s i s i r C The Northern as BY MÍCHEÁL Mac DONNCHA The 50th anniversary of the crisis of August 1969 should not be seen solely in the context of the Six Counties. This was a crisis that shook all of Ireland and had reverberations among the Irish across the world. It roused public opinion to support Northern nationalists, it both divided and revived the Republican Movement and caused a rift that nearly toppled the Fianna Fáil government. In theory all political parties in the 26 Counties were opposed to Partition. In practice all governments since 1922 had stopped short of confrontation with the British government on the issue. The first Free State government, that of Cumann na nGaedhal,
The reaction in the 26 Counties to the Civil Rights movement was overwhelmingly sympathetic in 1925 had signed a humiliating agreement with the British that effectively cemented Partition. This was after the Boundary Commission, a key factor in persuading Michael Collins to sign the Treaty, was exposed as a sham. Far from ceding so much territory to the Free State as to make the Northern Ireland state unworkable, as Collins thought it would, the Commission actually proposed to cede Free State territory. Even the virulently antiRepublican ‘Irish Independent’ newspaper said that if such an outcome had been anticipated then Collins and Arthur Griffith would never have signed the Treaty. This debacle was one of the factors that helped the rise of Fianna Fáil from its founding in 1926 until de Valera led it into 52
government for the first time in 1932. Dev maintained his antiPartition rhetoric throughout his career and received repeated electoral mandates on that basis. While his critics, both from a Republican and a pro-British point of view, can point out that the rhetoric was not matched by action, the fact remains that successive British governments continued to deny the expressed wish of the majority of the Irish people for a United Ireland. It is often said that people in the 26 Counties knew little of the realities of the discrimination and second-class citizenship experienced by nationalists in the Orange State. There is some truth in that but that does not mean it was not a political issue. That does not mean it was not raised in public discourse and in diplomatic contacts between the Irish and British governments and wider international opinion – it was. But once again, the action or lack of action of successive Irish governments belied the rhetoric. Anti-Partition campaigns involving ‘respectable’ politicians in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s were among the influences that led young people to join the reorganised IRA of that period, focussed on a renewed effort to end Partition by an armed campaign along the Border and in the Six Counties. But the response of de Valera, in his last term as Taoiseach in 1957, was to impose internment without trial of Republicans, just as the Orange government in Stormont had done. The end of the IRA’s Border campaign in 1962 led to disillusionment and a reassessment of Republican strategy that continued for several years. As part of that re-orientation Republicans were active in the Civil Rights Movement in the North, among people of many different political hues and none. The momentum achieved by that movement did not come from the Republican involvement but from the reality of the Orange state itself, as experienced by nationalists for nearly 50 years. A ISSUE NUMBER 3 – 2019 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 3 anphoblacht
