Arriving from Belfast at my in-laws’ house in Warrenpoint, overlooking Carlingford Lough and therefore the Border, I invariably receive a text message saying: “welcome to Ireland” (a bizarre experience to northerners who thought they had been there all along).
Sometimes a second message appears, a moment later, welcoming me back to the UK. These messages from mobile providers usually have exclamation marks and other excitable punctuation to alert travellers to changes in contractual terms as a result of a border drawn quickly and often arbitrarily a century ago.
Understanding why the Border exists has generated a universe of narrative history covering the Ulster Plantation onwards, but as Cormac Moore’s crisp and insightful new book The Root of All Evil shows, understanding how diplomatic manoeuvring and bureaucratic inertia created and sustained the Border is essential too. The Boundary Commission is a critical part of that story.
The commission has its centenary this year, and it is oddly fitting that it will pass with minimal commemoration. It was an anticlimactic coda to a revolutionary decade. But it was supposed to be a big deal, and was certainly understood as being so by the signatories who agreed its fatally vague terms in article 12 of the 1921 Treaty.
READ MORE
The principle of “temporary exclusion” from Home Rule for Ulster was conceded by John Redmond before the first World War. Fast forward through revolution and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 later created two devolved entities: Northern and Southern Ireland.
By the time of the Treaty talks only the first of these was functioning per the terms of the Act, with James Craig ensconced as prime minister and determined to turn Northern Ireland into “a new impregnable pale”. But the treaty talks were not just between the imperial British government and the 26 counties, but all of Ireland – represented by the plenipotentiaries of the provisional government.
Knowing the North would be an area of contention, the British split the Sinn Féin delegation by seeking secret agreement from Arthur Griffith (technically the lead Irish participant) that his delegation would, if pressed, accept continued exclusion of the six counties on the basis that a commission would be appointed to determine the wishes of local inhabitants and adjust the Border.
The Machiavellian Lloyd George appears to have given private assurances (or intimations) to Griffith that the commission would transfer vast swathes of the nationalist North, and at a minimum Tyrone and Fermanagh, into the South. These assurances were either lies or artfully constructed so as to be overinterpreted.
However, it was not Griffith alone, but the entire Irish delegation who agreed the obviously flawed (from a nationalist perspective) article 12, which qualified the commitment to local wishes being respected by adding the crucial words: “so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions”.
Moore’s book expertly explains how these 11 words served to “nullify” the entire claimed purpose of the commission – to respect the wishes of local inhabitants.
The maximum claim prepared by the Free State officials in the North Eastern Boundary Bureau would have moved the Border as far north as my hometown of Downpatrick in east Down. Not only did that not happen, but no major areas of Tyrone or Fermanagh were transferred, nor were Derry or Newry.
As Moore’s book shows, the fallout from the commission reinforced the Border rather than adjusting or undermining it. And if Griffith gets blamed for his naivety, it pales when set against the “appalling ineptitude” of Eoin MacNeill, the Free State appointee to the commission.
Of the three-man commission, MacNeill was working alongside a South African judge, ostensibly impartial but in reality steeped in imperial influence, and Joseph Fisher, Belfast publisher of the unionist Northern Whig newspaper.
[ Micheál Martin talks about Cormac Moore's book The Root of All EvilOpens in new window ]
Whereas Fisher constantly and strategically leaked inner deliberations of the commission to the unionist government and ultimately the press, MacNeill treated his role with chaste propriety, believing himself not to be “a representative of a Government nor ... an advocate for a particular point of view”.
In fact, MacNeill was literally a representative of the Free State government, and was chosen because his northern nationalist background would better enable him to articulate their views. His failure to competently perform either of these tasks culminated in his agreeing a boundary with minimal changes, and then resigning in ignominy when the recommendations were leaked to a newspaper to the humiliation of WT Cosgrave’s government. The report itself then was buried for half a century.
Moore’s book succeeds because he tells a story that is both very particular, with close reading of archive material and chronological detail but also, to use the cliche, mindful of the big picture. It wasn’t just the mistakes of Griffith or MacNeill, or the canniness of Lloyd George, or the obduracy of Craig, that shaped the Boundary Commission. It was “facts on the ground”, including the construction of Silent Valley reservoir in the Mournes as a source of Belfast’s water, and therefore an “economic circumstance” allowing the wishes of south Down residents to move into the Free State to be overridden.
But there was also the erection of customs posts by a Free State government desperate to demonstrate its newly won fiscal independence, and in doing so “unwittingly aiding” the unionist northern government in creating a sense of permanency around the Border.
As we consider the future of the Border in Ireland, and indeed an Ireland without a border, this book is a useful guide to some of how we got here and how we might avoid some of the same mistakes again.
