British society suffers ‘amnesia’ over Anglo-Irish Treaty, conference hears

There is no “narrative of grievance” in Britain as a result of Irish independence, a historian has suggested.

Prof Richard Toye said right-wing British historians and politicians who defend the Boer War could have ended up developing a grievance over the loss of most of Ireland in a similar way to how loss of territory is treated in Hungary today.

Much of what was regarded as Hungarian territory was ceded to neighbouring countries under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon and it is still a live issue in the country.

“They feel their country was mutilated. One could well imagine that such a narrative in certain circumstances could have developed in Britain,” he said.

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“That has come at the price of a type of amnesia. The treaty was not an inevitable outcome.”

Prof Toye, who is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, described the Anglo-Irish Treaty as a “profound event” in British history, but is not remembered as such.

“It is not given the significance that it deserves. That said, perhaps we should be careful what we wish for. If it was remembered, it may have been remembered in a negative way,” he stated.

He stressed that the British government was anxious to present the Treaty as an “act of generosity” towards the Irish rather than an act of humiliation on their own part. Previously they had presented the Transvaal constitution in 1906 as a gift to the Boers rather than a concession on their part.

Prof Toye gave the keynote speech on the first day of a conference in University College Cork addressing the centenary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

The British ambassador to Ireland, Paul Johnston, said he had a lot of experience of negotiating with other countries and getting to know the other negotiators was critical in advance.

He suggested that newspaper headlines about the relationship between Britain and Ireland “deeply relates to the past”.

He said events of recent weeks marking the decade of centenaries “still hold great resonance and still shape the political context for debates around these island profoundly to this day”.

Trinity College Dublin historian Ian d'Alton, who specialises in the study of Protestantism in the Irish State after independence, said the fate of southern unionists was essentially ignored in the Treaty negotiations.

"They might have thought that they still had some purchase, whether over Sinn Féin or the British Government; but the inconvenient truth was that once the Ulster issue had been 'settled' they became a complete cipher," he said.

He added that southern unionists had exhibited “extraordinary levels of incompetence” in not pressing the British government for more concessions from the Irish side.

"At critical junctures they failed to press Lloyd George for the government, and Arthur Griffith for Sinn Féin, for specific binding commitments on the Irish army, land purchase, double taxation, compensation, continuation of the grant for TCD and protection for ecclesiastical property," he stated.

“They got a couple of scraps from the Treaty table: in November 1921, Griffith gave a written assurance that they would benefit from a scheme to give them representation in the new parliament, especially the upper house.

“Ultimately, it was Griffith’s sensitivity towards keeping the minority’s money in the country more than southern unionist pressure that saw some protections written into the Treaty.”