A divided island
CORMAC Ó GRÁDA welcomes an exploration of how the border between north and south has shaped modern Irish history
The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics by Diarmaid Ferriter Profile, 192 pages, £12.99 As the UK’s only land border with the EU, Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic of Ireland has been much in the news recently. Meandering for 310 miles across backroads, and passing through farms and even houses, it could hardly be described as a natural border. With its 200-plus road crossings, and myriad twists and turns, it might have been designed by smugglers. Even during the Troubles, when the number of approved crossings was reduced to 20, smuggling went on.
Although there was never a clear faultline between a ‘Catholic’ south and a ‘Protestant’ north, the dividing line established in 1922 was a sectarian construct, a flawed recognition of conflicting loyalties. By opting for six of the island’s 32 counties, Ulster’s Unionists sacrificed unionists elsewhere in Ireland in order to “keep Ulster Protestant”. On their own logic they got more than they deserved, since two of the counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone, had significant Catholic majorities.
Historian Diarmaid Ferriter is particularly interesting on the origins and early history of the border. As he highlights, the realpolitik that led Lloyd George to support the Unionists “only to the extent that we cannot allow civil war to take place at our doors” cemented a border that caused less carnage and forced migration than most borders created in the wake of the First World War. That border gradually took on a life of its own, buttressed by tariffs, modest population transfers, divergent policies, southern neutrality during the Second World War and the IRA ‘ border campaign’ of the 1950s/60s. But its porosity during the Troubles meant the British Army never quite subdued the IRA.
For Unionist leaders, the “people of Northern Ireland” always meant one side only. At the outset, Protestants outnumbered Catholics two to one, but today that primacy has been eroded. While Protestants still outnumber Catholics in Northern Ireland’s population as a whole (although barely so), among those of school-going and working age, Catholics are in a majority.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which led to the virtual abolition of the border, was an inspired compromise that recognised new political realities. Insofar as the two Irelands are concerned, the draft Brexit agreement proposed by Theresa May in November 2018 was in the same ‘no winners’ spirit: the nationalist-republican side, which voted remain, would be forced out of the EU; whereas the DUP would get its way on Brexit, but would lose its veto on the backstop. Other scenarios were deemed too grim to contemplate.
Ferriter’s timely book explains all this and more, deftly interweaving history and current affairs.