32 Counties

The Failure of Partition and the Case for a United Ireland

Kieran Allen

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780745344171
• eBook ISBN: 9780745344195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'This is Irish history seen anew, from below, bristling with practical lessons for working-class struggle today' - Eamonn McCann

The 32 counties of Ireland were divided through imperial terror and gerrymandering. Partition was borne from a Tory strategy to defend the British Empire and has spawned a 'carnival of reaction' in Irish politics ever since. Over the last 100 years, conservative forces have dominated both states offering religious identity as a diversion from economic failures and inequality.

Through a sharp analysis of the history of partition, Kieran Allen rejects the view that the 'two cultures' of Catholic and Protestant communities lock people into permanent antagonism. Instead, the sectarian states have kept its citizens divided through political and economic measures like austerity, competition for reduced services and low wages.

Overturning conventional narratives, 32 Counties evokes the tradition of James Connolly and calls for an Irish unity movement from below to unitethe North and the Republic into a secular, socialist and united Ireland.

1

‘A Carnival of Reaction’: The Origins of Partition

In June 2021, Northern Ireland will have existed for one hundred years. It has its own parliament, police force and judiciary and operates like any other state with a civil service who pore over the details of its economy. It is anomalous in some ways, certainly. The Prime Minister is called the First Minister and must seek the agreement of the Deputy First Minister. Tax-raising powers are limited and its finances are dependent on the British Exchequer. Nevertheless, Northern Ireland still exists – and few imagined that it would last one hundred years. Certainly not Edward Carson, the founder of Ulster unionism, whose statue stands in front of Stormont, the Northern Ireland Parliament Buildings, portrayed in a moment of passionate oratory. Were his ghost to unshackle itself from its stone encasement, he could only look aghast as his followers sit alongside former Irish Republican Army (IRA) operatives. But even he would be surprised that his state has lasted so long because he had a profound ambiguity about the precise border and shape of that state.

Edward Carson was primarily a defender of British empire and, consequently, an ardent opponent of Home Rule for Ireland. When the first Home Rule Bill to give limited autonomy to a Dublin parliament was proposed in 1886, he was totally opposed. He switched his allegiance from supporting the Liberals to the Tories but, as his admiring biographer stated, ‘Carson knew next to nothing of the northern province of Ulster… Even then “Ulster” was a term which was used loosely.’¹ However, he recognised that the most determined opponents of Home Rule lay there and believed that if they were willing to threaten force, Home Rule for the whole island could be stopped. He was never enthusiastic about a separate Northern parliament and just as it was about to be established, stated that ‘I cannot understand why we should ask them to take a parliament which they never demanded and do not want.’²

His ambiguity about the very concept of ‘Ulster’ was evident in two key debates in the House of Commons. In June 1912, a backbench Liberal, Thomas Agar-Roberts, became the first person to propose the partition of Ireland when he moved an amendment to the Home Rule Bill to exclude four counties – Antrim, Armagh, Down and Londonderry – from its scope. Carson voted for this amendment, but a few months later he introduced his own amendment to the Bill, this time proposing that the whole nine-county province of Ulster be excluded from Home Rule. He argued that ‘It is far better statesmanship to exclude the whole of Ulster than to select counties which are nearly, so to speak, all the one way.’³ By ‘all one way’, he meant either Catholic or Protestant. Carson’s voting record is just one indication of the confusion surrounding the exact borders of a partitioned Ireland. In terms of geography ‘Ulster’ denoted one of the four provinces of Ireland and was composed of nine counties. Yet there was no clarity on what the political term ‘Ulster’ meant subsequently. Unionist leaders sometimes spoke of the ‘North East Ulster’, or ‘Protestant Ulster’ or just plain Ulster.

This ambiguity on the geographical limits of the Northern state is of some significance. Contrary to binary ethnonational explanations of the conflict based on British and Irish identities, or indeed theories of two nations, unionist national ‘identity’ has never been fixed. The allegiance of unionism to a particular territory was in fact pragmatically driven. It is almost universally agreed that a basic criterion for any definition of nationality is that it points to a defined and delineated territory. Yet unionism shifted from an all-Ireland unionism, to an Ulster unionism, to a six-county unionism. These shifts took place over a very short period of time, in line with the pragmatic interests of unionist elites rather than some deep-seated and immutable nationalism or identity.

The moment of truth came when Walter Long was charged by the British government with solving the Irish question in 1919 by chairing a committee to draft a Government of Ireland Bill. Long was a high Tory, descended from a mix of the English gentry and the Irish ascendency, and an ardent defender of landlord interests in Ireland. He was a former leader of the Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party and, as one of his biographers noted, ‘held the Catholic Irish in contempt, thinking of them as clearly inferior to the English, both racially and culturally’.⁴ His parliamentary secretary was James Craig, the future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. As a scion of the British establishment, Long was not motivated by any consideration of a balance between ethnic identities but rather by how best to defend the British empire when faced with rebellion in Ireland.

