Border Ireland

From Partition to Brexit

Cathal McCall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781138587045
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429996221
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

When the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought an end to decades of conflict, which was mainly focused on the existence of the Irish border, most breathed a sigh of relief. Then came Brexit. Border Ireland: From Partition to Brexit introduces readers to the Irish border. It considers the process of bordering after the partition of Ireland, to the Good Friday Agreement and attendant debordering to the post-Brexit landscape. The UK's departure from the EU meant rebordering in some form. That departure also reinvigorated the push for a 'united Ireland' and borderlessness on the Island.

As well as providing a nuanced assessment that will be of interest to followers of UK/Irish relations and European studies, this book's analysis of processes of bordering/debordering/rebordering helps inform our understanding of borders more generally. Students and scholars of European studies, border studies, politics, and international relations, as well as anyone else with a general interest in the Irish border will find this book an insightful and historically-grounded aid to contemporary events.

1 Bordering

Introduction

State borders are imagined as ‘lines in the sand’ that divide economic, political, and social spaces. They involve a bordering process that encapsulates both border territorial demarcation and the subsequent management of the border in the context of border control. The power of the state is revealed in this demarcation and management.

Binary distinctions are justified and embedded by bordering, that is, distinctions between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, ‘threat’ and ‘security’, and ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ (Newman, 2006a, 2006b). State borders are parameters of possession, protection, and exclusion in the national imagination. Within these borders, the nation inhabits a territory, strives to preserve it from incursion by unwanted ‘outsiders’, and sanctifies it as ‘ours, not theirs’ through its collective memories and commemorations (Berezin, 2003, p. 7). However, for many nations, the state border cuts through the national territory, undermining the national ideal.

The Irish border was delivered by partition which was enacted by the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and confirmed by the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921). The treaty was agreed between the British government and a delegation of Irish republicans led by Michael Collins, a commander of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament, TD).¹ Dáil Éireann ratified the Treaty on 7 January 1922 by a slim majority² and, therefore, acquiesced to the partition of Ireland. Thus, two separate polities were created on the island: the Irish Free State (which became the Republic of Ireland in 1949)³ and Northern Ireland which remained a member of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The Irish border, which separates the two polities, is 499 km long and coincides with county boundaries that were fully established in the early seventeenth century (Rankin, 2005). It is ‘the line in the sand’ – or, more accurately, the line in the bog, the field, the lough, the town, the townland, and even the house – that divided the island of Ireland economically, politically, and socially.⁴ The power of the British state as an empire in retreat ensured its creation (Anderson and O’Dowd, 2007).

Brendan O’Leary defines partition as

a fresh border cut through at least one community’s national homeland, creating at least two separate units under different sovereigns or authorities. The usual justification of such a partition is that it will reduce or resolve a national, ethnic, or communal conflict, but its opponents usually protest the freshness, the artificiality of dividing a national homeland, illegitimately ‘tearing’ it apart.

(2019a, p. 370)

Irish nationalists were the opponents of partition while Ulster British unionists became the justifiers. The border served to embed a binary distinction between Irish nationalist (nominally Catholic) and Ulster British unionist (nominally Protestant) communities and identities and, for Ulster British unionists, to sanctify Northern Ireland as ‘ours, not theirs’.⁵

Prior to partition, and certainly before the Home Rule crisis (1910–4), Ulster Protestants generally regarded themselves to be Irish. After all, the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland wherein English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh identities could be conceived of as complementary to an umbrella British identity. However, the rise of Irish republicanism and partition ruptured the link between Britishness and Irishness. Irish unionism retreated into Ulster unionism and became a Protestant British nationalism with its own de facto territory of Northern Ireland – ‘ours, not theirs’ – largely left to its own devices by the British government and able to pursue its exclusionary cultural, economic and political interests, and identity (O’Leary, 2019a, p. 359). Irish nationals in Northern Ireland, accounting for approximately one-third of the population, were marooned in a territory that became ‘theirs, not ours’.

After the partition of the island of Ireland became a reality bordering was driven by state-building on both sides of the border and by antagonism between the Irish state and the Ulster British unionist administration in Northern Ireland. However, in the public sector, a significant degree of ‘quiet’, practical North–South cooperation led by senior civil servants was evident (Kennedy, 2000). Between 1959 and 1965, North–South cooperation became ‘loud’ and political. It was embodied by the rapprochement between Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Seán Lemass and Northern Ireland prime minister Terence O’Neill. The decades-long violent conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, beginning in 1969, ended this period of North–South rapprochement.

Despite ‘the Troubles’, bordering remained incomplete. When the balance of violent conflict shifted from urban centres to the Irish border in the 1980s, British security forces had trouble coping with local mobile IRA units whose insurgents had an in-depth knowledge of the complex border terrain. Despite this challenge, the British border security regime remained spatially patchy. The British government recognised that a continuous, ‘hard’, securitised border would pay political dividends for Irish republican insurgents and would risk further alienating Irish nationalist borderlanders and the wider Irish national population on the island and further afield.

