The Government of Ireland Act, 1920

Passed at Westminster in 1920, the Act tried to settle the Irish question by giving Home Rule to two Irelands at once.

• It created two parliaments: one for Northern Ireland (the six north-eastern counties) and one for Southern Ireland (the other twenty-six).
• Each was given control of local matters, while Westminster kept reserved powers — defence, foreign policy, and the main taxes. Both would still send MPs to Westminster.
• A Council of Ireland was set up, with members from both parliaments, in the hope that the two might one day cooperate and even reunite.

Reactions. In the north, unionists accepted the Act without enthusiasm: they had never wanted Home Rule at all, but a six-county parliament guaranteed a permanent unionist majority. The Northern Ireland parliament was opened by King George V in Belfast in June 1921, with Sir James Craig as its first Prime Minister. Northern nationalists felt abandoned, trapped inside a state they had not chosen — and Belfast saw savage sectarian violence in 1920–22. In the south, Sinn Féin ignored the Act entirely: the Southern Ireland parliament never functioned, and the War of Independence went on.

Key idea: the Act of 1920 is the origin of partition. Everything in this option flows from it.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Boundary Commission

The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed on 6 December 1921, ended the War of Independence and created the Irish Free State — a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, with an oath of allegiance to the Crown and a Governor-General. Northern Ireland was given the right to opt out of the new state, and did so immediately in December 1922. The Treaty split the republican movement and led to the Irish Civil War.

The Boundary Commission (1924–25). Article 12 of the Treaty promised a commission to redraw the border in line with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as economic and geographic conditions allowed. Many nationalists expected large areas — Fermanagh, Tyrone, south Armagh, Derry city — to be transferred, leaving Northern Ireland too small to survive.

• The Free State appointed Eoin MacNeill. Northern Ireland refused to appoint anyone, so the British government appointed J. R. Fisher on its behalf. The chairman was the South African judge Richard Feetham.
• Feetham read Article 12 narrowly: the border would be adjusted, not redrawn. A newspaper leak in November 1925 revealed that only minor changes were proposed — and that the Free State might even lose some territory.
• MacNeill resigned in fury. To bury the report, the three governments made an agreement in December 1925: the border stayed exactly as it was, the powers of the Council of Ireland were transferred to the Northern Ireland government, and the Free State was released from some financial obligations under the Treaty.

Consequence: partition was now fixed. Unionists were relieved and vindicated; nationalists, north and south, felt betrayed — a grievance that lasted for decades.

The Boundary Commission

De Valera dismantles the Treaty

Éamon de Valera came to power in 1932 at the head of Fianna Fáil, determined to strip the Treaty of everything that tied Ireland to Britain.

• He abolished the Oath of Allegiance in 1933 and cut the Governor-General down to a nonentity.
• When Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, de Valera seized the moment: the External Relations Act removed the Crown from Ireland’s internal affairs, leaving it only a shadow role in the appointment of diplomats.
• In 1937 he replaced the Free State constitution with a new Constitution of Ireland, approved by the people.

The 1937 Constitution. It renamed the state Éire; created an elected President (Douglas Hyde was the first) and a Taoiseach; made no mention of the Crown or the Empire; and recognised the “special position” of the Catholic Church. Above all, Articles 2 and 3 claimed the whole island of Ireland as the national territory, while accepting that, for now, laws would apply only in the twenty-six counties.

Impact on relations: unionists were outraged — a foreign state was laying constitutional claim to their territory, and doing so in a document steeped in Catholic teaching. It hardened partition and deepened northern nationalists’ sense that Dublin talked about them more than it did for them. Britain, wary of the coming European crisis, chose not to make an issue of it.

The Economic War and the Anglo-Irish Agreements

The cause. Under earlier land purchase schemes, Irish farmers repaid loans to the British government — the land annuities. In 1932 de Valera stopped handing them over. Britain retaliated with duties on Irish agricultural imports (above all cattle); Ireland struck back with duties on British coal, iron and machinery.

• Effects on the Free State: its cattle trade — overwhelmingly dependent on the British market — was hammered. Farmers were ruined; calves were slaughtered because they were worth almost nothing. De Valera pushed self-sufficiency and tillage instead.
• Effects on Northern Ireland: the border became a real economic barrier, disrupting cross-border trade and smuggling flourished. But northern farmers, still inside the UK, could sell freely into Britain and gained ground at the expense of southern competitors.
• Effects on Britain: the damage was real but far smaller — Ireland was a much bigger customer of Britain’s than Britain was of Ireland’s.
• Easing: the Coal–Cattle Pact of 1935 allowed more Irish cattle into Britain in exchange for more British coal, softening the worst of it.

The Anglo-Irish Agreements of 1938 ended the dispute. The annuities dispute was settled by a one-off Irish payment of £10 million; a trade agreement restored normal commerce; and — most importantly — Britain handed back the Treaty Ports (Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly) which it had kept under the 1921 Treaty.

Why the Treaty Ports matter: without them, Britain could not use Irish harbours in the Atlantic war — and with them returned, Éire had the physical means to stay neutral in 1939. One agreement in 1938 shaped everything that followed.

The significance of 1938

Northern Ireland goes to war

When war broke out in September 1939, Northern Ireland was automatically at war as part of the United Kingdom. The Stormont government of Lord Craigavon welcomed the chance to prove Northern Ireland’s loyalty and value to Britain — and to contrast it with Éire’s neutrality. In practice the government was slow, complacent and badly prepared: air-raid precautions were feeble and evacuation plans thin.

Conscription. Conscription was introduced in Britain but never extended to Northern Ireland. Nationalists — backed by de Valera and by the Catholic Church — bitterly opposed it, and the British government concluded that imposing it would cause more trouble than the extra recruits were worth. Many unionists were angry at what they saw as a slur on Northern Ireland’s loyalty. Service therefore remained voluntary, and men and women from both communities volunteered.

The contribution.

• Industry: Harland & Wolff built and repaired warships and merchant ships; Short & Harland built bombers; the linen mills produced uniforms, parachutes and aircraft fabric; engineering works turned out munitions.
• Agriculture: tillage was hugely expanded, and Northern Ireland became an important supplier of food to Britain.
• Military and strategic: its ports, airfields and coastal command bases were vital in the Battle of the Atlantic, guarding the convoys that kept Britain alive. From January 1942 Northern Ireland was also the base for the first American troops to arrive in Europe, and later a training ground for the D-Day forces.

Relations: the war made Northern Ireland genuinely useful to Britain — precisely because Éire was neutral. Unionists never let London forget it.

Why did Éire stay neutral?

• Sovereignty. Neutrality was the ultimate proof of independence: a state that could not choose peace was not truly free. This was the whole point of de Valera’s twenty-year campaign.
• Partition. De Valera argued that Ireland could not fight alongside a country that still held six of its counties.
• Weakness. Éire had almost no army, navy or air force. Entering the war would have invited bombing it could not prevent.
• Unity at home. The bitterness of the Civil War was barely a generation old; taking sides in a British war risked tearing the state apart, and the IRA was already courting Germany.

The people overwhelmingly supported neutrality — it was one of the few policies almost everyone in Éire agreed on — even though tens of thousands of Irish citizens crossed to Britain to work in war industries or to volunteer for the British forces. At home the period was known simply as the Emergency: censorship, rationing, fuel shortages and the banning of the IRA, whose leaders were interned and some executed.

Benevolent neutrality. Neutrality tilted towards the Allies in practice: crashed Allied airmen were quietly sent north over the border while German ones were interned; the Donegal Corridor let RAF flying boats cross Éire’s airspace to reach the Atlantic; weather reports from Ireland’s west coast were passed on — one of them, from Blacksod, helped decide the timing of D-Day.

Britain’s offer. In June 1940, with France falling, Churchill offered a declaration in favour of a united Ireland in return for Éire entering the war. De Valera refused: the offer was vague, Britain could not deliver Northern Ireland’s consent, and it might buy nothing but a bombed and divided country. Unionists were appalled that the offer had been made at all.

Which phase?

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The Battle of Britain and the Belfast Blitz

The Battle of Britain (summer–autumn 1940) was fought between the RAF and the Luftwaffe for control of the skies over southern England. Because the RAF held, Hitler postponed his invasion plan — and Britain, with Northern Ireland, stayed in the war. Had it gone the other way, everything in this option would have been different.

The Belfast Blitz, April–May 1941. Belfast was one of the least defended cities in the United Kingdom: a handful of anti-aircraft guns, almost no searchlights, no night fighters based locally and public shelters for only a fraction of the population. The government had assumed the city was out of German range.

• 7–8 April 1941: a first raid on the docks and Harland & Wolff.
• 15–16 April 1941 (the Easter Tuesday raid): a devastating attack on densely packed working-class north Belfast. Around 900 people were killed — the greatest loss of life in any single night raid on a UK city outside London. Fire crews from Dublin, Dún Laoghaire, Drogheda and Dundalk crossed the border to help, sent by de Valera despite Éire’s neutrality.
• 4–5 May 1941 (the fire raid): incendiaries gutted the shipyards and docks.

