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- Herausgeber: UCD Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In this comprehensive history of the Irish Boundary Commission, Paul Murray looks at British attempts from 1886 on to satisfy the Irish Nationalist demand for Home Rule, Ulster and British Unionist resistance to this demand, the 1920 partition of Ireland and the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, where the roots of the establishment of the Commission are to be found. The evidence presented at the Commission and the principles on which it based its decisions are analysed against the background of evolving British views on the dangers posed for British and Unionist interests on both islands by a radical redrawing of the 1920 border. New documentary evidence is brought to bear on the motivation of its Chairman Justice Feetham, his susceptibility to external influences, and the significance of his political background as possible factors in his final decisions. The history of the Irish Boundary Commission is shown to also be part of a larger European narrative. This study is, thus, the first large-scale attempt to consider its significance in its wider international context.
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THE IRISH BOUNDARY COMMISSION AND ITS ORIGINS
1886–1925
PAUL MURRAY
Contents
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Acknowledgements
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This book has its remote origins in my Doctoral dissertation, Contested Borders and Minority Rights: The Partition of Ireland in Comparative Perspective, presented at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2003. I owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisor Dr Niall Ó Dochartaigh of the National University of Ireland, Galway for his help and guidance during the preparation of the dissertation, and to my External Examiner Professor Paul Arthur, University of Ulster, for his advice and encouragement.
I am also grateful to the staffs of the following institutions: The National Library of Ireland; The National Archives of Ireland; The James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway; The Public Record Office, London; The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; House of Lords Record Office; The Bodleian Library, Oxford; The Rhodes House Library, London; The Aidan Heavey Library, Athlone; The Archives Department, University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin Archives.
The following helped me in various ways: Declan McCormack, Dublin; Dr Conor Molony, Wimbledon; Dr Brian Murphy, Glenstal Abbey, Limerick; Gearóid O’Brien, Chief Executive Librarian, Aidan Heavey Library, Athlone; Pádhraic Folan, Galway; John Donohoe, Athlone; Deirdre Wildy, Special Subject Librarian, Queens University Belfast and Dr Rory McDonnell, University of California, Riverside, USA.
My thanks are also due to The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), for its generous funding of my Doctoral research during my period as an Irish Research Council Scholar. I am particularly grateful to the School of Political Science and Sociology, NUI Galway for funding to support the publication of this book. I extend special thanks in this regard to Professor Chris Curtin.
My editor, Noelle Moran, UCD Press, merits particular gratitude. Her expertise, encouragement and valuable advice have greatly benefited this publication.
It has been a great pleasure to work with Barbara Mennell, Executive Editor of UCD Press, who has been supportive throughout.
The County Londonderry Map from Sampson’s Statistical Survey (1801) was chosen for the cover because of the strategic importance of Derry City. On denominational grounds, there was a strong case for the inclusion of Derry City in the Irish Free State. Ultimately, Derry City and Newry were the most extreme examples of the Irish Boundary Commission’s failure to meet Nationalist expectations. I am grateful to the National Library of Ireland for permission to reproduce the map.
PAUL MURRAY
Galway, December 2010
Abbreviations
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Maps
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Map 1
Distribution of Catholics and Non-Catholics in Northern Ireland 1925. Figures are based on 1911 Census Returns (Map drawn by Sarah Gearty. A version was previously published in Michael Laffan, ‘The emergence of the two Irelands, 1912–25’, History Ireland (Winter 2004), p. 40.)
Map 2
Claims to Northern Ireland territory made by the Free State Government based on religious statistics for Poor Law Unions. (Map drawn by Stephen Hannon, based on North-Eastern Boundary Bureau, Handbook of the Ulster Question (Dublin, 1923), p. 52, and previously published in Kevin Matthews, Fatal Influence: The Impact of Ireland on British Politics 1920–1925 (Dublin, 2004), p. 119.)
Map 3
Revisions to the border envisaged by the Irish Boundary Commission. (Map drawn by Stephen Hannon, and previously published in Matthews, Fatal Influence, p. 225.)
Introduction
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This book is the first comprehensive history of the Irish Boundary Commission, from its emergence in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921 to its outcome at the close of 1925. It is also the first large-scale attempt to consider its significance in the wider international context. The readers I have particularly in mind are students of Irish and British history during the period from 1886 to 1969; political scientists working in the relevant area, and Irish studies academics generally. I have, however, tried to make the work accessible to a wider general readership.
