Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ironically it was one of the most prominent younger radicals, David Lloyd George, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer indirectly recharged the home rule project. The rejection of his 1909 ‘people’s budget’ by the House of Lords – breaking the unwritten convention that the upper house did not interfere with money matters – triggered a constitutional crisis which ended, after two narrow Liberal general election victories in 1910, in legislation to abolish the Lords’ veto power. The 1911 Parliament Act made possible not only death duties, but also Irish home rule. As the Act passed, the prime minister H. H Asquith announced that a third home rule bill would be brought forward. Enraged Tories denounced this as the result of a ‘corrupt bargain’ to keep the Liberals in power with Irish support – the budget was disliked by the influential Irish liquor trade, and home rule was the price of pushing it through. There was probably no deal as such, and the Liberals had in any case, thanks to Labour support, a comfortable majority. ‘A general understanding’ that home rule would follow, it has been reasonably suggested, was ‘surely the natural result of the long history of Liberal commitment’ to it.³
³ P. Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 29.

I very much enjoyed Townshend’s Ewart-Biggs-Prize-winning The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, so had pretty high expectations here, combined with fairly fresh memories of Ronan Fanning’s Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922. I don’t think you could read The Partition without also having read The Republic, or something similar – the story of how Northern Ireland came to be created is really a sidenote to the much bigger story of Irish independence, and Townshend has sensibly not repeated much from the previous book, which means that some important context is skimmed here.

But it doesn’t matter all that much, because this is a deep dive into archival sources and also (often neglected) contemporary newspaper accounts of the process of the partition of Ireland, which Townshend rightly puts as beginning in 1885 when the election results revealed that Nationalism was dominant everywhere in Ireland except in the north-east, and the question of how, or indeed if, Ulster could be incorporated into a future self-governing Ireland became a real one.

One part of the book was completely new to me: the confused and violent situation in Northern Ireland, especially Belfast, as the new government under James Craig was being set up and at the same time under ineffective but visible attack by Michael Collins from the south. There was a real intermixture of Loyalist militias of varying degrees of effectiveness and state support that would hold its own with many of today’s conflicts, including the bloody ethnic cleansing. Nobody comes out of this episode well, including the British government which was wilfully ignorant of events in Belfast, Derry and the border counties.

The last chapter, not surprisingly, looks at the history of the Boundary Commission, which started late and badly. The chairman was a South African judge, but from the imperialist side; the Northern Ireland government refused to appoint its commissioner, so London imposed a journalist who of course leaked proceedings to Craig; and the Irish Free State nominated Eoin MacNeill, the confused academic who had unsuccessfully countermanded the Easter Rising in 1916, by now Minister for Education.

Townshend spends some time wondering why Cosgrave did not instead appoint Kevin O’Shiel, who was an expert on boundaries and constitutions, but I think the answer is clear: MacNeill had the political heft and was actually an elected member of the Northern Ireland Parliament (though he never took his seat), whereas O’Shiel (despite his best efforts) was a mere political adviser. MacNeill, however, was thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the other Commissioners and secretariat, and only managed to exert some control of the process by resigning just before the report was due to be published, thus torpedoing the entire exercise. (I believe another book published this year is even more critical of him.)

Nationalists like to find villains for the crime of partition, but the fact is that Nationalist leaders failed to grasp the fact that the Ulster situation was a very serious impediment for their political project. Townshend doesn’t go into it, but much Nationalist rhetoric and indeed behaviour was intentionally offensive to those who they claimed as fellow citizens. Parnell, as a Protestant landlord himself, rather adopted the zeal of the convert, and no Nationalist leadership figure had credibility among Unionists. In the later stages, I think that Redmond missed a trick here, and in other respects, by refusing to accept a Cabinet position – it would have been tough going, but he would have had the threat of resignation in his dwindling armory. I very much agree with Townshend’s conclusion:

Almost nobody wanted it; but any implication that a better arrangement was possible, and somehow squandered through haste and carelessness, would be misleading. The intensity of Unionist hostility to home rule presented a political challenge of exceptional difficulty. Once Joseph Chamberlain had talked of a separate parliament for Ulster, it would have needed a major reconstruction of nationalist ideas to make a unitary home rule arrangement viable. That adaptation was not made, or even attempted, mainly because nationalists were doomed to believe that any resistance within Ireland to home rule was illusory. Even amongst others, partition was never embraced with enthusiasm. It was a negative concept, connoting at best failure, at worst abuse of statesmanship.

Townshend also looks briefly at why neither power-sharing nor UK-wide federalism could have flown. My own reflection on those points is that nobody ever suggested guaranteed positions in Irish government for the Unionists, at least not until the creation of the Free State in 1922 (when Collins basically gave them what they asked for, most importantly short-term over-representation in the new Senate). And the notion of ‘Home Rule all round’ failed to recognised the asymmetry between Irish demands on the one hand and Scottish and Welsh aspirations on the other. (And indeed between Scotland and Wales. Bear in mind that devolution was rejected by a 4 to 1 majority in Wales in 1979, and scraped through by just under 7,000 votes out of over a million cast in 1997.)

I don’t think this is a book for beginners, but those who already know a bit – even a lot – about the period will find some very interesting new information. You can get The Partition here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates, and Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer.