Back in 1917 and 1918, when the various Irish parties met in the Irish Convention to try to address the changed political conditions in Ireland after 1916, growing nationalism and the call for independence, Sinn Féin refused to take part. De Valera accused the British of undermining the process by assuring Ulster unionists that they would not be coerced into a republic. Bolstered by the assurance, unionists insisted on having their own way and, when the nationalists balked, the convention inevitably ended in failure. ‘It was evident to us,’ de Valera wrote before the convention reported, that ‘with the “coercion-of-Ulster is unthinkable” guarantee, the unionists would solidly maintain their original position.’. 1..
Thus de Valera must have known that partition would form part of any Anglo-Irish settlement when he gave a similar guarantee in writing to Lloyd George on 10 August 1921. ‘We agree with you,’ de Valera wrote, ‘that no common action can be secured by force.’ If the British stood aside, the Irish factions would settle partition among themselves without resorting to force.. 2.. ‘The minority in Ulster had a right to have their sentiments considered to the utmost limit,’ de Valera explained to a private session of the Dáil on 22 August 1921, according to the official . record. If the Republic were recognised he would be in favour of giving each county power to vote itself out of it if it so wished. Everyone knew what he meant: Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, which had Catholic nationalist majorities, should have the right to opt out of Northern Ireland. If this were agreed, nationalist Ireland would have to accept partition or coerce the remainder of Northern Ireland. He was opposed to such coercion.. 3..
The Treaty was concluded with the Irish delegation on behalf of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, even though the majority in Northern Ireland were not even consulted, but provisions were included in the Treaty to protect their interests. They were given the right to withdraw from the united Ireland within a month of the ratification of the Treaty, but in that event a boundary commission would be set up to redraw the border ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions’.. 4..
The Treaty’s provisions in relation to partition had the potential to be even more favourable than the county-option that de Valera had advocated the previous August, because in addition to Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, the boundary commission could also transfer other contiguous areas such as the city of Derry, and considerable territory in southern parts of Counties Armagh and Down. Shorn of so much territory, Collins argued, the remainder of Northern Ireland would become an unviable economic entity, and hence he believed that the Treaty contained the means to end partition.
Lloyd George sent one of his secretaries, Geoffrey Shakespeare, to Belfast with a copy of the Treaty and instructions to tell Sir James Craig, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, that ‘the . boundary commission is for the whole nine counties [of Ulster] and not for the six counties, if option is exercised’.. 5.. Shakespeare understood this to mean that parts of Counties Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal could be transferred to Northern Ireland as well as parts of the other six counties of Ulster being transferred to the Irish Free State.
‘We protest against the declared intention of your government to place Northern Ireland automatically in the Irish Free State,’ Craig wrote to Lloyd George. ‘It is true that Ulster is given the right to contract out, but she can only do so after automatic inclusion in the Irish Free State.’. 6.. On 9 December 1921, three days after the Treaty was signed, Lloyd George had told Craig that the boundary commission was little more than a technical matter. ‘You explained that it was intended only to make a slight readjustment of our boundary line, so as to bring into Northern Ireland loyalists who are now just outside our area, and to transfer, correspondingly, an equivalent number of those having Sinn Féin sympathies to the area of the Irish Free State,’ Craig reminded Lloyd George the following week.. 7..
During the Treaty debate in the House of Commons on 14 December, however, Lloyd George indicated that the boundary commission would likely transfer Fermanagh and Tyrone to the Irish Free State. The British, in trying to convince Craig, said privately that the boundary commission would merely re-draw the border to provide for pockets of Protestants in Counties Monaghan and Donegal to be included in the north, in return for similarly sized pockets of Roman Catholics in the six counties, so that the overall size of Northern Ireland would remain essentially the same. It was hardly surprising that Craig could ‘place no . reliance on the personal assurance’ that only minor adjustments were contemplated. ‘The Ulster cabinet will refuse to take part in the boundary commission and will proceed to any lengths necessary.’. 8..
‘For the unionists the language of treason and confrontation had become a habit,’ according to historian Paul Canning. ‘They found it difficult to speak otherwise.’. 9.. Craig had ironically been a vocal proponent of a boundary commission before partition was introduced in 1920. The British cabinet was told in December 1919, for instance, that he strongly favoured ‘a boundary commission to examine the distribution of population along the borders of the whole of the six counties, and to take a vote in those districts on either side of and immediately adjoining that boundary in which there was a doubt as to whether they would prefer to be included in the northern or the southern parliamentary area’.. 10..
The northern unionists were more bitterly opposed to the Treaty than de Valera. They saw it as a betrayal. As a result the unionist press seemed to be more favourable to the Long Fellow than to Collins, who was variously described in the Orange press as a ‘gun man’, a ‘dishonourable politician’, as well as a ‘conjuror’, who was ‘bereft of all honour’, and was prepared ‘to break his oath on the slightest pretext’. By contrast de Valera was described as honest and sincere in his ideals. ‘One can admire the attitude of Mr de Valera, who is out for an Irish Republic or nothing,’ one Orange journal noted. ‘These Orange journals are keenly desirous of seeing Mr de Valera’s policy prevailing,’ The Freeman’s Journal noted. ‘If Ireland would only reject Mick Collins along with the Treaty, Carsonia [a derogatory republican term for the six counties] would rejoice.’. 11..
