‘It does not matter what the authors meant’

Abstract

This chapter reassesses the unity of the Ulster Unionists in the run up to the partition of Ireland at ground level. Ulster Unionist party leaders insisted at the time and retrospectively that their decision to abandon the nine-county partition endorsed by Walter Long’s parliamentary committee for a six-county state was in keeping with the 1912 Solemn League and Covenant, but in the eyes of many of their supporters, a six-county solution violated the Covenant. Members of the Ulster Unionist Council even pressed for re-examination of the council’s decision to endorse the draft of what would become the Better Government of Ireland Act (1920), leading local committees throughout the province to express their views on what constituted the Ulster Unionist community. Utilizing private papers, contemporary press accounts, and UUC files, this chapter details a little-discussed controversy among Ulster Unionists in the spring of 1920 and contends that this dispute was central to the refinement of a distinct Northern Ireland Unionism in the 1920s.