The establishment of the Boundary Commission was triggered at the end of 1922, when the unionist authorities in the infant Northern Ireland formally indicated their wish to remain outside the new Irish state. In the Boundary Commission and Border Minorities, the final essay in this collection from the Ulster Historical Foundation, Cormac Moore focuses on a note of uncertainty that would create future consternation.
Although the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 stipulated that the commission would determine the delineation of a Border in Ireland “in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions”, it provided no details as to how these wishes would be measured. By local plebiscites, as took place elsewhere in Europe in the aftermath of the first World War? And were such plebiscites to be held, how would they be organised? At townland level? At parish level?
Although the Treaty’s Sinn Féin negotiators had perceived the establishment of the commission as a win for nationalists and an indication that partition would by no means be set in stone, then, the result was in fact a haze of ambiguity. Ultimately, while the commission’s leaked report of 1925 provided for certain land transfers from north to south and vice versa, the inhabitants of such areas would not be called upon either to assent or dissent: the transfers would simply be implemented.
As we now know, of course, such was the anger in Dublin and elsewhere in the face of the leaked report that no such transfers ever took place, and the form of the border remained unchanged. Moore’s somewhat blunt interpretation is that Michael Collins and his associates “blundered enormously in acceding to such an indefinable Boundary Commission”, though one might also note that the Irish negotiators were operating in a tremendously pressurised context, and in the face of considerable duplicity on the part of their British counterparts. In agreeing to such an ambiguously designed Boundary Commission, however, the Irish negotiators certainly relinquished control of the future.
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Moore’s essay is among the strongest in a collection published with the intention of illuminating the history of a momentous decade – and other pieces are similarly absorbing. Patricia Marsh’s examination of the impact upon Ulster of the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 shows the results – that is, the stark differences in mortality rates – of policy successes and failures across the province in these years. It illustrates too how transport links provided the means for the virus to spread with devastating effect: the (now-vanished) railway link west from Derry meant that influenza rates spiked in thinly populated districts of central Donegal – while, for example, railway-less parts of rural Connacht escaped relatively lightly. Marsh’s essay also provides a welcome focus upon social matters in a volume that is otherwise dominated by the swirling politics of the era.
Cecil Craig was a willing tool in the armoury of a specifically Protestant-unionist patriarchy – in other words, there is little of note here to be “reclaimed”
Elsewhere, arguments are rather less than convincing, with Diane Urquhart’s examination of the diaries of Cecil Craig perhaps the least persuasive essay in this collection. Craig was the English-born wife of Ulster unionist politician James Craig, who would become the first prime minister of Northern Ireland. Urquhart’s essay, Lady Cecil Craigavon and the reclamation of history, seeks to reframe the figure of Craig as a “conservative feminist”, tracing her high-profile role as a public speaker and advocate in an era “subject to considerable sex segregation”.
Craig’s diaries are certainly full of tempestuous life, and present to us a woman highly attuned to the changing tides of politics: but there is no evidence that her role functioned as anything other than that of the traditional consort: “the small role that falls to me is to accompany my husband, a duty which is a great pleasure, as it enables me to get to know better all the classes of the community.” She did nothing to further the principle of wider female involvement in politics; moreover, she embraced, as Urquhart concedes, the language of “sectarian-sustaining divisions”. Cecil Craig was a willing tool in the armoury of a specifically Protestant-unionist patriarchy – in other words, there is little of note here to be “reclaimed”.
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Other essays similarly perplex. In The USC and the Formation of the Northern Ireland State, 1920-22, Brian Barton reviews the notorious reputation of the Ulster Special Constabulary – the murderous and ill-disciplined auxiliary police force better known as the B Specials. Barton’s remark that “the incidence of USC indiscipline can easily be overstated” flies in the face of much readily available evidence. Moreover, it fails to engage with a fundamental ethical point – that state agents, regardless of the context within which they operate, cannot be permitted to engage in any atrocities. This essay and this volume offer, perhaps, a useful reminder of the need to work with the grain of history, and not to strain painfully against the facts.
Neil Hegarty’s latest book is Impermanence (No Alibis Press, 2022), which he co-edited
