Introduction
ARTICLE 12 OF THE 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty states:
a Commission consisting of three persons, one to be appointed by the Government of the Irish Free State, one to be appointed by the Government of Northern Ireland, and one who shall be Chairman to be appointed by the British Government shall determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland, and for the purposes of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, and of this instrument, the boundary of Northern Ireland shall be such as may be determined by such Commission.1
The Irish Boundary Commission was offered by the British government as a concession to Sinn Féin and Irish nationalism during negotiations on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, in the hope of bringing about a permanent peace between Britain and Ireland. The Sinn Féin plenipotentiaries accepted the Boundary Commission as a way to limit the consequences of the partition of Ireland, while for the British signatories it offered a path to an agreement on the troublesome Irish question that had dominated British party politics for decades.
Ireland had been arbitrarily partitioned by the British government under the Government of Ireland Act 1920 to appease Ulster unionists, whose opposition to a Home Rule government had been resolute since
the Third Home Rule crisis ten years earlier. Irish nationalists had never accepted this partitioning, but once the already established Northern Ireland government rejected British calls for the inclusion of the six counties in an all-Ireland parliament, the Treaty negotiations pivoted towards the establishment of a boundary commission on Ulster to overcome the impasse and go some way to meet the demands of the nationalists. Although boundary commissions had helped to resolve border disputes in post-First World War Europe, the nature and wording of the commission agreed to by Sinn Féin was at the heart of many of the subsequent problems Irish nationalists encountered. The devil was in the details.
Under the Treaty, the Irish Boundary Commission was to consist of three commissioners, one appointed by the Irish Free State government, one by the Northern Ireland government, and the chairman by the British government. The job of the commissioners was to deliberate on the boundary question in Ireland. They were afforded full powers to redraw the boundary line based on those deliberations. The vague wording of Article 12 gave great latitude to the commissioners to interpret the Boundary Commission’s terms of reference as they saw fit, and with the Free State and Northern government representatives cancelling each other out, considerable control was vested with the British-appointed chairman.
The Boundary Commissioners worked intensively for a year, receiving submissions, interviewing witnesses, visiting contested areas and using different tools and data to reach a decision on a new boundary line. Most of their work, as with the work of the governments beforehand, particularly that of the Free State government and its North Eastern Boundary Bureau, came to nought as there was no change to the border from the one provided for under the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Despite those efforts and the considerable political controversy that surrounded the Irish Boundary Commission throughout its existence, not one person or acre of land was transferred under the Commission’s remit.
While the tale of the Irish Boundary Commission could be accused of being one about nothing, given the ultimate outcome, the complex and fascinating story reveals much about the nature of Ireland’s partition
and about the Free State’s attempts to assert its independence on the one hand and the British government’s efforts to maintain the reach of its global empire on the other. The Irish Boundary Commission, in the words of Kieran Rankin, ‘served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State’s relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland’s six counties that exists to this day’.2 The Boundary Commission was a crucial high-stakes matter for the British, Free State and Northern Irish governments from the moment it became a component of the Treaty in late 1921 through to its termination four years later.
Nevertheless, this is not only a story of high politics but one of how the decisions from above impacted on people on the ground. Through the different reactions and inputs of people from multiple perspectives, who engaged with the Boundary Commission before and during its convening, the rich source material provides key information on the consequences of the partition of Ireland on day-to-day life, particularly for those who lived close to the border.
The Boundary Commission saga also revealed much about the Irish Free State’s efforts to forge its identity as a newly independent nation of the world while attempting to increase the size of its territory and the amount of people who resided in it, with an ultimate aim of ending partition. For Ulster unionists, the Commission was seen as an existential threat that required unity within and use of all their experience and allies from Britain to overcome the threat it posed to the territorial integrity of Northern Ireland. For British stakeholders, most desired that the Commission would disappear altogether or cause the minimum amount of damage to party politics there.
The aim of this book is to explain this incredibly complex, but captivating and important saga in modern Irish and British history. Published in the year of the hundredth anniversary of its collapse, it sheds more light on the intriguing and, particularly for Northern nationalists, infuriating story behind the Irish Boundary Commission, the results of which still resonate deeply today.
