On Saturday November 7th, 1925 the most damaging newspaper leak in Irish history appeared in a British newspaper.
The Boundary Commission report came as a shock to nationalist Ireland and would have profound consequences that endure to this day.
The Commission was set up under Article 12 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty to determine which parts of Ireland would go to the Free State or remain in Northern Ireland.
Article 12 stated the Commission would determine in accordance with the “wishes of the inhabitants the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland”. Had it said just that, nationalists could reasonably have expected the majority Catholic counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh, along with Derry city and south Armagh to be ceded to the Free State.
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Instead, Article 12 contained a pernicious subclause that the Commission would determine the boundaries “so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions”.
What did that mean? As historian Dr Cormac Moore, the author of The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission, has written Article 12 was a “poorly drafted, hastily written clause” which put the Free State in an disadvantageous position from the beginning.
Unfortunately for nationalist Ireland, two of the three members of the Commission determined to take a minimalist interpretation of Article 12. They were its chairman Justice Richard Feetham and Joseph Fisher, the Northern representative appointed by the British government, as Sir James Craig’s Unionist government refused to have anything to do with it.
The Irish representative was Antrim-born Minister for Education Éoin MacNeill who was appointed to represent the interests of nationalist Ireland on both sides of the Border.
MacNeill was a Professor of early Irish History at University College Dublin (UCD) and an otherworldly figure singularly unsuited to the skulduggery needed to fight his corner.
All three members of the Commission were sworn to secrecy, but only MacNeill kept that promise. Fisher is suspected as the person behind the leak to the pro-imperialist, anti-Irish Morning Post newspaper on November 7th.
[ When the Border was being drawn, my grandad tried to put Derry in the Free StateOpens in new window ]
Correspondence shows that he kept Craig up to date on the Commission’s deliberations. MacNeill kept his cabinet colleagues in the dark all along.
The Morning Post leak came as a profound shock to the Free State government of WT Cosgrave. The Commission not only envisaged minor tweaks to the Border, but also recommended the inclusion of a large swathe of east Donegal into Northern Ireland including a section of the west bank of the Foyle as far as Strabane. It had not occurred to the Irish Government that the Commission might actually recommend ceding territory to the North.
The majority nationalist towns of Newry and Enniskillen were to be retained by the North. Instead, the Morning Post rather gleefully reported that the Free State would receive “some wild and sparsely populated” land from the North, land, obviously, of no economic benefit.
Altogether the Commission envisaged the transfer of about 750 square kilometres and 31,319 people to the South and 200 square kilometres and approximately 5,000 people to the North.
MacNeill had blindsided his cabinet colleagues and left them effectively with a fait accompli. The Derry Journal, editorialised that his role was characterised by “inertia, incapacity and appalling ineptitude”.
MacNeill resigned from the Commission and then the cabinet on November 20th. It was “probably true that a better politician and a better diplomatist, if you like, a better strategist, than I am would not have allowed himself to be brought into that position or difficulty,” he declared in his Dáil resignation speech.
The Derry Journal wondered how MacNeill could not have kept the Irish Government appraised of how the negotiations were going. One nationalist priest described MacNeill in a single word as a “simpleton”.
The initial damage was done, but it was compounded by the actions of the Cosgrave government. Instead of opposing the leaking and ordering the Commission to go back to basics, its members rushed to London to suppress its findings.
A week of negotiations which began on November 26th ended on December 3rd with what amounted to the largest sovereign debt relief settlement of the 20th century. Under Article 5 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Free State inherited a proportional share of the United Kingdom’s imperial debt.
This was regarded as an intolerable financial burden on an impoverished state which had just been engaged in a Civil War.
The British government agreed to write off Ireland’s share, the equivalent then of 80 per cent of the new State’s annual GDP, for an agreement which allowed the Border to stay in place.
Cosgrave and Craig hailed the agreement as the beginnings of a new era in North-South relations. Cosgrave took the debt writedown, but the two premiers never met again. It would be 40 years later before such a meeting took place.
The Labour leader Tom Johnson said Northern nationalists were “sold for nothing”.
The Boundary Commission had two enduring legacies. It fostered the belief among many Northern nationalists that the Cumann na nGaedheal government had sold them out.
The debacle also led directly to the founding of Fianna Fáil in the following year. The anti-Treaty Sinn Féin’s abstentionism policy meant the Boundary Commission settlement went through the Dáil with little opposition. Though, in truth, anti-Treaty Sinn Féin didn’t have the numbers to defeat the Government, it illustrated to Éamon de Valera that the policy of abstentionism was a dead-end one. In March of the following year, de Valera was defeated at a special Sinn Féin ardfheis on abstentionism.
He left with his followers. Fianna Fáil was formally established in May 1926.
[ What did Éamon de Valera ever do for us?Opens in new window ]
