One hundred years ago this week, the Irish government entered crisis talks with its British counterpart over the unresolved question of the Border. The Boundary Commission, created under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, had finished its long-delayed work. Its conclusions were a calamity for the Irish side. Many nationalists had believed the commission would transfer substantial areas of Northern Ireland. The assumption was that a truncated Northern state would soon prove unworkable and that unity would inevitably follow.
Instead, the commission recommended only marginal adjustments to the existing line and even proposed that certain districts in the Free State be moved under Northern jurisdiction. For WT Cosgrave’s government, the report represented a humiliation at the hands of a process that had given the British and unionist perspective an advantage from its inception. The hurried negotiations that followed between Dublin, London and Belfast ended in a face-saving formula: the recommendations would be set aside and the Border would remain untouched.
A century on, with the question of reunification rising steadily up the political agenda, the Boundary Commission marks the moment when partition, viewed by many in the early 1920s as temporary, became firmly embedded. This was despite the fact that the frontier confirmed in 1925 cut abruptly across communities and landscapes. It severed towns from their hinterlands, disrupted trade routes and led to social and economic dislocation that endures in subtle ways even today. More profoundly, it set both jurisdictions on paths shaped by narrow and often defensive understandings of political identity. Ultimately it laid the ground for the violence that would erupt in the late 1960s.
Removing the Border is an ambition shared by every major party in the Republic and by a strong majority of its citizens. In Northern Ireland demographic and cultural shifts have removed the unionist parties’ built-in majority, but that does not in itself satisfy the criteria under which a border poll may be called by the Secretary of State. That could change in the years ahead. One lesson from 1925 is that it is unwise not to make preparations for all eventualities.
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There are other lessons. Nationalism underestimated the depth of unionist attachment to British identity. That position was too often expressed through policies of dominance and exclusion, but it was also deeply rooted. To ignore its contemporary expression would repeat a historic mistake.
A newly assertive and sometimes irredentist Irish nationalism has begun to surface, dismissive of the other traditions on the island. The presidential campaign offered glimpses of this tendency. It will better serve the reunification project if such instincts are kept firmly at bay.
