Few expected Northern Ireland to reach its hundredth birthday. When it was born in May 1921, it had a provisional feel. The Government of Ireland Act, under which it was set up, established linked parliaments in Belfast and Dublin, but the second had already been overtaken by events and never sat. Devolution, paradoxically, came to the one part of Ireland that had always vehemently opposed it.
For Irish nationalists, the partition was an abomination. Britain, they believed, had sundered their country so as to hang on to its wealthiest and most populous region, namely the industrialized northeast. In his poem Act of Union, Seamus Heaney portrayed Northern Ireland as the unwanted issue of a violent rape:
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders…
Yet the idea that Britain had maneuvered to hang on to Ulster is pretty much the opposite of the truth. It would be more accurate to say that successive British governments reluctantly accepted the demographic reality, namely that, as the Belfast writer Thomas Macknight put it in 1895, “There are two antagonistic populations, two different nations on Irish soil.”
When, in 1993, John Major’s government declared that it had “no selfish strategic or economic interest” in maintaining its jurisdiction over Northern Ireland, Ulster Unionists were upset but not especially surprised. London was simply restating, albeit in unusually bald terms, its long-standing position.
From at least the 1880s, Britain had wanted to create an autonomous Irish Parliament within the empire, or “home rule,” in the language of the time. But every attempt ran up against the unyielding hostility of Ulster Protestants, who believed that devolution would strand them inside a poor and backward theocracy: “Home rule means Rome rule.”
The 1920 Government of Ireland Act, as well as creating separate northern and southern chambers, established numerous all-Ireland bodies through which the two were eventually supposed to come together. Far from encouraging partition, Britain sought to cajole Ulster into a closer association with the rest of Ireland, partly, in fairness, because it hoped that Ulstermen would serve as a kind of ballast, holding a devolved Ireland within the British family.
Winston Churchill, who had enthusiastically backed that legislation, never gave up on it. “I still hope for a united Ireland,” he told the Irish ambassador in 1946. “You must get those fellows in the North in, though; you can’t do it by force.”
Force had been the first recourse of Irish republicans. Partition was accompanied by an upsurge in sectarian violence. Northern Ireland commissioned thousands of police volunteers who fought what came close to being a guerrilla war with the IRA. Dublin orchestrated an economic boycott against Belfast. It is interesting to note, given the current rows about the border, that it was Irish republicans who first insisted on putting up customs checks.
Both sides, naturally, are selective in their memories. Most Americans know that Catholics in Northern Ireland got a rough deal. Electoral boundaries were rigged to produce Unionist majorities, and there was discrimination in employment. Still, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland continued to grow in both relative and absolute terms, whereas intimidation reduced the proportion of Protestants on the other side of the border from 10% to 4%. That story is less often told.
The forced migration of southern Unionists partly explains why, even in a largely post-Christian age, most people in Northern Ireland resolutely oppose joining the south. Attitudes toward divorce, homosexuality, and abortion have converged. The “priest-ridden republic” that Ulster Protestants had feared was dismantled by Irish Catholics themselves. These days, the percentage of Protestants in the Republic is growing.
Yet the chief stumbling block remains. Supporters of Irish unification talk about respecting Ulster’s identity. But Ulster people, in the main, don’t want to be respected as Irish Protestants. They want to be respected as Britons. And that is where things break down, for while Unionism is comfortable with the idea that you can be both British and Irish — indeed, it arguably exists to make that case — there is no version of Irish republicanism that is not based, on some level, on a rejection of Britishness.
Paradoxically, the Irish politicians keenest on unification often backed policies that were surest to alienate “those fellows in the North,” such as staying out of World War II, quitting the Commonwealth, and backing Brussels, even at the expense of Irish interests, during the post-Brexit negotiations. It is, quite simply, impossible to accommodate Ulster’s sense of identity while stressing Ireland’s distance from Britain. That remains as true today as it was a hundred years ago, which is why Northern Ireland will be around for many more years to come.
