the insurgents that did much to create martyrs for the more militant nationalism of Sinn Féin. Though that party had in fact had little to do with the Rising, it benefited from being popularly identified with the actions of the new martyrs of 1916. Soon, many of the surviving insurgents had joined and gained influence within the party, which won a series of by-elections in 1917. The Home Rule Party's credibility was further undermined by the fact that movement on Home Rule by the British government came only in response to the Rising - hardly a vote of confidence in constitutional methods. Lloyd-George's attempt to bring about agreement between nationalists and unionists in 1916 however foundered on the issue of exclusion of the six north-eastern counties from the authority of a Dublin parliament. Unionists demanded that exclusion be indefinite; nationalists clearly could not compromise on the long-term unity of the island. A similar failure came in 1917-18, when an Irish Convention, boycotted by Sinn Féin, saw agreement between nationalists and southern unionists. Without the consent of Ulster unionists (who had tied their representatives to the will of the UUC) or the abstentionist Sinn Féin however, the proposals stood little chance of enactment. The initiative now lay with the more uncompromising elements.

Unionist confidence was boosted by the participation of some of the movement's leading figures in the British coalition government. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin's increasing mandate gave the party the moral authority to refuse a compromise solution of the kind put forward at the Convention. The Home Rulers were, in the spring of 1918, dealt a severe blow when the British government proposed conscription for Ireland. Nationalists, Sinn Féin, and the catholic church united to oppose the threatened compulsory army call-up - but it was significant that the radicalism of Sinn Féin was now, rightly or wrongly, seen to be given the sanction of the catholic church, lending the party increased respectability. Sinn Féin's virtual elimination of the Irish Party in the 1918 election gave confirmation of the radical shift that had taken place in Irish politics. The Irish Party, too, had been handicapped by changes in British politics, which meant that the old Liberal alliance was now to all intents dead. Home Rule Party successes were confined largely to Ulster, where an electoral pact had been brokered by the cathoic church to ensure that a split catholic vote in some constituencies would not allow the return of a unionist.

Military engagement, sectarian conflict
1919 was a year of increasing instability, leading to the all-out conflict of 1920-21. In Dublin, elected Sinn Féin MPs ignored Westminster and constituted themselves as Dáil Éireann, while the Irish Republican Army (as the Irish Volunteers were now known) began attacks on Crown forces. In Ulster, 1919 was something of an economic boom year, but as boom was replaced by post-war slump, growing political uncertainty and IRA attacks, sectarian violence began to rise to frightening levels. Claiming an IRA assassination for their provocation, protestant shipyard workers expelled catholics from Harland & Wolff in 1920. Most of these workers were never reinstated as a result of the poor employment position that prevailed during the economic slump. As communities polarised and fear flourished, catholics were driven from many areas, while a number of protestants suffered an analogous fate.

With IRA attacks on the increase, the UVF reorganised and rearmed. Both IRA and UVF organisations contained many ex-servicemen, hardened to violence as a way of achieving political ends, and desensitised to its effects by the horrors of trench warfare. Outside Ulster, whole areas fell outside British control as the alternative administration sanctioned by the Dáil - 'Sinn Féin courts', for example - established their moral authority with some popular support. Though the British military eventually enjoyed considerable success against the IRA and the Dáil institutions, it came at great financial cost. British politicians wanted a settlement. For a time, they had been engaged in drawing up new Home Rule legislation. Now, they sought to reconcile it with the realities on the ground in Ireland.

Home Rule comes to Ulster
The new legislation envisaged the creation of two separate Home Rule parliaments in Ireland. One, based in Dublin would control the affairs of the 26 counties not under the jurisdiction of the other, based in Belfast, and responsible for Antrim, Down, Londonderry, Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone. Unionists had not initially sought Home Rule, but increasingly came to see their own regional parliament as an important security against potentially unfriendly British governments. In Ulster, the new 'Northern Ireland' government-in-waiting began to consolidate its position from an early stage. UVF units were brought under a more direct form of official, central control, some of them integrating wholesale into the new Ulster Special Constabulary. This force, almost exclusively protestant, provided a means of taking pressure off regular police. Special constables, who knew their local areas well, proved particularly effective in combating IRA activity, but were too often seen to mete out violence against catholics without recourse to legal niceties. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, set up to replace the Royal Irish Constabulary in the new state, initially reserved 33% of places for catholics, but was able only to attract some third of that number. Catholics, determined to make the new partition arrangements unworkable, were often at this time unwilling to take part in the institutions of Northern Ireland, for fear of lending them an unlooked for legitimacy. Their unwillingness to take part in the new arrangement was heightened by the introdution of the draconian Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Acts, a series of legislative measures giving the Northern Ireland minister of home affairs emergency-style powers, and which, in their early years. tended to be used almost exclusively against nathonalists.

