Craolfar an cúigiú ceardlann sa tsraith ‘Machnamh 100’ dar teideal “Bunchlocha Bunreachtúla, Institiúideacha agus Taidhleoireachta: Castachtaí agus Conspóidí”

‘Interpreting the Period 1922 to 1926 in Irish History: Influences and Consequences’

Machnamh 100 – Seminar V, 26th May, 2022

The events of the period 1922 to 1926 are among the most important in modern history – not only in terms of how they fell out, and the consequences that flowed from them, but in what they tell us about the assumptions they carried, about independence, of the balance between parliamentary possibilities and military action, of the hold of empires and the force of a mythic dream of independence.

Where a balance was won, had to be struck, it was one too that accommodated overt and covert strategies, and within each an ongoing tension as to the value of radical or accommodating projects in relation to the release from empire, or accommodation within it.

One cannot avoid, I feel, reflecting on what lives might have been saved, relationships allowed to survive and develop, had the express will and vote of the vast majority of the people of the island for independence in 1918 been accepted and acted upon. 

We have our independence because it was fought for.  Yet neither the war with an empire, that the majority had voted to leave, nor a later civil war on the implications of the conclusion of The Treaty, was inevitable.

The decisions on the forms of independence were not strictly for the making by Irish people, with their differing perspectives.  They were being influenced by imperialist thinking, one that saw the cohesive value of loyalty to a crown, a perspective perhaps underestimated in Irish negotiations. 

There was too a huge difference, beyond geography, between those who had, within empire, experienced the benefits of an industrial revolution and its class conflicts, and those struggling for survival, for land, within a landlordism, that while it held ownership of land, in part as a means of status advancement in the society at the heart of empire, a society that viewed them as landowners to be on occasion visited in their demesnes, but not, on any terms, to be regarded as equals.

As to understanding the period, we are fortunate to have available to us now a rich vein of new scholarship, from new or neglected perspectives that can be added to the seminal work of Irish and American scholars in leaner times of publication.

In preparing my own contribution, I have drawn on some of these, having had of course the benefit of a brilliant, scholarly, informed, original paper from Professor Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania, and excellent responses from Professor Henry Patterson of the University of Ulster, Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne of University College Cork, and Dr. Theresa Reidy, also of University College Cork.

I have been enormously indebted to Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin’s work on the diaries of Joseph Campbell 1922/1923 entitled, As I Was among the Captives, published as part of the Irish Narratives series edited by the late David Fitzpatrick.

I immediately state a personal interest, as my father, John Higgins, was interned in Tintown in the Curragh and released at the same time as Joseph Campbell in December 1923.

I should say that my father’s brother Peter was, at this time, in Renmore Barracks, Galway, in the National Army.  My aunts were on a small farm in County Clare. 

They did not take sides in the Civil War but sent parcels with cakes, cigarettes and items of food or clothes to those interned, while also seeking news of possible releases from local senior Free State figures.

I believe Joseph Campbell’s Diary is incredibly important.  As Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin points out in her introduction, it is written by somebody who “was already a well-known literary figure at the time of his imprisonment and the writing of the diary”.

Born in Belfast, he had spent time in what was the South-Ulster Gaeltacht, and had experience too of all of the current literary movements, including modernism, which he discussed in the huts with Seán a Chóta and Francis Stuart, fellow prisoners.  Older than most internees, he was also exceptional in educational or social background terms. 

The majority of those interned were, for the most part, experienced in the underclass of city life – insecure non-inheriting sons from small farms, the trades, with bar and grocery strongly represented.

It is from being among them, including the sharing of their lost hopes, that Joseph Campbell has left us a daily account that is sensory, deeply moving.

It demonstrates the influence of his knowledge of, and respect for, works such as that of Dostoevsky.  His references to James Joyce’s method of recording the minutiae of sensory experience is contemporary to Joyce.

I was particularly interested in the period of the diary from Frank Aiken’s announcement of the end of the Civil War, on 24th May 1923.  All is lost for the internees.  On 3rd June 1923 there is an outburst of recrimination as to bad leadership and tactics, from Seán a Chóta, himself of course a diarist in the Irish language.

However, it is the experience of the month-long unsuccessful hunger strike in 1923 that reveals most the vulnerabilities on the part of internees, and the incredible cruelty on the part of those running the internment camp.

For those incarcerated, and who have lost, what concerns them most in 1923 is the uncertainty of their position.  Rumours of release circulate.  Newspapers are scrutinised for a hint.  Sometimes the rumours have been circulated by the authorities, such as the rumour during the hunger strike that if those remaining on it go off it, all internees will be released. 

In this short address, I must leave over the detail of what is little less than an anthropology of those from all parts of the island of Ireland who, for a variety of reasons, were incarcerated for the danger they were perceived as representing to the new State. 

Their prospects on release were grim.  If, a decade later, in preparation for power in 1932, representations from a newly-constructed Fianna Fáil would be sent to every parish to seek out IRA activists who had aspirations to get additional land, there would be no land on offer in 1924 for internees, nor for many, such as my father, would there be any prospect of a return to their jobs in the trades.

Responding to this, many of those trained in bar and grocery, for example, sought, after release, to rent a space to open a small business, thus making a job for themselves.  Representations by fellow workers for them to be allowed to return to work had fallen on deaf ears.