The need for a boundary commission arose from the nature of the 1920 partition of Ireland, which left Northern Ireland with a largely dissatisfied Catholic minority comprising over one-third of its inhabitants. The provision in the Anglo-Irish Treaty for a mechanism to rectify this anomaly was a necessary condition for Nationalist Irish assent to the agreement as a whole: it was, and is, generally accepted on all sides that the Irish negotiators would not have subscribed to the Treaty in the absence of a boundary commission.
Writing a history of the Commission necessarily involves taking account of the remote and proximate circumstances which led to it. These were: the Nationalist demand for Home Rule which divided Irish people into two irreconcilable camps, each claiming absolute legitimacy for its own stand point; British attempts from 1886 on to satisfy this demand; the partition of 1920 as a settlement for most Ulster Unionists but not for six-county Nationalists, or for the Unionists of Cavan, Donegal, Monaghan in particular, and the Free State in general; and the incorporation in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of a boundary clause both as a means of addressing northern Nationalist grievances with the 1920 boundary and of facilitating north-south political unity.
The first two chapters of this book, which deal with Home Rule, partition and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, are designed to provide the background necessary to an understanding of the formation, conduct and outcome of the Commission. The third chapter deals with events between the signing of the Treaty and the establishment of the Commission in 1924. In this chapter the implications of this development and of Nationalist vacillation, equivocation, uncertainty and division over the merits of the Boundary Commission are explored. The significance of the general British reluctance to face down the Unionist threat of militant opposition to any finding by the Commission that would involve anything more than a minimal transfer of six-county territory to the Free State are closely analysed.
During this period, both Irish and British statesmen were harbouring significant doubts about the utility of a commission, many of them favouring a negotiated settlement of the boundary by the parties affected. At the same time, members of successive British administrations publicly dissented from Free State interpretations of the boundary clause as giving warrant for substantial transfers of territory from north to south. As the time for the establishment of the Commission approached, there was a developing convergence of view between the British and Northern Ireland authorities that the Commission must not recommend more than minimal rectification of the boundary, against a background of Unionist threats of militant resistance to anything else. This position found theoretical support in the interpretation of the significance of the boundary clause advanced by Ulster Unionists, by those in power in Britain, and ultimately by the Chairman of the Commission, Justice Richard Feetham.
This contentious interpretation goes to the heart of the boundary dispute which Feetham had to resolve. It centred on the view that Northern Ireland, even in the wake of the Treaty, could not be considered a new provisional entity created by the terms of the Treaty. It followed from this that it could not be subject to the large-scale revision demanded by Nationalists. Instead, it must be regarded as a pre-established entity created by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. It therefore enjoyed prescriptive rights limiting the scope of the Treaty to effect minor territorial adjustments on either side of the 1920 boundary. It must end up, after the Commission had done its work, as substantially the same unit as that described in the 1920 Act.
Much of this book deals with the high politics of the Irish boundary question and its ongoing significance. I have, however, in an analysis of the evidence given to the Commission (Chapter Four) considered the views of people on both sides of the border who might have been affected in their everyday lives by the outcome of its deliberations. This evidence is a valuable record of the texture of daily life in Ulster in the early 1920s. It is also a barometer of the heightened political and religious sentiment generated by partition, and by the Boundary Commission. It throws useful light on the multiple practical inconveniences which the 1920 border and the 1923 Free State customs barrier had brought about, and raises troubling questions about the economic desir ability of any border.
Once Feetham had adopted his limited interpretation, the fate of the Nationalist case for substantial boundary revision was sealed. This and Feetham’s other views on the import of the boundary clause, and the decisions flowing from these, form the substance of Chapter Five. Another factor working to the advantage of Unionists was the transformation of British politics after the fall of Lloyd George’s Liberal-Conservative Coalition Government in November 1922. After that date, the position within the Empire of both parties to the boundary dispute was altered in favour of Unionism. Against the background of increasing Conservative and Unionist hostility to the terms of the Treaty, members of the Coalition Government most closely identified with it – including Birkenhead, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and Worthington-Evans – were obliged to rebuild their careers by publicly interpreting, or reinterpreting, the boundary clause in a restrictive sense. They also re-emerged as defenders of Ulster Unionism, and protectors of its integrity.
