Partition “broke apart a single, more diverse society” and was designed to be “intractable” because it created two states dominated by majority interests in the decades afterwards, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said.
The suppression of the 1925 Boundary Commission report and the “humiliation” of the Dublin government when the Border was left as it is today was “a defining moment” in history, Mr Martin said.
The Boundary Commission was set up as part of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act to redraw the Border that had then been agreed, taking into account the wishes of locals, along with geographic and economic issues.
The Free State government had expected large swathes of land to be transferred from Northern Ireland by the commission and it panicked when it realised that was not going to happen.
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Nationalists had hoped transfers to the Free State would include areas such as south Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone, where there were Catholic/nationalist majorities.
Instead, the report recommended only minor changes. Once the findings were leaked, London, Dublin and the unionist-controlled Stormont quietly put the report aside and reached an agreement that left the Border unchanged.
Instead, the Free State avoided paying any part of the United Kingdom’s national debt, getting out of a commitment it had incurred under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The final text of the commission’s report was not published for nearly 40 years.
[ How was the Irish Border drawn in the first place?Opens in new window ]
Speaking at the launch of a history of the commission – titled The Root Of All Evil and written by historian Cormac Moore – the Taoiseach said the commission’s report, and the reaction to it, was “a radicalising moment”.
Describing the book as a work of “impeccable archival research”, Mr Martin said Mr Moore is “part of a generation of young historians who have used the opening up of archives to give us a broader and deeper view of our past”.
Praising such work, the Taoiseach went on: “If all we see of the past is a reflection of our current beliefs then we are missing out on opportunities to find new ways forward and rejecting the need to challenge ourselves.
“For those who want to move past partisan and ideological debates of previous decades, a body of work is being built up which challenges us to look for new ways of framing the questions we ask of our history,” he said.
Quoting approvingly the words of Trinity College Dublin historian Anne Dolan, the Taoiseach told the book launch: “Maybe history’s job is to make it harder to be so certain and so shrill.”
He continued: “The Boundary Commission did not create partition, but it demonstrated the entrenchment of a hardline approach defined by dominating as large a space as possible rather than constructing diverse societies.
Laying some of the blame at the door of London, he said: “There is no way of looking at the evidence of London’s behaviour and missing the consistent bad faith which it showed to both the Dublin government and majority of the Irish people.”
“Partition introduced a division on this island which had no precedence in this island’s history,” he said, adding that partition ignored the reality of “how most services and institutions worked” and the opinions of large numbers of Border communities.
“Partition broke apart a single, more diverse society and created states which were less diverse and more open to being dominated by one interest. By creating jurisdictions which were likely to diverge significantly, partition was designed to be intractable.”
Pointing to the future, Mr Martin said that for “the first time in a hundred years we have a sustained effort under way to build understanding, engagement and mutual development” on the island.
The “generosity of spirit with which individuals, groups and communities on both sides of the Border” are engaging together is “one which has the potential to help us to break with failed approaches of the past”.