It would be similar in relation to the agricultural workers who had lost their employment, with the division of demesne land, the flight from, and the burning of, big houses.

Emigration was the option envisaged by many, but not easily accessed, and a change had to be forced in the permit system run by the IRA.  Without permission it was forbidden, seen as being "unpatriotic", to emigrate – and organisations like Clann na nGael in the United States were instructed that only those with IRA permits should be ‘allowed in’. 

This prohibition, despite letters from Seán Moylan and others, would prevail until July 1925 when the haemorrhage of those leaving was so great, thousands had left, that the Ard Cómhairle had to give way.

For those who stayed, unemployment was what beckoned.  Worse than unemployment itself was the fact that their character was blackened.  Their names would be handed in to the newly-formed police as suspects for the land agitation which was spreading and which the Churches as well as conservative politicians were titling ‘Bolshevism’.

For this reason my father had to leave his home parish and experience his unemployment of 1924 elsewhere.  The hunger for land, any land, more land, was widespread.

Professor Terence Dooley draws on the statistical sources on land ownership for the period.  By 1923 there were around 114,000 farms, comprising roughly 3,125,000 untenanted acres still to be transferred.

Professor Dooley quotes Kevin O’Higgins’s speech in the Dáil of 14th June 1923 when he spoke of ‘land grabbers’:

“They cannot have law and violence.  They cannot have an Act and their own plunder and, insofar as it can secure it, I will see that they do not have it […]

and by the time this Bill reaches its final stages, I hope to be able to assure the Dáil that there is not in any county over which we have, for the time being, responsibility and jurisdiction, one acre of land in the possession of any person but the legal owner.”

Terence Dooley’s Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a time of War and Revolution is a valuable, detailed, scholarly study of the experience of those in the country houses during the conditions of the War of Independence, when some were burned, and the Civil War when many more were burned. The context in which the occupants of those houses found themselves is well traced.

However, the immediate threats of the 1920s have to be placed in a larger and longer context of decline that begins with the first of the Land Acts in 1881.

Professor Dooley gives us a picture of landlordism in the 1880s.

Using K.T. Hoppen’s 500-acre threshold for admission to the landlord class, and drawing on a return of Irish landowners for the 1870s, Dooley enumerated and categorised landlords in Ireland as follows:

Those owning between 500 and 1,000 acres: 2,683 persons;  

1,000 to 2,000 acres: 1,788; 

2,000 to 5,000 acres: 1,225;

5,000 to 10,000 acres: 438;

above 10,000 acres: 303.

While this structure of ownership was carrying huge debt, it could never be sustainable.  Its decline is in stages from the 1880s. 

That decline will also be affected by those leaving, and by the loss of inheriting sons in the World War when it comes.  Then, too, a decrease in the release of funds from the British Government for land purchase, during the war, made it difficult to agree terms of purchase, with bonds yielding less than the War Bonds.

By the end of the 1920s, the agricultural labourers are now being opposed by organised large farmers.  Many labourers have of course emigrated.

Those agitating are being referred to, from such ranks as the graziers and others, as ‘Bolshevists’. 

The graziers, who have deflected the fury of those yet to get land on to the undistributed demesne lands, are themselves increasing their holdings.

Former militants in particular are angry, and they have their advocates in the Dáil.

Professor Dooley quotes a Dáil speech of the time:

“There is one class who seems to be nobody’s children and they are the ex-army men of the Old Volunteers.  I think if any class of people are entitled to consideration as regards land, they have first claim, because the Act of 1923 would not have been in existence at all, and we would not be here, were it not for them.

They seem to have been forgotten in every department, and I hope when the Minister sends his inspectors out that he will give them directions to have these men given special consideration.”

How much land was involved?

We do know, Professor Dooley tells us, referring to a British Government’s 400-page return of untenanted lands in the rural districts of Ireland in 1906, which distinguished 1,679 demesnes on which there was a ‘mansion’ and calculated that their owners – the vast majority of whom were aristocrats as defined here, with a respectable smattering of gentry, clergyman, merchants and professionals – continued to hold approximately 2.6 million acres of demesne and untenanted lands across the 32 counties. 

To quote Dooley:

“Big Houses did not look out of place as long as they continued to be surrounded by hundreds of acres of demesne and parkland.”

By way of contrast, and the contrast explains much, in relation to land hunger and land agitation, it is worth noting that by 1917, of the 572,574 holdings in Ireland, 112,787 were less than 1 acre, while 123,129 holdings were comprised of more than 15 but less than 30 acres.

Land hunger was of course a constant.  In the 19th century George Bermingham could write of a shopkeeper replying to his question as to how the vote on Home Rule had gone in the Commons the night before.

The reply was quick – “To hell with Home Rule.  It is the land we are after”.

While politicians in Dublin hurled abuse about forsaken principles and fealty to the British Crown, in rural Ireland people waited for the sanctioned transfer of their farms, and many more for the redistribution of untenanted and demesne lands. 

Some became impatient, as Dooley notes:

“At the beginning of the Truce period, the County Inspector of Tipperary reported: ‘The hunger for land is great, those who are landowners want more, while those who have none and who have been gunmen, believe that the estates of Loyalists, such as Kilroy, once cleared, will be divided amongst them’.

Standing as background then to the events of 1922-26 are a number of forces that would influence the choices made, policy and responses to a change that was imposed rather than chosen.