Oppositional antagonism to bordering was periodically evident in the peripheral and marginalised borderlands, where borderlanders were confronted with border infrastructure and closed border roads. Those who engaged in oppositional antagonism, domestic and commercial smuggling, and other acts of evasion from state authority offered some economic and social compensation (Leary, 2016).

This chapter begins with a consideration of the concepts of borders and bordering. It then charts the course of ‘line in the sand’ bordering on the island of Ireland from 1921 and details opposition to it. It also outlines countervailing North–South cooperation initiatives and the partiality of the border security regime during the Troubles. Finally, it considers the impact of bordering on borderland communities.

Borders and bordering

The raison d’être of state borders is to divide a territory into political, economic, and social spaces. An understanding of borders and bordering is informed by the analytical lens employed. In magisterial overviews of border studies, geographer David Newman navigated different approaches to studying borders and bordering that have been associated with different academic disciplines. Geographers have conceptualised borders as ‘lines in the sand’ that divide economic, political, and social spaces and are driven by a bordering process entailing both demarcation and management functions. Political scientists have tended to focus on the power relations involved in that demarcation and management (including border reconfiguration). Sociologists and anthropologists have been primarily concerned with binary distinctions when studying borders, that is distinctions between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, ‘threat’ and ‘security’, and ‘include’ and ‘exclude’(Newman, 2006a, pp. 143–7, 2006b, p. 176).⁶

The contemporary thesis that borders and border guards are everywhere and that bordering is an open-ended process involving the profiling and surveillance of whole populations has become increasingly salient as states and blocs of states seek to control migratory flows, that is who shall be included and who shall be excluded. Border technologies are of central interest in this thesis, as are border guards, employers, landlords, educationalists, and other ‘gatekeepers’ who are co-opted as participants in a border security regime (Amoore, 2006; Sassen, 2014; Topak et al., 2015).

The borders are everywhere thesis is the preserve of ‘critical border studies’, a sub-discipline of international relations, which concentrates on the borders/security nexus. Herein, borders ‘beyond the line in the sand’, that is the multifarious nodes of a state security regime, are of central importance (Parker et al., 2009) Amilhat-Szary and Girant attempted to encapsulate this approach in their ‘borderities’ concept which considers ‘the multiple rules and experiences of what a border can be’ (2015, p. 30). ‘Critical border studies’ implies that border studies is uncritical and passé, not least because state territorial borders and border regions are its key point of departure. However, Liam O’Dowd cautioned that

much contemporary border study lacks an adequate historical analysis of state and nation formation: they over-emphasise the novelty of contemporary forms of border change and globalization and, in the process, fail to register the extent to which we continue to live in a ‘world of diverse states’, shot through with the legacy of empires, past and present’.

(2010, p. 1034)

From this border studies perspective, the ‘line in the sand’ remains the central focus for bordering, debordering, and rebordering in twenty-first-century Ireland as it was in the twentieth century.

Challenges to bordering Ireland, 1920–60

Challenges to bordering Ireland were evident from the outset. Initially, the Government of Ireland Act (1920) made provision for a Council of Ireland to act as an institutional bridge between two devolved parliaments in Ireland, one in the North and one in the South. At the second reading of the bill on 29 March 1920, James Macpherson (chief secretary for Ireland) claimed that the Council of Ireland could become ‘virtually a Parliament for all Ireland, and from that stage to complete union is but a very slight and very easy transition’.⁷ Section 2(1) of the 1920 act outlined the functions of the council as facilitating harmonious action between the two parliaments, the promotion of a common approach to all-island matters, and the administration of services that were amenable to an all-island approach.⁸ However, this outline was vague. The lack of specificity combined with the dynamics of divergent Irish nationalist and Ulster British unionist political aspirations, violence, and state-building on both sides of the border conspired to fatally undermine the Council of Ireland (Tannam, 1999).

Ulster British unionists focused on the establishment of a Northern Ireland government and parliament from scratch and had little interest in the Council of Ireland (Buckland, 2001, p. 212). Meanwhile, the Irish Free State government was unenthusiastic about the Council of Ireland because participation would symbolise its recognition of the Northern parliament and a border which excluded the six counties of Northern Ireland from the thirty-two-county Irish national territorial ideal. In the event, divergent nationalist/unionist political aspirations, separate state-building in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, and North–South antagonism fuelled the bordering ahead.

The Craig/Collins Pacts of 1922 – made between Michael Collins, then head of the Provisional Government in the South (with Arthur Griffith), and Sir James Craig, the first prime minister of Northern Ireland – offered brief hope for the incremental development of North–South political cooperation between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. One of the terms of the first pact that Collins and Craig agreed to was that ‘[t]he two governments to endeavour to devise a more suitable system than the Council of Ireland for dealing with problems affecting all Ireland’.⁹ Their agreement intimated that the new Irish border could be configured as a political, economic, cultural, and intellectual bridge between the two new polities on the island rather than as a barrier between them.

Such a configuration had potential advantages for Ulster British unionists in Northern Ireland. Acco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bordering
• 2 Debordering|State
• 3 Debordering|Communities
• 4 Rebordering
• 5 Borderlessness
• Conclusion
• References
• Index