Long regarded the Sinn Féin rebels, who had launched a struggle for an independent republican Ireland, as ‘vile criminals [who] must be exterminated’.⁵ In May 1919 he had proposed the hiring of ex-servicemen to bolster the Royal Irish Constabulary – these subsequently became known as the Black and Tans, feared for the reign of terror they launched on the country. Long assumed that the British empire could defeat republican insurgents in a military combat, but he also thought there was need for a defensive political strategy to undermine Irish independence. His parliamentary committee charged with drafting a Government of Ireland Bill, therefore, proposed the creation of an Ulster parliament so that military action was complemented with a political initiative. This was to be a parliament for a nine-county Ulster and would sit alongside a Dublin parliament. This, he regarded, as a temporary arrangement, a prelude to the reunification of Ireland within a more federated British empire. His original proposals included the formation of a Council of Ireland, to which both Irish parliaments would devolve their powers, and which would lead to ‘the peaceful evolution of a single parliament for all Ireland’.⁶ As an arch unionist, Long did not envisage a six-county state. He never dreamed that it was a natural or inevitable boundary to express a particular identity.

However, Walter Long quickly learnt he was on the wrong track when he visited Ireland shortly after his proposals became known – visit may be a slight exaggeration as most of the time he stayed on his yacht, Enchantress, which was docked in Dun Laoghaire. Nevertheless, he got a clear message about the reluctance of Northern unionists and in a memo to Lloyd George, he noted their concern that ‘the inclusion of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan would provide such an excess of strength to the Roman Catholic party that the supremacy of the unionists would be seriously threatened’.⁷ In other words, they thought that the loyal, British part of Ireland could not encompass all of Ulster. Or as James Craig MP put it, the six counties were the largest area where there was ‘a decisive Protestant majority in which unionist power could be guaranteed, in perpetuity’.⁸ This shift in policy brought to the surface tensions within the ranks of Irish unionism. In May 1920, when the Ulster Unionist Council finally voted by a margin of 310 to 80 to accept a six-county state, there was a split in their ranks. Southern-based unionists broke off to form a short-lived Unionist Anti-Partition League led by prominent businesspeople including Rupert Guinness – Lord Iveagh, Sir John Arnott, Andrew Jameson and Maurice Dockrell.

The current Northern state, therefore, did not arise from a determined plan. It was never the stated goal of any major social or proto-national movement. Nobody suggested before partition that the six counties reflected a ‘natural’ ethnic identity. Its precise shape arose from a series of discussions between some, but not all, supporters of the British empire. It was forged as a backlash against a struggle to break free of that empire, a ‘fall back policy of an imperial state thrown onto the defensive during a revolutionary period’.⁹ The result was the creation of not just ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’ – but one where Catholics would always be in a minority and viewed as the internal enemy. The addition of counties Tyrone and Fermanagh, which had nationalist majorities, meant that the state was not too small to survive but still had an inbuilt Protestant majority. Hence its peculiarity and hidden in this paradox was a deeper one.

The official rationale for a six-county state was that it rested on a fixed identity. It was to be a home for those who were Protestant, unionist, pro-British and supportive of empire. Yet identities are never one-dimensional or static. The imposition of fixed, permanent identities defined against other fixed identities was vastly strengthened by the creation of the Northern state. Often identities change, become hybrid, or criss-cross with other identities as time progresses. Think of how the city of Glasgow became synonymous with a tradition of working-class militancy – but was also a city riven with sectarian conflict. Support for the soccer clubs like Celtic or Rangers remain to this day markers of ‘identity’, but they recede in significance when there are battles over issues like the poll tax or wider debates on Scottish independence. Northern Ireland, however, had a different dynamic from the very start. The construction of a Protestant state with an inbuilt large Catholic minority was designed to cement identities into permanent blocks. That in turn depended on drawing communal barriers against a disloyal minority who might undermine it. Put simply, the inclusion of a substantial nationalist minority was not just a matter of creating an economic and material viability for the new state. It was a precondition for maintaining Northern Ireland as a distinct ‘loyalist’ entity. The unionist elite simply exploited the fact that Catholics and Protestants lived side by side rather than embarking on any attempt at mass ethnic cleansing.

TERROR AND GERRYMANDERING

The new state was born in violence and it could hardly have been otherwise when a third of its population did not want to be part of it. Given their beleaguered status, Northern Catholics were often not openly or actively enthusiastic about the IRA’s campaign which was raging south of the new border. Whereas the rest of the country voted overwhelmingly for Sinn Féin in 1918, the older Home Rule party, which favoured limited autonomy within the empire, retained a support base among Northern nationalists, winning four seats in what became Northern Ireland. In 1920, for example, there were fewer than 100 Sinn Féin members in Belfast but there were 7,000 in the United Irish League, the northern version of the Home Rule party led by Joe Devlin. Sinn Féin’s main support base lay in the west of the province, particularly in Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh. Nevertheless, the mere existence of a substantial minority within the proposed boundaries of the Northern state was deemed a threat to unionist power. This became evident in local elections held in January and June 1920, which were conducted under the proportional representation system, just before a Northern parliament was established.