Of these the hunger for land is prominent.  Yet, there is too the huge variation in what was sought as independence.  There was an obvious difference among those seeking it, as to the means by which it would be achieved.

It was not a binary choice between parliamentary or military means.  Within each was a spectrum of radical or accommodating positions and projects in relation to achieving an exit from empire.

Development of a policy of full separation, on the releasing of any of its dependent parts, was not an attribute of empire, even when formally conceded. 

Institutional legacies too are left, not perceived as any detritus by those who now hold power, but rather as essential aspects of a gifted modernisation that is not to be questioned.

Following Memmi it is not difficult for the colonised and the coloniser to see their reflection in each other.  The insults exchanged in the Civil War demonstrate this, with the former comrade now an enemy.

It can be seen as the reflection of the coloniser lodged in both former comrades, now fighting, antagonists, who previously avoided this lodgement in each by having a shared enemy. 

A striking feature of those interned is their marginalisation, be it in terms of their occupation, their language.  They are from the edges of the property-owning clericalist society that now defines what is "respectable".

The gap between the ethos, the discourse, of the formal talks, be it from Truce to Treaty to surrender of arms, and the daily experience and discourse of those incarcerated, seems unbridgeable.

The diary entries of Joseph Campbell or of Seán a Chóta show this.  They reveal a resentment at the recollected absence of formal military leadership which was a source of failure.  This recollection will, in time, be countered by later texts which offer a heroic version of events, events which are not recalled in any similar way by those incarcerated.

This experience of 1923 to 1924 will not be followed by any reaching out, effort at inclusion of the broken, the losers.  The processing of the later pension applications is humiliating.  We get a minimalism that is forced on applicants by the bureaucratic structure of the application process, one which excludes any full narrative of events.  That bureaucratic ritualism is there in the questions.  The applications will, until the intervention of a concerned senior civil servant, be conducted as a box-ticking exercise. 

Understated in the history perhaps is the reference by the applicants to the poverty that they, the applicants are experiencing. 

The role of women in the independence struggle, far from being recognised, is revelatory of a misogyny which is exposed, not only in the treatment of pension applications, but in the interpretation of the revolutionary women’s speeches and their vote against the Treaty. 

One might reasonably speculate indeed if that is not an explanatory factor in the long delay on according rights to women, including within the context of the Constitution.

Is there any evidence of a transcending vision such as that allowed in the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil?

The vision that predominates is for the stability sought for property ownership, acquiescence in clerical control, respectability in the person, the family, the community.

Constitutions frequently come out of revolutions, and accordingly they tend to deal not just with the relatively prosaic matters of government organisation, but they have often, too, attempted to encompass a people’s spirit and values, a sense of the nation and of its citizens, as well as setting out the fundamental principles which were to govern the state’s laws and institutions.  An alternative view, such as that of Sartori, is that brevity in constitutions achieves certainty in an easier way. 

The Democratic Programme of the First Dáil had a visionary character.  However, as enacted in 1922, the Constitution of the Irish Free State was dictated in form and content by the requirements of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that had been negotiated between the British government and Irish leaders in 1921.

Saorstát Éireann consisted of 83 separate articles, totalling just 7,600 words.

The drafting committee had considered the inclusion of economic and social rights in the Irish constitution.

American labour lawyer Clemens James France, who assisted in the Constitution’s drafting, proposed, for example, provisions to ensure state control of natural resources, and further proposed that the state would capture the “unearned increment” arising from land value increases, thereby impeding speculation in land and promoting investment in industrial development.

Then too during the parliamentary debates on the constitution, Labour TDs such as Tom Johnson and T.J. O’Connell proposed the inclusion of modest welfare measures as well as provisions to protect children’s rights.  These proposals met with opposition.

UCD professor of economics, George O’Brien, as well as others, including Archbishop John Harty of Cashel, both questioned the social provisions’ economic and political viability, stating that such provisions carried the potential to alienate conservative, land-owning supporters of the Treaty.

Agitation by the landless across Europe and their seeking of the overthrow of authoritarian structures, their many expressions of emancipatory possibilities were known to each other by actionists across Europe and beyond. 

The Church was already directing labels of Bolshevism at the Labour and Trade Union Movement.  Tom Johnson’s or Labour’s condemnation of non-judicial executions brought, not any thanks, but death threats, from Liam Lynch on behalf of anti-Treatyites.

Issues of land remained omnipresent.  The Land Commission continued to redistribute farmland in most of Ireland, with untenanted land subject to compulsorily purchase orders, lands which were nominally to be divided out to local landless families, but in the execution this was applied unevenly across the State, with an emerging movement from IRA networks claiming that they who had driven out landlords were being ignored.

As to the 1922 Constitution itself, British law officers, operating under Lloyd George’s government, had further objected to the “Soviet character” of the Constitution’s declaration of “economic sovereignty”.

Ultimately, in what can only be interpreted as a significant missed opportunity, with lasting and far-reaching consequences on Irish society for decades to come, but in so many senses unsurprising, the Provisional Government dropped the offending provisions.

As to social policy then, the 1922 Constitution was limited to two “programmatic declarations” only, one specifying a pre-existing right to elementary education (Article Ten) and the other providing for the possibility of state ownership of national resources (Article Eleven).