The minority community in the new Northern Ireland unsurprisingly attached some hopes to the final agreement reached at the end of 1921 between the British government and the Sinn Féin and IRA leadership. The Anglo-Irish Treaty replaced the still-born 'Southern Ireland' with an alternative constitutional arrangement for the 26 counties analogous to Canada's dominion status - involving considerable independence within the overall framework of the British Empire. As part of the overall settlement, a Boundary Commission was due to investigate and recommend possible changes to the border between Northern Ireland and the new 'Free State' - in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, insofar as these were compatible with geographical and socio-economic factors. Clearly, the Northern Ireland government might not rely on tough security measures alone to consolidate its position.

Boundaries and majorities
Nationalist non-cooperation with the Northern Ireland government in some areas was swiftly stamped out by the new Belfast authorities. Those nationalist-controlled local councils, which had decided to offer their allegiance to the Dáil and conduct no business with the Belfast government, were suspended and replaced by appointed commissioners. In 1922, the Unionist government successfully amended the local government franchise, reverting from the proportional representation introduced by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, to the older first-past-the-post system of voting. The measure clearly disadvantaged minority groups in local government areas. In conjunction with this change, the boundaries between local government areas were also redrawn in line with the recommendations of the Leech Commission. The Commission, largely boycotted by nationalists, accepted and often acted upon the careful plans put forward by local Unionist groups. In many cases, these schemes suggested that boundaries be drawn in such a way as to maximise Unionist voting power. When this was combined with the fact that the franchise was, as in Britain, property-based - which in itself tended to favour the better-off unionist community - the local government reforms returned many local councils to unionist control. This was particularly valuable given the threat of the Boundary Commission which, it was hoped, was less likely to recommend the transfer of unionist areas to the Free State.

Unionists were aided in making these changes by the nationalist boycott not only of Leech, but also of the Northern Ireland parliament. The boycott was motivated by an unwillingness to give the new institutions any legitimacy, and by the feeling that participation in them would, in any case, achieve little for the catholic community. While arguably a nationalist presence would have made little difference, the lack of any coherent opposition inevitably made the Unionist task more easily achievable. Nationalism was weakened not only by the divide between what remained of the Home Rule Party (now known largely as the Nationalists) and supporters of Sinn Féin, by also by a further geographical division between catholics in outlying areas, who hoped they would be rescued by the Boundary Commission, and those in and around Belfast, who felt that the Commission should not leave them a small and stranded minority in the middle of a Unionist state.

External factors
The Westminster parliament, which by the terms of the 1920 Act retained the supreme authority over Northern Ireland, decided not to intervene over local government reform because of the threat of James Craig, the Unionist prime minister, and his cabinet, to resign should their legislation be vetoed. Faced with the prospect of a Northern Ireland without a government, and the spectre of being drawn back into the whole Irish question, Westminster politicians relented and let the measure pass. They had not the financial stomach for further Irish conflict, and in any case lacked the public backing for further expensive Irish involvement. The new Free State was otherwise occupied, with the disaster of internal civil war and subsequent reconstruction. The death of Michael Collins in August 1922 robbed it of the figure who had shown most interest in the fate of the six north-eastern counties. Though the pro- and anti-Treaty IRA co-operated in Ulster, the brutal civil conflict sapped much of the southern state's power and will to tackle partition. Hopes were still held out that the Boundary Commission would deliver. However, the meagre alterations offered when the Commission finally reported its recommendations encouraged the Free State to reject any changes to the boundary. Northern Ireland, by 1925, was firmly established.