As expected the parliament of Northern Ireland opted not to be included in the Irish Free State immediately after the latter came into being, which meant that the treaty-prescribed boundary commission had to be formed. Earlier, in February and March 1922 short-lived agreements had been made between James Craig, the Northern Ireland prime minister and Michael Collins, the chairman of the Provisional Government, to lessen discriminatory treatment of Catholics in Northern Ireland, particularly in matters of employment and police treatment, in return for cessation of support for the IRA within Northern Ireland and of the boycott in the south of Northern goods. Had either pact survived it was hoped that further cooperation might enable a boundary commission to be avoided. Within Northern Ireland, the RIC was transformed into the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the government also recruited various police auxiliary groups to assist in the maintenance of law and order, especially in view of the IRA continuing its campaign after the truce and the treaty. While it was hoped a proportionate number of Catholics could be recruited for the RUC, the auxiliary forces were uninhibitedly sectarian. That fact, together with the extraordinary special powers given to the minister for home affairs, would remain persistent grievances of Catholics in the north until the 1970s.
Soon after the Free State came into being, and while the civil war was still being fought, requests were made to the British government to call the boundary commission into being. It would be composed of a member for Britain, for Northern Ireland, and for the Free State. A number of factors delayed its formation, including the ongoing civil war and a change in British prime ministers. Lloyd George was eased out by a Conservative backbench revolt in October 1922. His successor, Andrew Bonar Law, resigned in May
1923 when he became aware of his terminal cancer. After a general election in December 1923, his successor, Stanley Baldwin, was compelled to step down, to be replaced by the first Labour Party prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. But Baldwin and the Conservatives were back in power following the election of October 1924. The British had hoped the need for a boundary commission could be avoided and, to that end, they had arranged in early
1924 for conferences among the concerned parties for a possible unification that would allow some internal Northern Irish autonomy, but the meetings came to naught.
The refusal of the Northern Ireland government to name a representative caused further delay as legislation had to be passed authorizing the British government to name a Northern Ireland representative. The commission finally came into being in November 1924, with Eoin MacNeill, its minister for education, as the Free State representative; the South African jurist, Richard Feetham, the British nominee and chairman; and J. R. Fisher, a barrister, the representative designated by the British for Northern Ireland. MacNeill, a fulltime minister and an historian, was no match for the barrister and jurist. He innocently agreed at the beginning to regard the proceedings of the commission as comparable to those of a jury and to accept a unanimous report. He did not seem to take into account the presumption by Feetham that the commission's mandate was not so much to make major boundary changes as to make adjustments that would in no way impair the political viability of Northern Ireland. In fact the nationalists and the Free State had assumed that the commission, on whose formation they had been so insistent, would be governed primarily by the views of the populace, which they expected would result in a substantial loss of territory by Northern Ireland.
A leak of the impending report to the Conservative Morning Post on November 7, 1925, intimated that the recommendations would entail a relatively small loss of population and territory by Northern Ireland and even a loss of some territory and population by the Free State. Uproar in the Dail fiireann prompted Mac-Neill to resign from both the commission and the ministry. Before the official release of the report, whose publication would make it the rule, several Free State ministers, including Cosgrave and O'Higgins, met with members of the British cabinet, and with Craig, in an effort to avoid the implementation of the report. The British, aware that publication could bring down the Free State government, agreed on December 3 to suspend the report (which was put under wraps for a half century), to maintain the status quo boundary, and, as compensation, to forgive the Free State any obligations it had, which were still to be determined, for its proportion of the imperial debt at the date the treaty was implemented.
The government's defense of the agreement was that even the hoped-for boundary change would have left a substantial number of Catholics in an even-more endangered position in a smaller Northern Ireland. They also argued that the amicable spirit in which the agreement had been reached augured well for better relations with Northern Ireland, which would have to be a prerequisite for any possible political unification of the island.
In October and November of the next year, at the Imperial Conference in London, the dominions of the commonwealth were acknowledged to be autonomous communities equal in status and in no way subordinate one to another. That statement would serve as the basis for the 1932 Statute of Westminster giving the legislatures of the dominions power to overturn any Westminster legislation governing them. At the conference O'Higgins approached both Edward Carson, the former leader of the Irish unionists, and L. S. Amery, the secretary of state for the dominions, with a suggestion similar to Arthur Griffith's "Dual Monarchy" concept. He hoped a separate coronation of the king as "king of Ireland" would make the Northern Ireland government amenable to unification. This willingness to abandon republicanism, even as an aspiration, failed to win British or unionist sympathy, but it did demonstrate an awareness of the inextricable interrelationship between both parts of the island and the other, larger island that, only now, is receiving institutional implementation following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
World History