It is important too, in our decade of commemorations, to realise that while there has been a reluctance, in the early days of the State, to put the events of this period through a formal commemorative lens in the fullest sense of recovering all of the pain, the violence, avoidable and unavoidable, the experience was real and damaging.  It stayed on in the lives of those impacted. 

Their pain was passed on in many cases, generating consequential pain suffered frequently in silence.  That silence would be contradicted by those who addressed their experience in a secondary way, in fiction yes, but really not at much of a distance.

I believe that Síobhra Aiken’s Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War more than adequately disposes of the over-generalised suggestion that silence on the Civil War was general.

Her work, be it on the fiction, biography or stories of the decades that followed the Civil War, gives further strength to my own long-held belief that there are just so many instances where literature gives us the lived and sensory experience that a narrowed theoretical model in the social sciences, or indeed the historiography, has allowed. 

Her critique, for example, of the work of Annie M.P. Smithson, including the career of how Walk of a Queen was received, is an example of this.  So much of what was written was an indirect attempt to recover, imagine, compensate perhaps, or even transact what was experienced but, given the social milieu, had better be left unsaid. 

It was not only among the landless or the unemployed ex-internees that division would be sown, opportunities for solidarity lost.

In cities like Belfast, where one of the positive consequences of the industrial legacy was a strong working class culture that had within it a trade union militancy that sought to prevent and reduce sectarian action against fellow workers.

However, that working class culture too would come to be divided, and significant parts of it captured by bigotry, with appalling consequences for the minority, and indeed a bigotry that would be a poison transmitted, resurrected, but now, thankfully, being rejected.

In the South, an authoritarian version of religion was claiming obedience in matters not only of the spirit, but of the body and life itself, and having it conceded to it, influence and hegemony in many of the institutions of the State. The appalling 1930s would be indeed a carnival of reaction, small-mindedness, repression and abuse.

The authoritarian abuses North and South were moving the people ever further away from each other.  The shell of each of the authoritarian systems was hardening, seemed impermeable.

Change has come, if too slowly, too late, for many.  We must welcome and sustain those cracks that have let in the light, that have led to communities beginning to see and understand the incubus for violence which these authoritarianisms constitute.

We are ceasing to see the necessity for abuses to be directed at each other.

We are beginning to appreciate the need and satisfaction that comes from narrative hospitality and decency in discourse.  All of that is precious.  It is what offers hope.  

Go raibh míle maith agaibh.