Chapter One
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’
ON 7 SEPTEMBER 1921 THE British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, hosted a Cabinet meeting in Inverness Town Hall in North Scotland. Being hauled to a far-flung corner of Scotland did not impress the Cabinet nor its advisers, with one Cabinet member, Austen Chamberlain, remarking, ‘I simply splutter with rage.’1 At that Cabinet meeting, in proposing a conference with Sinn Féin to reach a settlement on the Irish question, Lloyd George stated that he did not want any such event to ‘become entangled in the Ulster problem; that [Sinn Féin president Éamon] de Valera would raise the question of Fermanagh and Tyrone, where we had a very weak case, the Conference might break on that point, a very bad one. He would rather break – if there was to be a break – now, on allegiance and Empire.’2 He added, ‘Men will die for the Throne and Empire. I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh.’3
In many ways, the boundary dispute, which became a key component of the Irish question at the time of the 1912–14 Third Home Rule Crisis, hinged on Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone. The Ulster unionist case – that areas of Ulster which did not want to be part of a Dublin-based Home Rule parliament should be excluded – was severely undermined by their insistence that Tyrone and Fermanagh must be excluded also,
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’ 5 despite both counties having Catholic majorities and consistently electing nationalist public representatives.
The ‘how and where a border might be drawn’,4 and for how long, dominated much of the talks and negotiations from the moment Liberal backbencher Thomas Agar-Robartes tabled an amendment to the Third Home Rule Bill in June 1912 to exclude the four counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down from the scheme.5 For Ulster unionists and British politicians, mainly from the Conservative Party, the exclusion of some or all of Ulster went from being a ‘wrecking amendment’ of the entire Bill, to being ‘supported on the grounds of logic’.6
Different schemes of exclusion were devised that could have seen from four to all nine counties of Ulster omitted from the Home Rule Bill.7 The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) leader John Redmond was under increasing pressure from the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith to accept some form of exclusion of some areas in Ulster for some length of time. Asquith, in turn, was under intense pressure from within and outside his own party to deal separately with some or all of Ulster, including from a sometimes shrill monarch, King George V, who, in correspondence with Asquith, actively promoted the permanent exclusion of six counties.8 On one occasion he wrote to Asquith fearing that the crisis in Ireland ‘all point [sic] towards rebellion if not Civil War, &, if so, to certain bloodshed’. He was also worried about ‘alienating the Ulster Protestants from me probably for ever, & whatever happens the result must be most detrimental for me personally & for the Crown in general’. He complained to Asquith that ‘I cannot help feeling that the Government is drifting & taking me with it.’9 He proposed a conference to attempt to prevent a civil war in Ireland.
The king’s suggested conference, the Buckingham Palace Conference of July 1914, held as a far more deadly war in Europe loomed large, resulted in a breakdown, as many had predicted beforehand, over whether the excluded area should comprise ‘six counties or four’.10 While the Ulster unionist leader Edward Carson insisted ‘he would certainly never agree to leave out Tyrone or Fermanagh’, Redmond found it ‘absurd and intolerable
The Root of All Evil
that while a majority of Unionists can exclude a county from the Irish Parliament, a majority of Nationalists should be refused the right to vote for their inclusion’.11 The IPP was aghast that all the focus was on the large Protestant minorities in Tyrone and Fermanagh, while there was little mention of the larger Catholic minority in County Armagh. According to the 1911 census, Armagh had a higher percentage of Catholics (45.33 per cent) than Tyrone, Fermanagh or Derry city had of other denominations (44.6 per cent, 43.8 per cent and 43.8 per cent respectively).12
Table 1: 1911 Census of Ireland Religious Denominations in Ulster13
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’ 7
As the First World War commenced, Home Rule was put on the statute book with two important provisos: ‘on the one hand, a Suspensory Bill stipulated that the Home Rule Act would not come into operation until the end of the war; secondly, parliament had the Prime Minister’s assurance that special provision must be made for Protestant Ulster.’14
Despite their previous reservations, in the summer of 1916 Redmond and the IPP leadership agreed to the temporary exclusion of six counties as Lloyd George tried to introduce a Home Rule scheme to be immediately implemented following the fallout from the Easter Rising. Opposition from Southern unionists and in Britain, as well as the discovery by the IPP of the duplicitous dealings of Lloyd George, who had promised Carson the permanent exclusion of the six counties, ended the agreement. However, divisions within Ulster nationalism started to appear openly due to the fact that parliamentary nationalists had agreed to the exclusion of Tyrone and Fermanagh, albeit temporarily, and that this exclusion would likely form the basis of any future proposals.15