The evolution of the idea of a boundary commission and, above all, the formulation in the Treaty of the task it was to perform gave rise to endless difficulties. The boundary clause – the work of the British negotiators – had no clear, indisputable meaning. It mentioned inhabitants whose wishes were to be consulted without indicating their geographical location. It provided no indication as to how the wishes of these unidentified inhabitants were to be ascertained, leaving it to the imagination and ingenuity of the Commissioners to apply it as they thought best. There was no indication whether large or small units were to be considered for transfer, or whether transfers were to be made in one or both directions. A week after the Treaty was signed, Asquith was at a loss to know whether the Commission was to operate by counties, by any specific areas or merely on an enumeration of population. All that Lloyd George would tell him was that those who framed the boundary clause had avoided giving specific directions of the kind mentioned by Asquith.
How the Irish negotiators could have subscribed to such a clause still remains a mystery, as does the fact that de Valera’s Dáil Cabinet, having been afforded an opportunity to scrutinise it, failed to insist on a more sensible, workable provision. Griffith was made aware of the problem by his legal adviser, but failed inexplicably to pursue the matter. It is also surprising that those Irish politicians, including de Valera, who opposed the Treaty, appeared to be unaware of the pitfalls inherent in the boundary clause. In the aftermath of the Treaty, a long succession of British and Irish politicians and publicists displayed the utmost confidence in offering conflicting interpretations of this obscure but vital provision. The only interpretation that mattered in the end was Feetham’s. His findings aroused dismay both among northern Nationalists and Free State Government politicians. A common Nationalist reaction was that he had behaved throughout as a servant of the British Government and that his appointment as Chairman was based on the well-founded belief that his report would reflect the views of those who appointed him. In Chapter Five, which deals with Feetham’s judgements, I outline the evidence, never more than circumstantial, tending to reinforce or contradict this view.
In addition, I consider the commonly-expressed view that the appointment of an English-born judge with conservative views as chairman of the Commission was inappropriate, if only because his impartiality was bound to come into question, even more emphatically so after his findings were revealed in a newspaper article before they were suppressed with the agreement of the main participating parties and did not come to public light until 1969. Misgivings about Feetham’s appointment were partly inspired by European parallels: post-war commissions were chaired by demonstrably neutral figures having no connection with the parties involved. In this case, it has to be borne in mind that the fixing of the Irish boundary dispute was seen by the British as one between two members of the Empire, and that the Westminster Government in appointing Feetham, a South African by adoption, was acting not as the Government of Britain but as the Imperial Government: a distinction, however, not easy to maintain in practice.
The history of the Irish Boundary Commission is part of a larger European narrative. In Chapter Six, I locate those who participated in its evolution and proceedings in the wider international context. The Irish Commission was only one of many such bodies provided for in post-war treaty settlements with the purpose of fixing the frontiers of wartime belligerents. For this reason, I have thought it useful to go beyond Irish and British contexts to consider how European commission practice relates to the Irish case, and in particular what lessons are to be drawn by looking at Irish departures from European norms in the matter of ascertaining the wishes of the inhabitants of disputed areas. Some of the European parallels, examined in Chapter Six, are instructive: those with Upper Silesia, Klagenfurt, the Aaland Islands and Schleswig, for example. So too are some further afield: the Turk-Kurd conflict in Anatolia, and the French decision to add Muslim-majority territory to the Christian heartland of Mount Lebanon, with the purpose of creating a state large enough to be viable.
In my further study, I analyse the Nationalist and Unionist positions on partition, self-determination, territorial integrity and secession (Chapter Seven) in the light of the considerable existing literature on evolving international norms. My main purpose in this chapter is to suggest that both positions have much to recommend them, and to indicate the difficulty of reconciling them, at any rate in their purest form. Through this close examination I come to the conclusion that neither the Unionist nor Nationalist case on partition can command unqualified assent.
