A century ago this week, the unionist prime minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig, arrived back to Belfast from London to be feted by his followers. The negotiations he had been involved in cemented the Border on the island of Ireland, giving solid meaning to his rallying call of “not an inch”. After details of the Boundary Commission report had been leaked the previous month - indicating the Free State had no chance of obtaining the prizes it sought, including Fermanagh and Tyrone - Free State ministers were involved in a desperate scramble to manage the fallout and mask their humiliation.
These were high stakes talks and led to deep feelings of betrayal on the part of marooned nationalists in Northern Ireland with enduring implications. The head of the Free State government WT Cosgrave had met with Craig and British ministers in London on November 26th and he and Craig became unlikely bedfellows in agreeing the Border should stay as it was. The Irish Minister for Justice, Kevin O’Higgins, and Minister for Industry and Commerce Patrick McGilligan, along with attorney General John O’Byrne, then travelled to London on November 28th, where British prime minister Stanley Baldwin told them, “As an outsider I cannot see how even an angel could devise a boundary which would be agreed.”
Various things were discussed, including easing the plight of northern nationalists due to the discrimination they faced and their persecution by the Ulster Special Constabulary. Regarding the nationalists of Fermanagh and Tyrone, O’Higgins said plaintively “Ireland thought that this [Boundary] Commission was going to rescue them.”
The Free State representatives were negotiating from a position of abject weakness. They stressed that the boundary commission debacle could collapse the Irish government and there was no alternative pro-Treaty government possible. While the deputy secretary to the British cabinet, Thomas Jones, paid tribute in his diary to the eloquence with which O’Higgins spoke of northern nationalists, O’Higgins’s polished righteousness was to melt due to his political straitjacket and the obduracy of Craig.
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An agreement between London, Belfast and Dublin on December 3rd, after Cosgrave travelled to London again, saw the boundary commission report, in the words of Baldwin, “buried”. The Border would remain as it was, and the council of Ireland that had been part of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920 would be jettisoned, with instead a promise of occasional north-south consultation on matters of mutual concern. The only gain for the Free State was that the article of the treaty obliging it to pay a share of the UK imperial war debt was revoked, something supported by Craig, as he said “I want to help you all I can to get as much as you can out of these fellows”.
Cosgrave sought to spin the agreement: “we have sown the seeds of peace.” This was partly about a rush to move on and paper over the gaping cracks in the unity project. In the subsequent Dáil debate on the agreement (held in the absence of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs who abstained from the Dáil) O’Higgins asked northern nationalists to sacrifice their interests “to the best interests of the whole country.” This tone, suggests historian Clare O’Halloran, involved a deliberate distancing, and a determination to “divest themselves of the embarrassing burden of the northern minority.” It was no wonder one of their leading voices, nationalist MP for Fermanagh and Tyrone Cahir O’Healy, railed against the Free State government for agreeing “to a Partition forever.” The Irish Labour Party leader, Thomas Johnson, also condemned the agreement.
I joined other historians and a public audience at a conference in Belfast this week to mark the centenary of the agreement. It was apparent there is still much interest in the blame game, but historian Margaret O’Callaghan wondered if we are too hard on that generation of Free State ministers, given that there was no way the boundary commission clause of the Anglo-Irish Treaty was ever going to be interpreted in a way that would deliver Irish unity, no matter who was in power in Dublin. It was not designed to succeed, but to get over a hump in negotiations in late 1921.
Cosgrave and Craig got on well, but never met again, underlining the hollowness of the aspiration to north-south co-operation. Intriguingly, Cosgrave wrote to Taoiseach John A Costello in 1950 and told him that in 1925 he and Craig had discussed eventual unity; that “he and I would settle the terms and make the agreement for unity” and Craig was “quite insistent that the agreement would be made by the two of us”. Whatever about the veracity of that, what Craig and Cosgrave - and before his death in 1922, Michael Collins - all shared was distrust of London.
The issues raised a century ago during that highly charged period are by no means just historical matters.
[ When the Border was being drawn, my grandad tried to put Derry in the Free StateOpens in new window ]