Divisions appeared within Ulster unionism, too, as unionists from Counties Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan believed that the 1912 Solemn League and Covenant oath was compromised after the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC) supported the exclusion of six instead of all nine Ulster counties in Lloyd George’s 1916 scheme.16 This sense of abandonment was felt even more acutely in 1920 when, under the Government of Ireland Bill, instead of accepting the nine counties offered by the British government to form the devolved entity of Northern Ireland, the UUC insisted on six counties again. As Belfast-based MP Thomas Moles explained, the three counties had to be sacrificed in order to save the six: ‘In a sinking ship, with life-boats sufficient for only two-thirds of the ship’s company, were all to condemn themselves to death because all could not be saved?’17
Ulster unionists desired the largest area possible that would provide a secure permanent majority for unionists, but not too large an area that might threaten their control and leave them faced with the prospect of being ‘outbred’ by Catholics.18 To avoid a nine-county parliament, leading Ulster unionist James Craig, who went on to become Northern
Ireland’s first prime minister, even proposed a boundary commission. In December 1919, in a private conversation with the Conservative Minister for Pensions Laming Worthington-Evans, Craig suggested:
[The establishment] of 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 districts on either side of and immediately adjoining that boundary in which there was a doubt whether they would prefer to be included in the Northern or Southern area. This proposal, carefully limited in its application, was commended as being in accord with the practice and principles adopted in the Peace Treaties.19
Another prominent Ulster unionist, Colonel Frederick Crawford, chief organiser of the 1914 Larne gunrunning, also favoured a boundary commission. In agreeing with Crawford in February 1920 that ‘the Boundary Commission may be the best way out’, Carson felt, however, ‘a great deal of anxiety as to what they may do with portions of Co. Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone’.20 Responding to another Crawford letter relating to a boundary commission in May 1920, he wrote, ‘I greatly fear if we once begin to raise the question of partition of the County [of Donegal] there would be an attempt to take away parts of the Six Counties where the Nationalist majority prevails.’21
While the British government in late 1919/early 1920 considered the boundary commission proposal favourably, the issue was not pursued further due to fears that ‘enquiries would produce unrest’. The ‘consequences of that omission’, historian Nicholas Mansergh argued in 1991, ‘are with us to this day’.22
The British government acceded to the UUC’s wishes to confine the Northern Parliament to six counties in the spring of 1920, just as the Government of Ireland Bill was being brought before the House of Commons.23 Having not been consulted on a settlement that was less favourable than the 1914 Home Rule Act, which by 1920 was far below
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’ 9
the minimum demanded by most of the Sinn Féin-supporting Irish public, unsurprisingly the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was rejected by the vast majority of the people in Ireland. Despite the considerable opposition, however, the British government carried on with the Act, but its provisions only ever became applicable to Northern Ireland. The British remained at war with the rest of Ireland, finally agreeing a truce with Sinn Féin in July 1921, shortly after Northern Ireland had been established two months earlier, in May.
Even though Northern Ireland was in existence and Ulster unionists believed they had secured their final settlement, its durability, even its continuance, was fluid. As Margaret O’Callaghan has written, ‘at its very base, the status of Northern Ireland was ambivalent’.24 The vulnerability of Northern Ireland’s position was made apparent to James Craig just days after the Truce. Once the Truce came into force on 11 July, negotiations for a settlement began almost immediately between Sinn Féin and the British government. Four meetings were held in London between their respective leaders, Éamon de Valera and David Lloyd George, with the first one taking place on 14 July. Lloyd George offered de Valera dominion status for Southern Ireland ‘with all sorts of important powers, but no Navy, no hostile tariffs, and no coercion of Ulster’.25 Agreement was not reached, though, due mainly to Ulster. The leading Conservative, Andrew Bonar Law, who was recovering from a prolonged illness at the time, believed the biggest problem ‘as always in the past, to be Ulster. I greatly fear that de Valera will find it impossible to treat Ulster as entirely outside his sphere.’26 Bonar Law, who had played a prominent role in Ulster unionism’s resistance to being included in a Dublin parliament during the Third Home Rule crisis, feared that Lloyd George might force unionists into one. This is exactly what Lloyd George attempted.