The Irish Boundary Commission, despite the considerable effort expended on all sides on research, propaganda, meetings, intensive lobbying and the preparation of large volumes of evidence, effected no change whatever in the boundary established in 1920. It might therefore be deemed a futile, wasteful exercise, scarcely worthy of serious investigation. It has, nevertheless, significant claims on our attention. Its incorporation in the Anglo-Irish Treaty made it possible for the Irish negotiators to sign the document, an act which soon plunged Nationalist Ireland into civil war, and engendered a sense of betrayal among Unionists. Controversy over its implications dominated British and Irish political discourse for long periods from early 1922 to late 1925, and occupied much parliamentary time in both countries. The seeming threat it represented to the integrity of Northern Ireland greatly strengthened the Ulster Unionist Party, as it adopted the role of aggressive defender of the territorial status quo, uniting all shades of Protestant opinion behind it on the single agenda of maintaining intact the 1920 boundary. Six-county Nationalists, and their political representatives, derived no ultimate benefit from the incorporation of a boundary clause in the Treaty. Encouraged by their leaders and southern politicians to expect considerable transfers of northern territory to the Free State, the generality of border Nationalists kept aloof from the political institutions of Northern Ireland to their ultimate detriment, allowing Unionists to assume long-term control of the great majority of public bodies, many of these traditionally Nationalist, and to shape these in their own long-term interests. The failure of the Commission to meet Nationalist expectations undermined the credibility of the Free State and enhanced that of its southern political opponents. One of the significant consequences of the Commission debacle was the emergence of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and the resulting transformation of southern Irish politics.
The published material on Home Rule, the Ulster question, partition and the Anglo-Irish Treaty is vast. I build on this throughout my first three chapters. I have also drawn on a wide range of British and Irish archival materials: British and Irish parliamentary records; local and national newspaper reports; contemporary pamphlets and other primary sources.
I take existing scholarly positions forward in a number of areas. Hitherto, discussion of the Irish boundary question has been predominantly in terms of its British and Irish contexts. I use extensive material on post-Versailles European and other boundary settlements to draw instructive parallels with the contemporary Irish one, and explore, in depth, the implications of these for discussion of the latter. My analysis of the submissions to the Commission and of the principles underlying Feetham’s judgement, the anomalies and apparent double standards involved in this, breaks new ground. Among these anomalies are Feetham’s willingness to override the wishes and interests of Mourne Catholics but not of Poyntzpass Protestants.
The significance of Francis Bourdillon’s role as Secretary to the Boundary Commission has not hitherto been given the attention it deserves. In the year before his appointment, as Kevin Matthews has briefly noted, Bourdillon, who had worked on the Silesian Boundary Commission, submitted an advisory document to Lionel Curtis at the British Colonial Office on how the Irish boundary clause might be applied in the light of European experience. Bourdillon anticipated the fundamentals of Feetham’s approach to Irish boundary determination, particularly in its restrictive view of the territorial implications of the boundary clause. Bourdillon’s anticipation of Feetham, not hitherto analysed in the scholarly material, raises questions about the integrity of the Irish Commission, which I explore in this study. In this respect, the Bourdillon material is not unique. In early 1922, Feetham’s fellow-Commissioner, the Unionist representative J. R. Fisher, had advised Craig to seek the exclusion of the most troublesome part of Northern Ireland (South Armagh) and the inclusion of Donegal (at the expense of Fermanagh) and North Monaghan. Three years later, Feetham recommended two of these three areas for transfer, along with East Donegal.
Bourdillon’s submission throws considerable light on European commission practice, specifically with regard to plebiscites, which he, in contrast to the British authorities, considered essential to boundary determination, advancing compelling reasons for this point of view. Bourdillon’s well-documented evidence in support of plebiscites in advance of boundary change reinforces the lessons I draw upon in Chapter Six from my analysis of the cases of Klagenfurt, Allenstein, Marienwerder, Upper Silesia and Schleswig.
In Chapter Six, I also draw attention to the fact that the absence from the Anglo-Irish Treaty of formal guidelines to the interpretation of Article 12 made the Irish Boundary Commission an oddity among bodies of its kind. Another significant departure from Continental practice was that Article 12 conferred on the British Government, a contending party to the dispute, the right to appoint the Chairman of the Boundary Commission. European commissions, in contrast, were presided over by persons from countries with no vested interest in the disposition of disputed territory. In relation to this latter concern, I address the British point of view, which I find not entirely convincing, that the Irish dispute was between two members of the British Empire, the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, and not between sovereign states, as was the case in Europe, and that it was therefore appropriate that the Chairman should be drawn from the Empire.
There was the further British argument that in appointing a South African judge as Chairman, the Westminster Government was acting, not as the Government of Great Britain but as the Imperial Government. I point out that since the personnel of both these Governments was the same, this argument can scarcely carry conviction. On the Irish Nationalist side, it was commonly felt that Feetham’s British birth and conservative political views predisposed him to favour retaining the 1920 settlement virtually intact, a course which his final report recommended. No such argument could have been made had a demonstrably impartial figure, aloof from British or Irish interests, been appointed Chairman.