Machnamh on Constitutional Trajectories Since 1922 by Brendan O’Leary

26th May, 2022

Three new political entities emerged on this island in 1922: the Irish Free State; Northern Ireland; and, sometimes overlooked, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Two new states materialized. Northern Ireland was not one of them—though many have suggested otherwise, including James Craig who boasted of “a Protestant State” in riposte to those who had allegedly boasted of a Catholic one.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has never met any formal definition of a state—not Hegel’s, not Marx’s, not Max Weber’s, nor that of any other German eminence. Nor has it ever met standard legal definitions. Legislated through the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 Northern Ireland was neither domestically nor externally sovereign and has never had constituent power. Differently put, it cannot make its constitution on its own. Intermittently, it has been a devolved entity (1921-72), with delegated powers, powers that have been revoked in favor of direct rule (1972-98, 2000, 2002-7), and that may be revoked again. “In terms”, as lawyers say, it has never been a state in a federation: its powers could always be revoked. Throughout its existence Northern Ireland has been subject to the overriding sovereignty of the Westminster parliament—and still is, even though that parliament repealed Section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act in 1998. The Suspension Act of 2000, passed and implemented without the approval of the Government of Ireland, is a recent illustration of this sovereign override. On April 30, 2021, a BBC reporter told us that “A panel of historians set up to advise the government on Northern Ireland’s centenary has settled on 3 May 1921 as the birthdate of the state.” Admittedly, that must be the sole occasion on which a panel addressing a controversial topic in and over Northern Ireland has made an agreement to time—albeit with three days to go. The panel erred, however, if it thought it was naming the birthdate of a state called Northern Ireland. 2 The reporter mentioned that seven other birthdates had been considered. My own writing, with some disposition toward mercy, has considered four plausible birthdays: December 23, 1920, when the Government of Ireland Act was ratified; May 3, 1920, when it entered into force; June 22, 1921, when the Belfast parliament was opened; and, lastly, the occasion unionists are inclined to forget, 8 December 1922. That was when the Belfast parliament voted to secede from the Irish Free State, into which it had been legally put by the treaty signed in 1921. That treaty was not ratified by the King-in-Parliament until late 1922, after the final draft of the Constitution of the Irish Free State had been ratified. The previous version had been rejected by the British cabinet as incompatible with the treaty of 1921, a rejection that made the war of Green against Green, the Irish civil war, more likely. Any place with four or more birthdays is unlikely to be the subject of an agreed celebration, or commemoration, and so it has proved. But one factual observation flows from the fourth birthday: if the people of both jurisdictions vote in future with concurrent majorities to create a “sovereign united Ireland” then they would accomplish reunification. If Northern Ireland had a constitution before the Good Friday Agreement, it was the Government of Ireland Act, originally drafted to create two devolved parliaments within the Union, with continuing Westminster sovereignty, and with continuing but reduced Irish representation in the House of Commons. The Liberal Imperialist and Conservative solution to Irish self-determination was to invent two Irelands, Northern and Southern, with a geographic insouciance that still rankles, especially in Donegal. Unionist elites decisively shaped the final territorial definition of Northern Ireland—insisting on six counties, thereby betraying their co-ethnics in Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan. They did not, however, significantly debate or reflect—they did not engage in an act of Machnamh—on what constitutional forms Northern Ireland should have. In practice they resented inconvenient deviations from the Westminster mothership and would soon rectify them. No evidence exists of serious reflection within the UUP of the 1920s regarding what constitutional forms would best win the consent of the newly created political minority in Northern Ireland—the nationalists who saw themselves as part of an all-island majority, and the other overlapping minority, cultural Catholics. Rather, the UUP focused on control: preventing or putting down republican rebellion, organizing unionists, and disorganizing Northern nationalists and republicans—who were, admittedly, doing a thorough job of disorganizing themselves. Unionist elites did care about local fiscal burdens and benefits. Throughout the 1920s Craig worked successfully to increase subsidies from the London Treasury, and to bypass Lloyd George’s fiscal provisos. Had he not done so, Northern Ireland might have gone bankrupt in the 1930s, like Newfoundland. The British compromise was to give home rule to those who claimed they did not want it after they had refused or postponed it for those who had wanted it. As it happened, however, unionists 3 preferred local home rule to its alternatives, but not home rule within the Irish Free State. They cared about who ruled at home. The UUP would work to make Northern Ireland as culturally British as possible. They abolished proportional representation in local government almost immediately—to strengthen the case against revisions of the new border. Within the decade, PR-STV was abolished for elections to the Stormont parliament being built in Belfast’s eastern suburbs. Twice London governments chose not to prevent the abolition of proportional representation. The UUP sought to polarize local politics on the national question, curiously called “the constitutional question” by all sides, thereby making it easier for the party to act as a pan-Protestant alliance of classes and sects. The “adversarial politics” of the Westminster parliamentary model may be suited to homogeneous societies—if two major parties compete for the moderate median voter. But it has always been deeply unsuited to places rent by divisions over national, ethnic, and religious questions as was already apparent as the Union of Great Britain and Ireland began to democratize significantly after 1884. Reverting to winner-takes-all in single member-districts in Belfast helped the UUP to marginalize Protestant socialists—deemed “rotten Prods” during the expulsions of Catholics from Belfast’s shipyards. It also helped keep loyalist ultras generally within the folds of the dominant party. Republicans and Northern nationalists were given no reasons to abandon “abstentionism.” Among other “securities” for Southern Protestants, STV-PR had been introduced for Irish local government electionsin 1920 and wasthen put into the Government of Ireland Act. STV-PR would stay in the South, championed by Arthur Griffith, incorporated in both the Constitution of the Irish Free State and its replacement. Subsequent efforts, by Fianna Fáil governments, to replace STVPR with winner-takes-all were defeated in referendums in 1959 and 1968. These institutional decisions had consequences. Fianna Fáil, while the largest party, always faced prospects of not being able to form a government. The UUP did not, though it was constantly anxious that it might lose. It dealt with the anxiety by making losing highly improbable. STV-PR was not restored in the North until 1973. In the interim, the Ulster Unionist Party won all general elections held to the Belfast and London parliaments. No alternation in government took place. Two prime ministers, Craig and Brooke, served for twenty years each. Death in office may have been the most common means of changing cabinet ministers. There was no incentive to attract Catholic let alone nationalist votes. The party did not debate Catholic membership until the late 1950s. Abuse of power was plentiful, especially where its exercise would further entrench the party. All the pathologies of the UUP’s dominance were aggravated by the abolition of PR. Namely, partisan control of the police and its B Special reserves; gerrymandering; making elections into censuses of the loyal; direct and indirect discrimination against Catholics, 4 nationalists, and republicans—in employment, housing allocation, and the building and siting of infrastructure; the maintenance of an unreformed local government franchise; and the weakness of parliamentary opposition. Failure to protect the securities they had included in the home rule acts typified Westminster’s negligent oversight. Northern Ireland has been the subject of five major treaties since its creation:  The founding treaty amended the Government of Ireland Act, putting Northern Ireland into the Irish Free State, while allowing it to secede back into the UK, subject to two provisos: a boundary commission, which would, it seemed, create a fairer border, and an obligation on Northern Ireland to pay its full fiscal contributions, then known as Imperial contributions. Neither proviso was fulfilled.  