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Principal Address
Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, Queen’s University Belfast
Recovering imagined futures in nationalist Ireland, in the summer of 1921 Dr Margaret O’Callaghan An Dr Margaret O’Callaghan
A Uachtaráin, Fellow Speakers – It is a great honour to be asked to participate in Machnamh. I have been asked by the President to reflect on the idea of recovering imagined futures in the Irish independence struggle and its historiography from the perspective of the summer of 1921. My colleagues have been asked to reflect on hope, class and gender, and on freedom as personal for women’s participation in politics. I hope also to provide contexts for their reflections. We know what happened after that summer of the Truce, but the protagonists at the time did not. I am going to look backwards from that crucial summer of 1921 and to reflect on some futures imagined both then and in the decades before.
On 22 June 1921 King George V opened the parliament of Northern Ireland and a month later the military Truce of July 1921 suggested a way for the end of the British-Irish war of the previous two years. Settlement talks between Britain and Dáil representatives were anticipated. Looking back at that summer of 1921 the key shape to see here is that British policy decisions have already put in place an entity called Northern Ireland, prior to any ceasefire, talks, or future accommodation with the rest of Ireland. Éamon De Valera and Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and William T. Cosgrave, countless volunteers in the field, were preoccupied by the hope of an imminent all-Ireland settlement; but British policy had1 already put in place the reality of a new six county Northern Ireland. It would take a very brave man, Edward Carson, the leader of Ulster Unionism said to Andrew Bonar Law his Conservative ally in May 1921, to take away Ulster’s parliament.2
1
The Government of Ireland Act 1920
2
Quoted in Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path; British Government and Irish Revolution1910-1922 (London, 2013), 255.
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