It may be arguable whether justice was done by the Commission, or whether Feetham tried to act impartially, but my analysis makes clear that, given all the circumstances, justice was not, indeed could not, be seen to be done.
ONE
THE PARTITION OF IRELAND
THE FORCES AT PLAY
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I HOME RULE: THE IMPERIAL DIMENSION
The formal implementation of partition in 1920 is best understood as the ultimate outcome of the Irish Nationalist demand for Home Rule, and of the attempts of successive British administration to satisfy this demand. For long periods between the British General Election of 1885 and the Tripartite Agreement between the British, Free State and Northern Ireland Governments in 1925, the Home Rule question became the predominant theme of English political debate, undermining governments, splitting the Liberal Party, unleashing furious passions, hatreds and prejudices, generating fears and insecurities among Irish Unionists for their future political, economic and religious prospects, and among Conservatives and Imperialists in general for the future of the British Empire. The Home Rule agitation threatened the conventions upon which the British Constitutional system depended. It saw British Privy Councillors inciting rebellion, and retired law officers of the Crown recommending armed resistance to an Act of the British Parliament, while Army officers prepared to resign their commissions rather than be obliged to move against such resistance. It also saw the leader of the Conservative opposition condoning violent action, if that were found necessary, to prevent Home Rule. The extended history of the Home Rule crisis illustrates the truth of Martin Gilbert’s comment that the cause of Ireland poisoned British politics. ‘The Conservatives,’ he observes, ‘remained convinced that Liberalism would betray Ulster,’ while the Liberals were confirmed in their view that the Conservatives would use the claims of Ulster as an excuse to disrupt an Irish settlement, and as an opportunity to kill Liberalism.1
British Conservative politicians feared that the implementation of Home Rule, under a single Irish Parliament, inevitably dominated by Nationalists, would ultimately lead to the political separation of Ireland as a whole from the British Empire. Since 1800 the Act of Union had politically united Ireland to the rest of the United Kingdom. Preservation of the Union, and the political integrity of the British Isles and by extension of the Empire, was so fundamental to British Conservatives that they adopted the alternative name of Unionists as a token of this. As Lord Hugh Cecil put it to Bonar Law: ‘We are the Unionist Party: that is, we exist to oppose Home Rule.’2 Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister from June 1885 to February 1886, and again from July 1886, objected to the First Home Rule Bill on the ground that Irish people as a collective, ‘like the Hindus and the Hottentots, were inherently incapable of self-government’.3 He was certain that the concession of Home Rule to Ireland would lead to the disintegration ‘not only of the polity of the United Kingdom, but also, as a result, to the disintegration of Britain’s Imperial position.’4 Democracy, Salisbury believed, ‘works admirably when it is confined to people of the Teutonic race.’5 Lord Randolph Churchill put it more starkly when he claimed that Home Rule would ‘plunge the knife in the heart of the British Empire.’6
In September 1912, the backbench Conservative peer Lord Willoughby de Broke assured a Loyalist attendance at Dromore, County Down, that English Unionists would rally to the cause of their Ulster brethren if Home Rule were forced upon them by Asquith’s ‘radical government’. He promised that such a government would find that it faced the opposition of more than Orangemen: ‘every white man in the British Empire would be giving support, either moral or active, to one of the most loyal populations who ever fought under the Union Jack.’7 Over a decade later, the threat that a boundary commission might represent to the integrity of Northern Ireland and by extension to that of the Empire, inspired one English Imperialist, W. Comyns Beaumont, to declare that ‘like many others I regard Ulster as the key question of the Empire’s maintenance – once weaken there and we are done.’ ‘For one,’ Beaumont promised, ‘I am ready at any time to fight for Ulster if she should be compelled to resist the vile intrigues employed against her.’ F. E. Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, believed that Ireland could not be given even the limited measure of Home Rule envisaged by the Liberals without undermining, by contagion, British India and the worldwide Empire, and furthermore that Ireland occupied too important a strategic position on Britain’s Atlantic flank for Britain to permit an arrangement that might lead to secession. Like many contemporary British Conservative and Irish Unionist statesmen, Birkenhead found the Irish demand for Home Rule not only impossible, but also incomprehensible, not being able to understand how anybody could desire to cease being British. He had modified these views by the time he signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but neither he nor the other British negotiators was prepared to concede a degree of Irish freedom that might have made the British mainland less secure than it had been under the Union.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