. This attitude was somewhat surprising. Collins had challenged de Valera to present his alternative to the Treaty during the Dáil debate and de Valera proposed what became known as Document No. 2. This included the six partition clauses of the Treaty verbatim. The only difference was a declaration to the effect that ‘the right of any part of Ireland to be excluded from the supreme authority of the national parliament and government’ was not being recognised, but for the sake of internal peace and in order to divorce the Ulster question from the overall Anglo-Irish dispute, de Valera said he was ready to accept the partition clauses of the Treaty, even though they provided ‘an explicit recognition of the right on the part of Irishmen to secede from Ireland’. In other words, the unionists of Northern Ireland did not have a right to partition, but the rest of the island was willing to accept partition anyway. ‘We will take the same things as agreed on there,’ de Valera told the Dáil. ‘Let us not start to fight with Ulster.’. 12..
Although Craig stated publicly that he suspected that Lloyd George had given Collins a secret assurance in relation to the boundary commission, the Big Fellow publicly denied receiving any kind of guarantee from the British prime minister. Nevertheless he intimated privately that he had received assurances from members of the British delegation. Seán MacEoin, who had seconded Griffith’s motion proposing the Treaty in the Dáil, stated that Collins did actually get a commitment in writing from Lord Birkenhead. ‘If the six counties opted out of the all-Ireland parliament, the British government agreed that instead of one representative on the boundary commission they would accept Collins’ nomination of their man and this gave the Free State two . members instead of one,’ Birkenhead wrote to Collins, according to MacEoin. ‘This would rectify the situation in Ireland’s favour.’
‘Collins gave me that letter to read,’ MacEoin explained. But the letter vanished after Collins’ death.. 13.. It seems strange that nobody else ever mentioned seeing it.
Ernest Blythe rather contemptuously dismissed MacEoin’s story. As a northern Protestant and a member of both Griffith’s cabinet and the Provisional Government, Blythe had a deep personal interest in the Ulster situation, but he dismissed the suggestion that Griffith and Collins had ever been given such an assurance. Blythe later wrote:
If you knew Seán MacEoin even fairly well, you would know that he inclines to give play to his imagination and his sense of the dramatic when he is talking about other people and wants to make his story sound a little sensational. I venture to say that no one knowing him even fairly well would attach any importance to testimony from him which on a matter not directly concerning himself, was intrinsically unlikely. Birkenhead may, like all men, have been foolish in some respects, but he certainly was not enough of a blithering idiot to write a letter of the kind suggested. Whatever he may have done during negotiations by way of innuendo or private hint to suggest vaguely the possibility of substantial transfers to the Free State we can be sure that he did not speak as suggested by MacEoin.. 14..
Birkenhead was actually one of the British ministers who privately assured the unionists that the boundary commission would not transfer large areas. ‘The real truth is,’ he wrote to Arthur J. Balfour, ‘that Collins, very likely pressed by his own people and anxious to . appraise at their highest value the benefits which he had brought to them in a moment of excitement, committed himself unguardedly to this doctrine, and that it had no foundation whatever except in his overheated imagination.’. 15..
Had Griffith and Collins ever been given such an assurance, Blythe believed that they would undoubtedly have mentioned it in cabinet. ‘I was present at a good many cabinet meetings with both in the early months of 1922, and I never heard either of them say anything of the kind,’ he explained. ‘Of course both believed in making our maximum claim and both hoped for the best, and people may have confused what they said we should claim with what they believed we might get.’. 16..
Blythe was present when Kevin O’Higgins actually asked Lloyd George what the twenty-six counties were likely to get from the boundary commission. ‘He could not possibly forecast the decision of a judicial commission,’ the prime minister replied.. 17..
In his own account of a private meeting with Lloyd George just hours before the Treaty was signed, Collins indicated that the prime minister had referred to his predictions: ‘He remarked that I myself pointed out on a previous occasion that the north would be forced economically to come in.’. 18.. Lloyd George had not disagreed with the assessment, but that is vastly different from guaranteeing that the territory would actually be transferred.
The following day, less than twelve hours after the Treaty was signed, Lloyd George actually told his cabinet that ‘a boundary commission would possibly give Ulster more than she would lose’.. 19..
If the British did give any such assurance to Collins, surely he should have insisted on getting something in writing. Moreover he should have insisted on a proper explanation for the qualifying . phrase stipulating that the transfer of territory would be compatible with ‘economic and geographic conditions’.
In the circumstances, stories about secret assurances must be treated circumspectly. There was no doubt, however, that such stories were circulating, and they help to explain both the confidence on the southern side that the boundary commission would transfer considerable territory and the anxiety among unionists.