In the six-county area, nationalists won control of ten urban councils, including Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen, Newry and Strabane and 13 rural councils. In Derry, a city with a mythological status in the history of unionism, nationalists took control. More significant in some ways was the emergence of the Labour Party in Belfast which, with 13 seats, became the main opposition to the Unionist Party. Labour’s breakthrough followed a wave of working-class militancy which culminated in a massive strike in 1919 for a 44-hour week involving 60,000 workers. These twin opponents of unionist hegemony needed to be smashed if a stable unionist regime was to be established and this was achieved through systematic violence and state repression.

By 1920 loyalist vigilantes had started calling themselves the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the name that had originally been used by armed militias who pledged to resist Home Rule by force. One of their first major interventions occurred in Derry in response to the electoral victory of nationalists in the local council. On 19 June, the UVF began by firing shots into Catholic areas, killing innocent bystanders. Rioting and IRA retaliation ensued but when a curfew was imposed on the city, the search for arms was concentrated in the Catholic areas. As the historian Jonathan Bardon noted, ‘A striking feature of the army’s intervention in Derry was its close alignment with the UVF.’¹⁰ In all, 20 people were murdered during the Derry riots, 15 Catholics and five Protestants. In the same month, the Ulster Unionist Council decided to officially revive the UVF and placed advertisements in newspapers calling on loyalists to enlist. Carson then used the occasion of the annual Orange procession on 12 July to deliberately inflame the situation. Adopting his familiar stance of pressing for stronger action from the British empire, he said, ‘if the British government are unable to deal with these matters, they ought to ask somebody else to deal with them… we know well that the real battlefields of Ireland in relation to a republic must be Ulster… We in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Fein.’¹¹

One week later, pogroms and ethnic cleansing started in the aftermath of the funeral of Colonel Gerard Smyth, a divisional police commissioner for Munster who had been assassinated by the IRA. Smyth had been one of the main advocates of shooting republicans on sight, telling police officers under his command that ‘the more you shoot, the better I like you and I assure you that no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man’.¹² After his funeral in Banbridge, loyalists attacked Catholics in the town and the neighbouring Dromore.

Shortly afterwards, the Belfast Protestant Association called a meeting in the Harland and Wolff shipyards for all unionist and Protestant workers to which thousands showed up and passed a resolution not to work alongside those who were ‘non-loyal’.¹³ A mob then assembled to chase out Catholics and ‘rotten Prods’ who had shown insufficient loyalty to the empire. Among the latter were leaders of the 1919 strike and as one of them, James Baird, stated, ‘Every man who was prominently known in the Labour movement… was expelled from his work.’¹⁴ The expulsions spread to the main workplaces in Belfast and by the end of it an estimated 10,000 workers or about 10 per cent of the nationalist population of the city were driven out. The sectarian conflict then spread from workplaces to the streets with injuries and deaths following. In August, the IRA assassinated a police officer, Oswald Swanzy, who had been involved in the murder of Thomas MacCurtain, the Lord Mayor of Cork. Swanzy’s killing occurred in Lisburn and in retaliation, loyalists launched a pogrom against the town’s small Catholic minority. Over the course of three days, 300 homes were destroyed and Catholics were forced to flee on foot to Belfast. A London Times reporter claimed that ‘the war on Catholics is a deliberate and organised attempt. . . to drive the Catholic Irish out of North East Ulster’.¹⁵ While this may be an exaggeration, there can be little doubt that the birth of the Northern state coincided with attempts to terrorise the minority who did not want to belong to it. The period from 1920 to 1922 is one of escalating violence, reaching its crescendo in May 1922 when 66 civilians were killed – 44 Catholics and 22 Protestants.

Despite the fact that the violence was often led by the illegal UVF, this force was soon integrated into the official apparatus of the British state. James Craig, who was then a junior minister in the British cabinet, proposed the creation of a new volunteer constabulary which would be raised from the loyal population. Craig, who would soon become the first Prime Minister of the Northern state, wanted a local force that would be controlled by unionists. The volunteer constabulary was supposed to assist the police force but was organi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 ‘A Carnival of Reaction’: The Origins of Partition
• 2 Republicans and Loyalists
• 3 British Imperialism
• 4 Managed Sectarianism
• 5 Protestant Workers
• 6 The Return of the National Question
• 7 The Left and Irish Unity
• 8 What Kind of United Ireland?
• Notes
• Index