The treaty of 1925 amended the foundational treaty. It buried the boundary commission, and the Council of Ireland—though the latter idea would be resurrected and rejected in the making and defeat of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and 1974.  The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 created the inter-governmental conference; pledged the further reform of Northern Ireland in return for security co-operation; and incentivized power-sharing devolution.  The latter was not agreed until the British-Irish Agreement of 10 April 1998, which promised to safeguard and implement the three-stranded power-sharing settlement reached in multi-party talks in Belfast.  Last, and most recent, is the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol, an integral part of the UK’s Withdrawal Agreement of 2020 with the European Union, intended to preserve the gains of the 1998 Agreement. The Government of Northern Ireland was a party to just one of these treaties, that of 1925—but not as a state. The Good Friday or Belfast Agreement—the latter name preferred by those who emphasize where it was signed rather than the day it was made—addressed how a Northern Ireland government would be composed, at least this side of a reunified Ireland, and it was agreed by double referendums, not just in the North, and negotiated and ratified under the supervision and with the exhortation of the two sovereign governments. Being the subject of five significant international treaties suggests that sustained insecurity describes Northern Ireland’s constitutional trajectory—for which many are jointly culpable, not least unionist leaders. Even the place’s name has never been fully agreed. Unionists would have preferred to call it Ulster, taking the name of the whole for the larger portion. They lobbied for that name-change in 1937 when the name of the Irish state was changed, and in 1949 when the republic was redeclared. London governments refused the name-change but did not object to the Royal Ulster Constabulary—or later to the Ulster Defence Regiment. To this day, most loyalist militia have Ulster in their titles, not Northern Ireland. For traditional Irish nationalists the place remains “the North of Ireland,” for traditional republicans, “the six counties.” 5 A last measure of Northern Ireland’s constitutional insecurity may be taken from Richard Humphreys very useful edition of key documents, Reconciling Ireland: Fifty Years of British-Irish Agreements. His text includes 40 agreements made between 1973 and 2020, but not the recent Protocol to which the UK and Ireland are parties—Ireland through the EU. We may expect further such agreements before future referendums decide the status of Northern Ireland. In the long story of British direct rule between 1972 and 1998, that I cannot examine here, the Government of Ireland Act was progressively amended or extinguished by British governments until it was replaced by the 1998 Agreement. Unlike previous power-sharing initiatives, the Good Friday Agreement eventually appeared to stabilize between 2007 and 2017, after the St Andrews Agreement led to minor adjustments of its content. For the first time constitutional arrangements enjoyed legitimacy throughout the island as well as within and across Northern Ireland. The parties to the 1998 Agreement included republicans as well as loyalists. They accepted consociational arrangements, power-sharing between communities and parties based on the principles of parity, proportionality, autonomy, and veto-rights on devolved matters. I have reviewed these in detail elsewhere—generally favorably. However, these arrangements are not “constitutionalized” as that term is understood elsewhere. They are partly in a UK “constitutional statute,” the Northern Ireland Act 1998, as modified by subsequent legislation, notably the St Andrews Agreement. All that does is to protect the GFA against implied repeal. They are also in the provisions of the text agreed by the parties in 1998 that are not incorporated into UK domestic law. These include the recognition of the right of the people of Ireland, North and South, respectively to exercise their right of self-determination to create a sovereign united Ireland, or to maintain the Union; to do so “without external impediment;” and, not least, the obligation of “rigorous impartiality” in administration by the incumbent sovereign government. Lastly, they are protected by two treaties, one between the UK and Ireland, and now one between the EU and the UK. The permanent constitutional trouble, admittedly not the only one, is that Westminster’s sovereignty hangs like a sword of Damocles over all these arrangements. No Westminster parliament can bind its successor. Each fresh UK government may modify these and any other constitutional arrangements—if it so chooses—provided it can pass the relevant laws. Simply put, a binding treaty with a parliament that allows itself easily to modify or repudiate treaties, deeply impairs the UK’s capacity to make credible commitments to foreign governments, including Ireland’s. Equally that same parliament cannot make solemn internal constitutional pledges to nationalists, unionists, or others. What Westminster gives, Westminster may take away, by the same means. 6 The constant lobbying of the Westminster government of the day to implement the 1998 Agreement—or not—or to implement the Protocol—or not—reflects this condition of permanent constitutional insecurity. Perfidious Albion, I like to say, is a constitutional condition, not a national character trait. No Anglophobia is required for this diagnosis—or intended. No governing arrangements or platform of rights in any part of the Union is institutionally entrenched against a simple majority in the House of Commons and the Lords—including the Acts of Union, as recently advertised by Justice Adrian Colton’s eloquent essay in constitutional law, upheld by the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal in March 2022. So long as parliamentary sovereignty remains the UK’s Grundnorm the credible entrenchment of rights and procedures—even when sincerely supported by London ministers—cannot be offered to the Scots or the Welsh, let alone the three designations of Northern Irish. And as observed throughout this island, the current Conservative government feels free in principle to repudiate— allegedly “in a very specific and limited way”—treaties which it has very recently signed. Northern Ireland was a constitutional failure before 1998, an example of how the Westminster model may be abused by a dominant party based on a dominant nationality, ethnicity, or religious community. Its replacement by a consociational devolved settlement with institutionalized NorthSouth and East-West relations, is a very distinct improvement, but that settlement has proven brittle, especially without sustained British and Irish governmental oversight and cooperation. The settlement was not made by and has never been fully owned by leading English Conservatives, with the notably honorable exceptions of Christopher Patten and John Major (the latter in retrospect). The fragility of the settlement has been exposed by the Johnson administration’s decision to choose a hard exit from the EU—for Great Britain, while in bad faith signing a Protocol to address the Brexiteers’ afterthought—Northern Ireland. Whether the 1998 settlement endures remains to be seen; if it does, it will ease a more benign path toward reunification.