Craig was not involved in the talks between de Valera and Lloyd George that summer. He informed Alfred Cope, assistant under-secretary in Dublin Castle, ‘I’m going to sit on Ulster like a rock, we are content with what we have got – let the Prime Minister and Sinn Fein settle this and if possible leave us out.’27 He wanted to make Northern Ireland ‘a
new impregnable Pale’.28 Craig believed that ‘no coercion of Ulster’ was among Lloyd George’s non-negotiable commitments. On 18 July, however, Lloyd George put forward ‘five suggestions to Craig and his ministers as to how they might accommodate de Valera’s requirement of Irish unity with local autonomy for the north devolved from Dublin’.29 However, the concerted efforts of Lloyd George, Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain, South African leader Jan Smuts and Alfred Cope to budge Craig were all in vain. After Craig and his colleagues emphatically rejected the suggestions, Lloyd George backed down.
In the British government’s official offer of dominion status to de Valera on 20 July, the document stated that a settlement ‘must allow for full recognition of the existing powers and privileges of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which cannot be abrogated except by their own consent’.30 This sentence was subsequently used extensively by Craig and his colleagues to refuse to co-operate with the Boundary Commission as it did not have the Northern government’s consent.31
In rejecting the British government proposals on 2 August, de Valera demanded that any offer of dominion status would include Northern Ireland as part of the Irish dominion. Failing this, he demanded complete independence for Southern Ireland. De Valera was adamant that ‘we cannot admit the right of the British government to mutilate our country, either in its own interest, or at the call of any section of our population’. He also ruled out the use of force against Ulster.32 He followed up by stating in Dáil Éireann on 22 August, that they ‘had not the power, and some of them had not the inclination, to use force with Ulster. He did not think that policy would be successful. They would be making the same mistake with that section as England had made with Ireland. He would not be responsible for such a policy.’ For de Valera, ‘if the Republic were recognised, he would be in favour of giving each county power to vote itself out of the Republic if it so wished’.33
According to John Bowman, the ‘one “certain result” of the county option would have been the gain of Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh to the south at the expense of the north’, something the Southern unionist
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’ 11
Lord Midleton ‘believed that the Sinn Féin leadership was especially covetous of’ and that there would be ‘no more trouble’ if they were transferred.34
While no agreement was reached between de Valera and Lloyd George, both sides remained engaged, the Truce held, and they agreed to a conference in London to negotiate a settlement. During the impasse between de Valera’s talks with Lloyd George in July and the negotiations that started in October 1921, Sinn Féin established a committee to ‘collect, compile and arrange … statements of fact and argument bearing on the position of Ulster’. It had the remit to address the ‘challenge which Ulster posed to the Sinn Féin cabinet’ and ‘devise a policy tolerable both to their own supporters and to the British government and which could also be imposed on the Ulster unionists’.35 The suggestion by some Northern Sinn Féin members to set up an advisory body of experts on the North, to support the negotiation team in London, was not taken up, however.36
Much has been written about the Treaty negotiations from October to December 1921, with many arguing that Sinn Féin was primarily interested in issues related to sovereignty and the Crown, and not in the issue of partition. In Lord Longford’s account of the Treaty, Peace by Ordeal, for example, he contended that, for Sinn Féin, ‘Ulster was not the main issue, as can be seen from the negligible time spent in the Dail debate over the Ulster provisions of the Treaty’ and was instead ‘a strange abstract factor in tactics’.37 Given the amount of time and energy spent on Ulster before and during the negotiations, most of it instigated by Sinn Féin, this stance does not bear up under scrutiny. It is important to note, though, that while Sinn Féin cared deeply about the essential unity of Ireland, it lacked a coherent policy on Ulster and was unable to press home its advantage on the British government’s reluctance to break up the negotiations over the province.
