Remembering the Past

The Government of Ireland Act 1920

THE Government of Ireland Bill, which laid the basis for partition, was introduced in the House of Commons in December 1919.
It was rejected by all sides in Ireland and the pro-unionist Irish Times commented:
“The Bill had not a single friend in either hemisphere, outside Downing Street.”
Not a single Irish member of any party voted for it. With the establishment in Ireland of Dáil Éireann after an overwhelming vote for Sinn Féin and full independence the Bill seemed doomed at birth. Yet it was the law that would shape the destiny of Ireland for decades.
While the Government of Ireland Bill was passing through Westminster in 1920, the Black and Tan War was escalating and in the north-east of the country the forces of unionism were preparing to establish the state provided for them in the Bill. The Ulster Volunteer Force was reorganised and by October had 30,000 members. Unionist leaders Edward Carson and James Craig pushed for the establishment of a Special Constabulary, later to become the notorious ‘B Specials’. Their request was granted and the UVF was armed and uniformed by the British Crown.
With the British Government diligently preparing the legal ground for partition, unionist forces set about preparing the political conditions in the Six Counties that they would rule. Between June 1920 and June 1922, 428 people were killed in conflict there; 8750 Catholics were driven from their jobs; 23,000 Catholics were driven from their homes.
The unionists had already recognised that they would not have a sufficient majority to control the historic province of Ulster with its nine counties. Carson spelt it our crudely in the House of Commons on May 18th 1920:
“We should like to have the very largest area possible, naturally. That is a system of land grabbing that prevails in all countries for widening the jurisdiction of the various governments that are set up; but there is no use in our undertaking  a government which we know would be a failure if we were saddled with these three counties [Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan].”
In the same debate, British Prime Minister Lloyd George frankly admitted that if the Irish people were asked what form of government they wanted they would choose an Irish Republic “by an emphatic majority”.
Lloyd George and his government were determined that they would never have that. Throughout the rest of 1920, they waged war on nationalist Ireland in order, in the words of The Times newspaper, “to scourge the Irish into obedience, leaving as sole alternative to resistance, the acceptance of the present Bill”. That was in November 1920, the bloodiest month of the Anglo-Irish War.
In that month, 18-year-old IRA Volunteer Kevin Barry was hanged; in India, Corporal James Daly of the Connaught Rangers was executed for leading a mutiny in that regiment in protest against British atrocities in Ireland; 14 British Intelligence officers were executed by the IRA in Dublin; 13 people were shot dead by the Black and Tans at Croke Park; two IRA officers, Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, and a civilian, Conor Clune, were tortured and shot dead in the guardroom of Dublin Castle; at Kilmichael in Cork the IRA inflicted the worst military defeat on the British thus far in the Tan War. British atrocities continued into December, notably the burning of Cork city centre.
It was against this background that the Government of Ireland Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons on November 11th 1920 and became law at the end of December. Irish republicans of course totally rejected it and labelled it ‘The Partition Act’.
With his Partition Act now law, Lloyd George tightened his repressive regime in Ireland.
When he failed to defeat the IRA, negotiations became unavoidable. Lloyd George’s task was to sell the Government of Ireland Act to both unionists and nationalists with as little modification as possible.
To do this he had to assure unionists that there would be no change in the size of their ‘Northern Ireland’ state.
He had to persuade nationalists that in return for staying in the British Empire they would be able to reduce the size of the Northern state to a size that made it unworkable and made Irish unity inevitable.
Lloyd George managed to do both.
Lloyd Geroge wrote a letter to Arthur Griffith during the Treaty negotiations in 1921 stating that if the unionists refused to allow a Boundary Commission to delimit the area of the Northern state “he [Lloyd George] would fight, summon parliament, appeal to it against Ulster, dissolve, or pass and act establishing an all-Ireland parliament”.
But Lloyd George’s colleagues in Government had already told the unionists that the boundary of the Six-County state would definitely not be changed. After the Treaty they were assured again that the Boundary Commission would be a dead letter.
A major factor in the ability of Griffith and Michael Collins to ‘sell’ the Treaty was Article 12, providing for the Boundary Commission which, they asserted, would make the Northern state unworkable and end partition. But when the Boundary Commission was finally established, in 1925, it ended in disaster, proposing minimal changes, breaking up in disarray and leading to a humiliating agreement with Britain by the Free State Government which cemented the partition boundary.
The Government of Ireland Act remained the legislative basis for partition and British jurisdiction in the Six Counties until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Arising from that Agreement, the Northern Ireland Act 1998 repealed the Government of Ireland Act 1920. In the House of Commons, Peter Robinson responded to the new Act:
“It is very clear that, far from the Bill’s leaving Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom, it introduces a transitional state. The Bill moves Northern Ireland from its full and rightful place within the United Kingdom out on a limb; it is being pushed towards an all-Ireland state.”

• The Government of Ireland Act became law on December 23rd 1920, 90 years ago this month.