Independent Ireland

The Irish Free State, by contrast to Northern Ireland, was a state, and became a free state. Statehood was in its founding title, but Whitehall’s lawyers sought, unsuccessfully, to keep it constrained by the narrowest construal of “the Treaty.” The domestic sovereignty of the IFS was mostly clear at the outset, albeit constrained by the “Articles of Agreement for a Treaty” ratified by Dáil Éireann and the Westminster parliament in 1922. The Free State immediately had the treaty-making powers of Canada, and by 1923, against the wishes of His Majesty’s Government, it was recognized by the League of Nations, of which it would become a member in good standing. By 1931, Westminster had renounced the right to legislate for any dominion—the designation through which British drafters of “the Treaty” had hoped to confine the sovereignty of the Irish Free State. Within fifteen years most of the constitutional articles, including most of those in the Treaty, imposed against the first preferences of the Irish negotiators, were gone. Successive constitutional 7 amendments by Cumann na nGaedheal or Fianna Fáil-led governments were not contested or were acquiesced in by London governments. The Irish of the Free State adopted Bunreacht na Éireann, by referendum, in 1937. Literally that is the Fundamental or Basic Law of Ireland, but officially it is translated as the Constitution of Ireland. Unlike the Free State Constitution, the Bunreacht was entirely made in sovereign Ireland, and ratified by its sovereign people alone, through their own parliament and by a referendum. It thereby achieved a widespread standing that its predecessor never attained, because both the Treaty and London’s rejection of the official first draft of the Constitution of the Irish Free State were accompanied by a British threat to renew war. The following year Neville Chamberlain’s government, on the advice of his senior military officers, relinquished the so-called Treaty ports, leaving the Government of Ireland fully sovereign over its territory. The so-called “economic war” was settled at the same time—in de Valera’s and Ireland’s favour. So by 1939 the State named Ireland in the English language had become fully externally sovereign, demonstrated through its subsequent neutrality throughout World War 2. In all but name it had become a republic again, with an elected President, described as taking “precedence over all other persons in the State.” The outstanding feature of the Treaty contested by nationalists of all hues—Northern Ireland’s existence—was tactically but not tactfully addressed in Articles 2 and 3 of the Bunreacht. These claimed the whole island as Ireland’s national territory but confined the jurisdiction of the Oireachtas to the territory of Saorstát Éireann. Seen as aggressively irredentist by unionists, these articles were qualified by Article 29 of the Constitution, which obliged Ireland to obey international law, and to settle territorial disputes peaceably. They deliberately left open the possibility that Northern Ireland could be transferred to Ireland by an agreement between Great Britain and Ireland, without the consent of its parliament or a majority of its people. After 1937 Irish governments effectively did not recognize Northern Ireland, silently repudiating the agreement of 1925. Irish sovereignty was prioritized ahead of détente with the Northern government. Non-recognition was fully reciprocated by the Government of Northern Ireland’s cultural and ideological distance from de Valera’s Ireland, which it berated for betraying the Treaty—one that the UUP government had not recognized at the time. We also now know that in June 1940 Craig wrote to Churchill recommending that Scottish and Welsh regiments should be sent to topple the regime in Dublin and to install a British military governor. On this occasion Churchill did not agree with Craig. Mutual non-recognition persisted: the Prime Ministers of Ireland and Northern Ireland did not meet between 1925 and 1965. The UK did not recognize Ireland by its official name until 1998; Ireland did not fully recognize Northern Ireland by its name until it ratified the British-Irish Agreement and modified Articles 2 and 3 in 1999 to specify mutual consent for reunification. 8 Disputes over names and refusing to recognize one another’s preferred names feature in the base currency of deep national and ethnic conflict. The Constitution of the Irish Free State was replaced for two reasons. One was to complete the implementation of De Valera’s Document Number 2, his alternative to the 1921 Treaty, that had been rejected both by the British and by a majority of his fellow Sinn Féin cabinet members, and a majority of the revolutionary Dáil Éireann. The other reason was that the Constitution of the Irish Free State had become too British, but not in a monarchical sense. Unexpectedly, each article could be amended by a simple majority of the Oireachtas, i.e., the Oireachtas became sovereign. Legally that development was allowed to happen through the exploitation of a badly drafted albeit misinterpreted Article 50—what is it about Articles numbered 50? In that article the entrenchment of the constitution had been postponed for eight years—initially to enable minor corrective amendments by ordinary legislation; but it was then extended for sixteen years, through arguably invalid amendment of the amending provision. Had the planned entrenchment occurred, then a referendum passed by a qualified majority would have been required to ratify constitutional amendments. Legally, the de facto shift to Oireachtas sovereignty was also enabled by a curious court judgment by Judge MR O’Connor in May 1924, R (Cooney) v Clinton. The judge held that retrospective legislation validating the military courts that had been used to try militant republicans should be treated as a constitutional amendment—even though the act in question had not been brought forward as such. Effectively this decision returned the Irish Free State to the British judicial doctrine of ‘implied repeal.’ As a result of this decision and subsequent cases the Constitution could be amended by ordinary legislation “without specifying the provisions to be amended and without even specifying any intention to amend the Constitution.” The Cumann na nGhaedheal government also abolished the article enabling a popular initiative to launch a referendum because Fianna Fáil began to mobilize to hold one targeted against the Treaty. Despite its eventual failure the Free State Constitution nevertheless deserves some backward glances of approval, but not because of its unstable compromise between a democratic and republican ethos and British monarchic symbolism, but rather because of its innovative ambitions and its good faith intent to accommodate Irish Protestants and Unionists—including Ulster Protestants. The innovative ambitions included the desire to entrench citizen not parliamentary sovereignty—by making the people sovereign, and by requiring referendums to change the constitution—and the desire to establish judicial review to ensure that governments did not breach the people’s rights. The accommodationist ethos was present not just in the determination to keep 9 STV-PR as a safeguard for Protestants throughout the island, but in the decision to establish a Senate in which Protestants would be significantly over-represented: a goal lost when the Senate became party-politicized. Last, but not least, all three internal drafts of the Constitution of the Free State, obliged a request from Michael Collins regarding the North. Article 44 of the final constitution had the following provision: “The Oireachtas may create subordinate legislatures with such powers as may be decided by law”. Collins had wanted a mechanism readily available to incorporate a devolved Northern Ireland within a reunited Irish Free State. Fifteen years later, Éamon de Valera kept open the option for “subordinate legislatures.” Article 15.2 of the Bunreacht provides that, “1° The sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State is hereby vested in the Oireachtas: no other legislative authority has power to make laws for the State. 2° Provision may however be made by law for the creation or recognition of subordinate legislatures and for the powers and functions of these legislatures.” (Author’s emphasis) There is a clear difference between the two constitutions. Under Ireland’s current constitution, a law may be passed by the Oireachtas to recognize an existing legislature as subordinate. At the time this text allowed for the recognition of the Northern Ireland Parliament, which had been running for some sixteen years when Bunreacht na hÉireann was ratified. The same clause could, however, be used to recognize the current Northern Ireland Assembly as a subordinate legislature. De Valera’s constitution has proved robust and flexible, surprising many. It has become a constitution as ordinarily understood. The Oireachtas is not sovereign. The constitution protects popular sovereignty. Referendums are required to amend the constitution. Judicial review and presidential reference for judicial review have helped protect constitutional and human rights, both those that are explicit, and those Americans call “unenumerated.” The constitution has been sufficiently flexible to allow Articles 2 and 3 to be amended to reflect the principle of concurrent consent for Irish reunification, and to enable amendments, starting with the modification of Article 44 on religion, that reflect the country’s thoroughgoing secularization, as well as its integration into the European confederation. It is sufficiently flexible to allow for two different models of future reunification—one with a continuing Northern Ireland Assembly, and one in which Northern Ireland is dissolved. It must, however, be radically amended or replaced if federation becomes the chosen model of reunification, an unlikely possibility I believe. The Constitution’s Preamble, however, is not fit for purpose: it reads as sectarian, whatever the drafting intent. Likewise, the provisions on declarations for officeholders, including the President’s, need to be fully secularized. Its drafting spirit was patriarchal and regressive regarding women’s rights. A full scan and deliberation over the constitution, particularly its language provisions, is minimally necessary before the momentous and galvanizing prospects of reunification referendums circa 2030. Comprehensive replacement, however, may not be required, unless the model of 10 reunification chosen is based on holding a constitutional convention elected by the entire people of the island.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

