Without a Dog's Chance

The Nationalists of Northern Ireland and the Irish Boundary Commission, 1920–1925

James A. Cousins

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788551021
• eBook ISBN: 9781788551045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Covering the years 1920–1925, Without a Dog's Chance is the first major study of Northern nationalists' role in the Boundary Commission that they, and their allies in the Irish Free State, had hoped to use to end partition and destroy the new Northern state.

For Northern nationalists, the partition of Ireland was an intensely traumatic event, not only because it consigned almost half a million nationalists to a government that was not of their choosing, but also because they regarded partition as the mutilation of their Irish citizenship and nationhood.

Without a Dog's Chance fills an important gap in the history of this period by focusing on the complex relationship between partition-era Northern and Southern nationalism, and the subordinate role Northern nationalists had in Ireland's post-partition political landscape. Feeling under-valued, abandoned and exploited by their peers in the South, Northern nationalists were also radically marginalised within the new Northern Irish state, which regarded them with fear and suspicion.

With December 2020 marking one hundred years since partition, this timely book is essential reading.

CHAPTER 1

The Making of a Trapped Minority

Henry II, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I, Cromwell, William III, and Castlereagh (with whom was associated William Pitt) were enemies of Ireland. But not one of them contemplated partition. Up to Cromwell’s time the favorite plan for Conquest was Colonization plus Extermination of the ‘natives.’ Elizabeth, James and Oliver put this plan into operation with great zeal. But they did not think of splitting Ireland into warring factions.

– Fear Na Traigh1

It is tempting to begin any study of Irish nationalism with an examination of the bumpy path by which Ireland came to be controlled by the Protestant planters of Ulster and the Pale, or the eighteenth-century Penal Laws that their descendants used to build the Protestant Ascendancy. It would be, perhaps, more tempting still to probe the deeper recesses of Anglo-Irish relations in search of antecedents of, and unionist responses to, the cultural, political and insurrectionary nationalism that flourished under the United Irishmen and their Young Ireland followers or the constitutionalist brand of nationalism that Daniel O’Connell developed to fight for Catholic Emancipation. Yet, as fruitful as such an investigation could be in understanding nationalism and unionism in Ireland, the immediate origins of Northern Ireland’s nationalist minority problem are to be found in the Ulster Crisis of the late nineteenth century and the Home Rule movement whence it grew. Thus, demonstrating the process by which the nationalists of Northern Ireland came to be a trapped minority should also begin there, in the era of William Gladstone and Charles Stewart Parnell. With that in mind, this chapter examines the well-trodden history of Ireland during the second half of the nineteenth century, while focusing on the competing visions of the island’s proper place in the world that was then emerging.

In 1868, William E. Gladstone became leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland, and he immediately began searching for a way to reconcile Ireland to its place within the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom was born in 1800 in the aftermath of the United Irishmen’s failed rebellion in 1798 and had endured both insurrectionary and constitutionalist threats to its integrity thereafter. Having taken a menacing Fenian form by the time Gladstone took the reins of power in 1868, physical force Irish nationalism was on the rise. Fenianism had emerged in America and Ireland during the late 1850s and represented a confluence of numerous oathbound and republican secret societies including Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s Phoenix Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) launched by James Stephens and the American Clan na Gael within which John Devoy was to become a consummate fixture. Unlike the followers of constitutionalist Daniel O’Connell, Fenians saw engaging in parliamentary politics as recognition of Britain’s right to make rules for Ireland as well as a corrupting force that subordinated Irish issues to the vagaries of British politics. Moreover, as undignified as they believed it was to grovel for concessions at Westminster, it was equally clear to the Fenians that no such display could bring about the independent Irish republic they envisioned. O’Donovan Rossa made this point clear when he observed: ‘I don’t believe the Saxon will ever relax his grip except by the persuasion of lead and cold steel.’2

It was with O’Donovan Rossa’s form of lead and cold steel persuasion in mind that the IRB embarked on a series of ill-fated insurrectionary acts in Britain, Ireland and British North America between 1866 and 1871. From a military perspective, Fenianism was inconsequential but a Fenian mythology, and indeed a martyrology, emerged nonetheless. It was this rising tide of Fenian sentiment that Gladstone was determined to halt and then harness when he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

In his own words, Gladstone sought to ‘draw a line between the Fenians and the people of Ireland and to make the people of Ireland indisposed to cross it’.3 To achieve these ends and with the intention of making Ireland a contented part of the United Kingdom, Gladstone embarked on a conciliatory Irish policy that included the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, land reform and, ultimately, Irish Home Rule.4 Loosely defined as local self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom, Home Rule was at the centre of Irish nationalist politics from 1870, when Isaac Butt founded the Home Government Association, until the rise of Sinn Féin at the end of the First World War. Home Rule reached the zenith of its influence under the leadership of Protestant landowner Charles Stewart Parnell, who made parliamentary obstructionism the hallmark of his Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP).5 Not only did this approach threaten to clog the wheels of government but Parnell’s aggressive style and language also put an edge on parliamentarianism that made him and Home Rule more appealing to the radical elements on the periphery of Irish politics.6 In 1879, Parnell forged an alliance with Mayo land agitator and Fenian Michael Davitt, which put him in a position to exploit and harness a serious wave of violent land agitation that was then gripping rural Ireland. Davitt and Parnell were able to convert this Land War (1879–82) into a national movement in which Home Rule came to be seen as a panacea for all of Ireland’s ills.7

When the Land War had subsided, Home Rule became the primary preoccupation of Parnell and the IPP.8 Irish Protestants had been active within the agrarian movement but were soon alienated by Parnell’s renewed focus on the national question and his increasingly deferential attitude towards the Catholic Church that accompanied this shift. This was a decisive turn, especially since it coincided with the Reform Acts of 1884–5, which enfranchised Ireland’s tenant farmers for the first time. The full impact of electoral reform became clear enough after the 1885 election in which the Liberal Party was wiped out in Ireland and the IPP, having won eighty-six seats, was left holding the balance of power at Westminster.9 The ability to make or break governing administrations became the chief weapon of the IPP during this period of flux as both the Liberals and Conservatives vied for its support.

Initially, Parnell allied with the Marquess of Salisbury on the basis that the Tories pursue a conciliatory Irish policy. Salisbury’s own foray into land reform – the Ashbourne Act – should be seen in this light; however, at that time, there was also an indication that Randolph Churchill and other English Tories were amenable to some form of devolved local government for Ireland.10 Significantly, Gladstone was also moving in the direction of supporting Irish self-government and when this was leaked to the press in December 1885, the Conservatives responded by clothing themselves as the defenders of the Union against Home Rule. This hastened the collapse of Salisbury’s minority government and returned Gladstone to power in 1886.11

Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule has been seen as both a genuine moral conviction that devolution was needed to keep the people of Ireland ‘indisposed to cross’ the line that he first spoke about in 1868,12 as well as a cynical ploy to outmanoeuvre rivals. Both of these factors came into play when, in April 1886, Gladstone introduced the first of his two Home Rule Bills.13 The legislation of 1886 called for the establishment of a devolved Irish assembly with its own executive. The measure required Irish MPs to withdraw from Westminster and it included a long list of fields that were to remain the preserve of Westminster, including the crown, foreign policy, trade, customs and the ability to make peace and war.

The legislation was complex and, perhaps, even ‘unworkable’14 but it was something that Parnell was more than prepared to pursue; yet he had to do so without the support of the Whig and Radical factions of the Liberal Party, which both abandoned Gladstone over the Irish Question. Home Rule also met with frenetic opposition by both Irish Protestants and British Conservatives, who cast the measure as an attack on the Empire as well as the Union. The opposition of Irish Protestants came principally from the Anglican landed elite in the South of Ireland and the Presbyterians of Ulster – a region that had benefited from the industrialisation that they associated with the Act of Union.15 Under the circumstances, Tory unionists were quick to exploit Ulster hostility as Randolph Churchill became the flag-bearer of the Union, marshalling the forces of the North with the suggestive watchwords: ‘Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right!’16

Home Rule was ultimately defeated in the Commons by this alliance of Liberal and Tory unionists, causing a re-orientation of the party structure in 1886 that kept Union-oriented parties in power for all but three of the twenty years that followed. Moreover, as Home Rule came to be construed as ‘Rome Rule’ by Irish Protestants, the murky sectarianism that had long been a part of Irish life evolved into the rigidly confessional politics that still haunt modern Ulster.17 Gladstone submitted a subsequent Home Rule Bill, much the same as the first, during his short-lived fourth admi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction. The ‘Tips of Dangerous Icebergs’: Partition, the Nationalists of Northern Ireland and the Trapped Minority Framework
• 1. The Making of a Trapped Minority
• 2. ‘A Triumph of Gilbertian Humour’: Partition and the Anglo-Irish Treaty
• 3. Sisyphus Redux: Northern Nationalists and the Treaty Debates
• 4. ‘The Matter is Too Serious’: The Craig–Collins Pacts and Northern Conditions
• 5. ‘Hope Deferred’: The Northern Advisory Committee and Continued Instability in Ireland
• 6. The Woe that ‘Reckless Folly Brings’: The Irish Civil War and the Eclipse of the Boundary Commission
• 7. ‘No Other Policy’: Regime Change, Northern Policy and the ‘Hideous Skeletons’ of War
• 8. ‘Without Further Hugger-Mugger’: In Search of Peace and Clarity on the Boundary Question
• 9. ‘Not One Word!’: Watchman, Kevin O’Shiel and Dublin’s North Eastern Boundary Bureau
• 10. ‘Too Full of Secrecy and Mystery to be Wholesome’: Northern Nationalism, the Free State and Article 12 of the Treaty
• 11. ‘Do it Without Them’: Convening the Irish Boundary Commission
• 12. ‘Bartered and Sold’: The Wishes of the Inhabitants Denied
• Epilogue and Conclusion. ‘Blessed are they that Expect Nothing …’
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Plate Section