During the Treaty negotiations, the two primary issues discussed were Ulster and the Crown. Despite Northern Ireland being an established polity since May 1921, the Irish plenipotentiaries, led by
Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, were successful in reopening the Ulster question. The Irish delegation’s position was that ‘the unimpaired unity of Ireland is a condition precedent to the conclusion of a Treaty of Association between Ireland and the nations of the British Commonwealth’ as articulated in a memorandum it presented to the British in late October.38
With the Treaty negotiations commencing on 11 October, partition formed the basis for discussion during the fourth and fifth sessions, held on 14 and 17 October respectively.39 At the session on 14 October, Collins was the first person to mention the possibility of a boundary commission being constituted to deal with Ulster, saying, ‘There might be a plan for a boundary commission, or for local option, or whatever you may call it. It is not intended to use force, not because Ulster would not be defeated in a fight, but because defeat would not settle the matter.’40
At the fifth session it was apparent that the Irish delegates’ focus was on the areas in Northern Ireland with large nationalist majorities. Griffith claimed that if the Northern government refused their ‘reasonable proposals, then people must be entitled to choose freely whether they will come with us or remain under the Northern Parliament’. Another Irish delegate, George Gavan Duffy, stated, ‘If the Orange Party in Belfast knew that they could not retain Fermanagh and Tyrone it would be much easier for us to come to terms with them at a round table,’ adding that the ‘English Government should say that there had been a mistake and that the six counties could not be retained … every capital town in the six counties, except Belfast, was controlled by us.’ Collins stated, ‘freedom of choice must be secured in order to enable the people to say whether they would come with us or remain under the Northern Parliament’.41
In a memorandum the Irish delegation sent to the British negotiators on 24 October, its policy on Ulster was further crystallised: ‘Should we fail to come to an agreement [with Ulster unionists], and we are confident we shall not fail, then freedom of choice must be given to electorates within the area.’ On the same day Griffith wrote to de Valera in Dublin, saying that the British must fight on the Crown, but ‘I told them that the only
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’ 13 possibility of Ireland considering Association of any kind with Crown was in exchange for essential Unity.’42
With the Irish delegation stating that its allegiance to Crown and Empire was contingent on Ireland’s ‘essential unity’, Lloyd George and others within the British government pushed to change Northern Ireland’s status. Lloyd George told Griffith and Collins that ‘he could carry a six county parliament subordinate to a national Parliament’.43 He was probably being disingenuous here, as James Craig had emphatically rejected similar proposals by him in July. Lloyd George also assured Griffith and Collins that he would resign ‘if Ulster proved unreasonable’, rather than use force against Ireland.44 But his secretary, fellow Welshman Thomas (Tom) Jones, added the threatening caveat that the returning Bonar Law would then probably form a government and would introduce Crown colony government for the South for a couple of months.45
During the negotiations, Lloyd George had to expend as much energy in soothing unionist (both Ulster and Conservative) fears as he did in negotiating with Sinn Féin. While, as Ronan Fanning has written, Craig and Bonar Law were not ‘the elephants in the room’, they were ‘the elephants outside the door’.46 Lloyd George’s government had been re-elected in a landslide in December 1918. However, most of the seats in the coalition were won by the Conservatives: 339 in contrast to 136 seats for Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals. Afterwards Lloyd George ‘was sensitive to his own vulnerability in the House and felt himself on occasion to be a prisoner of the Coalition’.47 This was apparent during the Treaty negotiations. The make-up of the British negotiation team suited Lloyd George, as many of the diehards within the Conservative Party were absent. Bonar Law was absent due to illness. Walter Long, who had delivered the Government of Ireland Act 1920, had retired earlier in 1921, and Arthur Balfour, arguably the most intransigent Tory, was sent away for the final phases of the Treaty negotiations by Lloyd George to a naval conference in Washington from November 1921 to February 1922. Even though they were considered diehards, Winston Churchill and Lord Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) were included because ‘they were too dangerous to leave out’.48
Lloyd George himself was ambivalent about what terms would be agreed – he just wanted an agreement, reminding his colleagues, ‘We are after a settlement – that [is] our objective.’49 He was hampered, though, by elements within the Conservative Party who supported the Ulster unionists. In the House of Commons on 7 November, Lloyd George was asked for assurances by Antrim-born Conservative MP Sir William Davison that he would not force the government and people of Northern Ireland ‘into surrendering any of the territory or rights granted to them by the Government of Ireland Act’.50 Lloyd George had survived a censure vote just days earlier, after ‘roughly three dozen Tory MPs tabled a motion demanding that the government abandon its talks with Sinn Fein and work the 1920 Act’.51
Working in tandem with diehard Tory opposition was the diehard Tory press. The Morning Post devoted much of its 31 October edition to ‘British Generosity and Irish Ingratitude’ since 1916. It wrote of ‘the foul methods of the Sinn Fein rebels’ who used men, woman and children as shields while the rebels ‘fire at Crown forces or throw bombs’. After ‘The Great Surrender’ (the Truce), the newspaper was astonished that some of ‘these men are now of the Downing Street tea party’. De Valera was described as ‘an alien’, born ‘in a low quarter of New York’. Against the name of Collins, formerly known as ‘Mysterious Mike’, ‘stand charged several ambushes in Dublin with their cost of over 70 lives’. Rounding off its invective was an editorial describing the situation
as that of ‘a motor-car with one wheel over a precipice’; and yet the cry is still ‘Go forward!’ Ulster is now to be dragged in, and Tyrone and Fermanagh are to be offered to the rebels in a desperate attempt to placate them … The motor-car is hanging over a precipice, or, as we put it the other day, is foundered above the axles in an Irish bog.52
Even though, as Churchill explained, ‘We can’t give way on the six counties … we are not free agents,’ Lloyd George met and corresponded with
‘I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh’ 15
Craig in November to try and squeeze him into accepting an all-Ireland parliament.53 Austen Chamberlain thought it was possible for the British government to convince Craig to accept an all-Ireland parliament, saying at the time to his wife, Ivy, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Craig to govern Tyrone and Fermanagh ‘with their Sinn Fein majorities’.54
In a letter from Lloyd George to Craig on 10 November, he proposed that the ‘Government of Northern Ireland would retain all the powers conferred upon her by the Government of Ireland Act’, but the ‘unity of Ireland would be recognised by the establishment of an all-Ireland Parliament’.55 He emphasised the financial disadvantages of staying out of such a parliament, writing, ‘Customs barriers would have to be established between Northern and Southern Ireland over a jagged line of frontier,’ adding that the ‘difficulty of working any such arrangement would be unceasing, the cost considerable, and the vexation to traders continuous.’ Moreover, ‘the finance of the Government of Ireland Act would necessarily have to be recast’ and the ‘people of Northern Ireland would have to bear their proportionate share of all Imperial burdens, such as the Army, Navy and other Imperial Services, in common with the taxpayer of the United Kingdom’.56
In explaining his rationale for potentially imposing financial ‘penalties’ on the North for staying out of an all-Ireland parliament, Lloyd George told his secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson, ‘They have their hands on their hearts all the time, but if it comes to touching their pockets, they quickly slap their hands in them. I know … My wife is a Presbyterian.’57
Craig did not budge, writing to Lloyd George on 11 November emphatically rejecting an all-Ireland parliament, stating, ‘Such a Parliament is precisely what Ulster has for many years resisted by all the means at her disposal, and her detestation of it is in no degree diminished by the local institutions conferred upon her by the Act of 1920.’ He added, ‘The feelings of the loyal population of Ulster are so pronounced and so universal on this point that no Government representing that population could enter into any Conference where this point is open to discussion.’
An illustration of British government and Sinn Féin delegates in session during the Treaty negotiations in London in late 1921. The Sinn Féin delegates devoted much time to the ‘Ulster Question’ during negotiations, but agreed to an ambiguously worded Boundary Commission that was at the root of the many subsequent problems faced by Irish nationalists. (Illustrated London News)
Almost from the moment of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister James Craig adopted a ‘not an inch’ strategy that ultimately prevailed. (Bystander)
Michael Collins beside Richard Mulcahy at the funeral of Arthur Griffith in August 1922, just days before his own death at Béal na mBláth. (Illustrated London News)
The North Eastern Boundary Bureau (NEBB) was established in October 1922 by the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State to collect and compile data, and to prepare the government’s case before the Boundary Commission. It undertook a huge volume of work throughout its existence, including publishing and distributing leaflets, pamphlets and a book. Here is one leaflet distributed to British audiences. (Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)
The delegation to the League of Nations when the Irish Free State was admitted in September 1923. Kevin O’Shiel, NEBB Director, is standing fourth from the left. Becoming a member of the League of Nations allowed the Free State to avail of a new avenue to press its case over the Boundary Commission. (Courtesy of University College Dublin Archives)
The NEBB recommendations on ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ territorial claims to be made to the Irish Boundary Commission. Both projections were significantly more generous to the Free State than the award actually proposed by the Boundary Commission. (Courtesy of Kieran Rankin)
RUC and customs officers at a border customs post in Killeen near Newry around 1930. (Courtesy of the Museum of the Police Service of Northern Ireland)
