Partition-Within-Partition

Abstract

The Island of Ireland was partitioned and placed under two new systems of government between 1920 and 1922. This was not the simple and straight-forward process of division to be seen in places like Czechoslovakia, but it has its instructive side. Independence for Slovakia was relatively easy to arrange because the population of the area came very close to agreement that they all wanted to be Slovaks together, but cases like the division of the island of Ireland or of the Indian subcontinent are more complicated.From the early 1870s onwards, people used 'Home Rule' to refer to a policy of setting up an elected assembly in Ireland to look after problems that were of direct concern to the Irish.(f.1) The Irish assembly would not have the same powers as the self-governing colonies enjoyed under 'responsible government.' Some Irish politicians in the first half of the century had wanted to repeal the 1800 Act of Union between Britain and Ireland; in the 19th century such a change would have given Ireland responsible government. Few people imagined Home Rule meant as much as repeal of the Union, but one problem was that Home Rule could mean anything from improved systems of local and municipal government to a substantial step towards independence. The Irish members of parliament (MPs) who supported the change always called themselves nationalists, though British politicians and commentators almost always called them Home Rulers, a term that fitted the facts of the situation because the Home Rule nationalists were eventually displaced by Sinn Fein opponents of British rule who also had a very good claim to call themselves nationalists. It is easier to follow events if nationalists are understood to be all Irish opponents of the status quo.Early in 1886 William Gladstone, Britain's prime minister and leader of the Liberal party, provided a fixed and definite meaning for Home Rule by introducing a bill which would have given Ireland something like the powers of a Canadian province within confederation, though its constitutional position would not have been as well established as that of a Canadian province; because the parliament in Dublin that was at the centre of his scheme would be created by an act of the Westminster parliament, it could be ended by another act of the Westminster parliament. Canadian provinces had powers that did not depend on Ottawa at all, even if they were not certain whether they held these sovereign powers because they had possessed them before 1867 or because the 1867 act of the Westminster parliament declared that they possessed them. The new Dublin parliament would owe its powers to Westminster, but it would be accepted by the Irish because the bill gave it control over land legislation.Most of the popular force behind Home Rule came from the hope that it would enable the Irish to run agricultural and land-owning policies in the way that suited them best, and Gladstone met this popular demand very fully. He reckoned that it would make the position of landlords, whether absentees who lived in England or residents who lived on their estates, very difficult, and he proposed a scheme of land purchase to enable tenants to buy out their landlords. The 1886 Home Rule Bill was defeated in the House of Commons, and the land purchase bill faded out of discussion, but the Conservatives could see that the position of the landlords had become untenable and over the next twenty years arranged for them to be bought out by their Irish tenants. Gladstone tried again with a second bill in 1893, but it was defeated in the House of Lords.Home Rule was so unpopular in Britain that it crippled Gladstone's Liberal party for twenty years and established the political dominance of the Conservatives and those Liberals who had joined them as unionists who wanted to maintain the union between Britain and Ireland. During this period an Ireland that had been a community with problems about questions of religion and of landownership became a nation with political aspirations, even if the aspirations were not easy to define; because the world was far from safe for small nations and the British connection had many advantages, very few people would have thought complete independence was either possible or desirable. …