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August 12 - October 22, 2022
As a result of these, the south and south-western parts of the country were ultimately hived off into a Roman Catholic–dominated Irish Free State with the same constitutional status as either Australia or Canada. This state evolved into today’s Republic of Ireland.
However, having been fully informed of what was on offer, he managed to evade going back to London for the treaty negotiations,
Collins had warned even before the truce was declared that once it came into operation his principal weapon, secrecy, was gone.
Collins did not regard the treaty as a perfect solution but as a ‘stepping stone’, as he put it, to full and final freedom.
The sizeable Catholic minority in the northern state viewed the treaty with considerable apprehension because of the prospect of being handed over to the tender mercies of the Unionist and Protestant majority.
de Valera and his cohorts concentrated their fire on the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown which dominion status entailed. Incredible as it might appear today, partition was almost overlooked in the endless arguments about the Oath, and forms of government.
The Machiavellian de Valera appears however to have been motivated, at least in part, by rivalry with Collins and pique at the fact that the treaty was signed without his consent. Certainly in subsequent years he did more to validate Collins’s ‘stepping stone’ theory than anyone else in the manner in which he jettisoned the IRA and used the Free State apparatus to work towards dispensing with the link with the Crown.
I discovered that Collins, in his capacity as head of government, commander-in-chief of the Free State Army, and, possibly more importantly, head of the IRB, had used the ‘stepping stone’ as a base for undeclared military actions against the north.
In the disorder of the time, undercover squads drawn from the B-Specials (the north’s armed, Protestant militia), the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the British Army seemed to be able to murder Catholics at will.
The aftermath of the death and destruction of the civil war, the waste, and above all the disillusionment – that this was what the independence struggle, ‘that delirium of the brave’, had led to – drained the infant Free State of vision, political energy and financial resources.
It is to the credit of the first Free State administration that democracy survived in such conditions.
said he was prepared for war if ‘one inch of the loved soil of Ulster’ was removed by the commission.
No one in authority in London pointed out that this constituted a violation of the treaty.
Now, in the south, they were altered to take a Catholic complexion. The legal system was changed to allow for prohibitions on abortion, contraception, divorce and the introduction of censorship. While there was no official policy of discrimination against Protestants, the ethos of the south became unwelcoming to aspects of Protestantism.
‘protestant parliament for a protestant people’,
But it was nevertheless a benign, democratic Roman Catholic state.
It was a theocratic, frankly sectarian document which recognised God in its preamble and the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church in its text.
In Articles 2 and 3 it reiterated the republican ideal by making a specific claim to Northern Ireland.
By contrast, de Valera having renegotiated the return of a number of ports deeded to Britain in the treaty which would have been valuable in convoy protection, the south decided to remain neutral. Therefore, to all the historical baggage inclining London towards Belfast’s side of the argument, there was added a great weight of wartime obligation.
a guarantee that there would be no change in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland without the consent of the assembly at Stormont.
The extra land would have brought with it extra Catholics and would, as Carson had said, have made for assimilation into a united Ireland.
Churchill, like Lloyd George, wanted the six-county state set up at whatever cost, in whatever shape, for one overriding reason – to get Ireland off the British agenda.
In the event, however, what was created was a fundamentally undemocratic state specifically designed to prevent power changing hands, or to allow reform to take place from within by the normal democratic processes of education, organisation, and the ballot box.
In the event the one that did was the housing question.
had the reputation amongst Currie’s fellow Catholics of being a ‘decent enough old sort’.
Those facts did not constitute a problem. The fact of his religion did. Were he a Protestant he would have been rehoused long ago.
They ceased to either speak or mingle with them until after the ‘twalfth’, when normal Irish friendly relationships would re-establish themselves for another year as though nothing had happened.
It at least enabled him to live in the land of his forebears, a pleasant land, free of crime, where traditional family values flourished
Though people, Protestant and Catholic, lived side by side literally, there was very little contact between them.
There was no point in applying for jobs under the local authorities or within the Northern Ireland civil service for instance. Nor in a whole lot of private employments, the shipyard and the aircraft factory [Short Brothers, and Harland and Wolff in Belfast] and so forth.
But the abolition of PR after the state was set up, and the practice of gerrymandering and discrimination, which went hand in hand with the abolition, meant that for all of my youth it was a Unionist-dominated council.
The population of Derry was roughly two-thirds Catholic to one-third Protestant, and the Catholic population kept growing.
The enforcement of these conditions was not due to an inherent cruelty on the Unionists’ part. Inefficiency played a role, because they did not build enough houses anyway for either Catholic or Protestant, but, overall, housing policy had a basic political goal.
although long abolished in England both business and property votes still counted in local elections
The general vote was confined to the occupier of a house and his wife. Occupiers’ children over twenty-one, and any servants or subtenants in a house, were excluded from the local franchise.
The purpose of the exercise was to ensure that Unionists had continued supremacy in the areas where in fact they were in the minority. Places like Derry, Armagh, Dungannon, Enniskillen and so on. This was the only way in which the Unionists could remain in control. That’s why housing was such a fundamental matter. The allocation of a public authority house was not just the allocation of a house. It was the allocation of two votes.
The activities of students on the continent of Europe, and of Martin Luther King and his followers in America, were beginning to work their alchemy in Northern Ireland also.
Inspired by the new ideas of protest emanating from the civil rights movements abroad, two aggrieved local families, the Goodfellows and the McKennas, staged squats in vacant council houses.
But then Austin Currie decided that the time had come for such a protest and personally led a third sit-in. This one caught the headlines because Currie was an MP.
They thus legally obtained more votes than there were voters on the electoral lists.
no one in the Unionist Party ‘considered it incongruous that 80, 000 people in Belfast should be denied a Local Government vote while 12, 091 graduates at the University could claim a sizeable parliamentary representation’.
The discrimination was even greater in the case of local government where, as can be seen in the table above, some 220, 000 voters were disenfranchised from the number shown on the Westminster lists.
Deep in the Unionists’ psyche there still lurks a hope that some contemporary apprentice boys will arise to make a similar gesture in the faces of oncoming liberalism, Dublin, Irish-America, the media, and betrayal from London.
What this meant in practice was that in 1965 – while there were only a handful of unhoused Protestants – there were 2, 000 Catholic families on the city’s waiting lists. Of the 177 employees of Londonderry Corporation, 145 were Protestants, earning a total of £124, 424. Thirty-two were Catholics, earning £20, 424.
Emigration was the reason why the ratio of Protestant to Catholic remained at the same two-thirds:one-third ratio which had obtained when the Government of Ireland Act was passed forty years earlier in 1920 – despite the high Catholic birth rate.
how did England allow a political slum like the Six Counties, whose public housing system and much else besides embodied such marked departures from British practice, to develop into what London claimed to regard as as much a part of the UK as either Scotland or Wales?
a graveyard of political reputations.
Put bluntly, what Callaghan was saying was that it took a crisis, not to ‘enable’, but to force Britain to do something about the political slum which it had allowed to fester under its jurisdiction for half a century.
since 1922 there had been a Speaker’s ruling that Northern Ireland matters could not be raised in the House of Commons.
The original ruling, which quickly became settled policy, was to prevent discussion of sectarian assassinations, which at the time were mostly of Catholics.