Impact. Close to a thousand people died across the raids; tens of thousands were made homeless and streamed out of the city as “ditchers” and evacuees. Their arrival in the countryside exposed the poverty, filthy housing and poor health of Belfast’s slums, shocking rural Ulster and forcing government and public opinion to face conditions they had ignored — a direct spur to post-war reform.

Éire and the Blitz. Éire had declared a State of Emergency in 1939, banned and interned the IRA, and lived with rationing, censorship and fuel shortages. Neutrality did not mean safety: German bombs fell on Éire on several occasions, and on 31 May 1941 a raid on the North Strand in Dublin killed 28 people. Germany later paid compensation.

Neutrality in practice

The Welfare State comes to Northern Ireland

In 1945 a Labour government under Attlee won a landslide at Westminster. At Stormont, the Unionist government of Sir Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough) was deeply uneasy: Labour was socialist, sympathetic to Irish nationalism and committed to nationalisation. But it was also offering money.

Why a Welfare State? The Beveridge Report had named the “five giants” — want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The war had exposed just how bad conditions were (the Belfast Blitz evacuations proved it), and there was a powerful feeling that the sacrifices of war had earned a better peace.

Northern Ireland followed Britain under the principle of parity: the same benefits and services, funded largely from the UK Exchequer.

• Family allowances and National Insurance: unemployment and sickness benefit, pensions.
• National Assistance for those who fell through the net.
• The National Health Service in Northern Ireland from 1948 — free medical treatment at the point of use, a transformation for poor families.
• Housing: the Northern Ireland Housing Trust (1945) began building badly needed new homes.
• The Education Act (Northern Ireland), 1947: free secondary education for all, with selection at eleven, and grants that opened grammar schools and universities to able children from poor homes.

Differing attitudes. Most people welcomed it. Some Unionists resented dependence on a socialist government and the cost; a hard-line minority disliked benefits flowing to large Catholic families. Many nationalists welcomed the benefits but noted that discrimination in housing allocation and jobs continued locally. The Catholic Church objected to state control of schooling, though church schools received substantial state funding.

Long-term significance: the Welfare State widened the gap in living standards between Northern Ireland and Éire, giving unionists a powerful new argument for the Union. And the 1947 Education Act helped produce the educated Catholic middle class that would lead the civil rights campaign twenty years later.

Éire after 1945

• Éire emerged from the Emergency poor and isolated: rationing continued, fuel was scarce, industry was undeveloped and emigration — overwhelmingly to Britain — drained away the young.
• There was no equivalent of the British Welfare State. Health and welfare provision remained limited, and the Catholic Church’s influence over health and education policy was strong.
• Éire received Marshall Aid and began some state-led development, but growth was slow, and the contrast with the new benefits and services in the north was stark.
• In 1948 Fianna Fáil lost power after sixteen years. A coalition inter-party government took office under John A. Costello.

The Republic and the Ireland Act, 1949

In 1948, on a visit to Canada, Taoiseach John A. Costello announced that Ireland would repeal the External Relations Act and become a Republic. The Republic of Ireland Act came into force on 18 April 1949: Ireland left the Commonwealth and cut its last constitutional link with the Crown — while keeping the claim to the north in Articles 2 and 3.

Reaction in Northern Ireland. Unionists were alarmed and, at the same time, delighted to be handed such a gift: a state that had just walked out of the Commonwealth was hardly an attractive partner for union. Brookeborough called a snap Stormont election for February 1949 on the single issue of the border.

• The Anti-Partition League (founded in 1945) campaigned for a united Ireland and drew support from all the main parties in Dublin.
• Money was collected for anti-partition candidates outside Catholic churches in Éire — which is why the 1949 Northern Ireland election became known as the chapel gate election.
• The effect was the opposite of what was intended: unionists denounced blatant interference from a foreign state, the unionist vote was mobilised as never before, and Unionism won a resounding victory.

The Ireland Act, 1949. Westminster replied in June 1949. The Act recognised that the Republic had left the Commonwealth, but declared that it would not be treated as a foreign country: Irish citizens kept their rights in the United Kingdom, and trade continued. Crucially, it gave Northern Ireland a constitutional guarantee: Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom unless the Parliament of Northern Ireland consented otherwise.

Where relations stood in 1949: unionists had the firmest guarantee they had ever been given, and a Welfare State to defend. The new Republic had full sovereignty — and no more influence over the north than before. Northern nationalists were left more isolated than ever. Partition was harder, not softer, than it had been in 1920.

The chapel gate election

Cause → consequence

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Name the ports

Name the Act

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Conscription in Northern Ireland

The essentials to remember

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