The other state created in 1922, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is sovereign over Northern Ireland. It is sometimes, inaccurately, referred to as “the British state in Ireland,” because there is no good adjectival form for UK. “Ukania and Ukanian”, advanced by Tom Nairn, have no extensive followers. In 1922, the territorially reconstructed United Kingdom lost more of its sovereign territory (22%) than Germany had at Versailles (13%), a vivid testament to its failure to incorporate Ireland into British nation-building. This down-sizing, under the pressure of ballots and armed insurrection, caused no significant political aftershock within Great Britain. No institutional transformation occurred akin to France’s reconstruction during withdrawal from Algeria. Any prospects of “home rule all around” or of federalizing the UK died, surviving only in the Round Table group—pan-dominion or commonwealth imperialists led by Lionel Curtis, who had been an advisor to Lloyd George during the making of the Treaty and after. From the perspective of British political elites, especially the Conservatives, down-sizing from Ireland, South and North, was almost a complete success. Ireland no longer sent over 100 MPs to the House of Commons. Tiresome “Irish questions” were removed from the Commons, aided by a Speaker’s convention blocking parliamentary questions and discussion on matters devolved to Northern Ireland. The Tories could also count on 10-12 UUP MPs at Westminster to take the Conservative whip until 1972, a phenomenon which concentrated Harold Wilson’s mind when Labour won a House of Commons majority of four seats in 1964. Managing Ireland became largely a question of international relations, whereas Northern Ireland was delegated to a small number of officials in the Treasury and the Home Office. The removal of “the Irish question” from the Commons also unexpectedly facilitated the growth of Labour and the Conservatives at the expense of the Liberals. “Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” So wrote a professor of politics in 1967. That illusion was easier to believe after 1945 and before the duopoly of Labour and Conservatives began to breakdown in the mid-1970s. At least Scotland and Wales were part of the embellishment and detail; Northern Ireland was not; it was not treated as part of British party politics—its details did not fit class politics, even though its dominant party represented conservative British Protestant culture in nearly fossilized forms. Intellectual neglect within the British academy mirrored the political neglect in Westminster and Whitehall, and in the press and civil society. British imperial elites also quickly judged that partitioning Ireland had been a success—whence the confidence with which some of their officials advanced partition as a “solution” for mandate Palestine and “British” India. 11 After 1918 and 1945 the victors of two world wars saw no reason to replace their constitution, essentially the English constitution, with its core doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Later, the not-so-post-imperial political elite of Greater England found European integration, especially the European Union, a profound challenge. There they encountered a constitutionalized confederationin-the-making, rather than an international organization to be treated à la carte. We all know how that tension ended, or at least appears to have ended. Grafting the English constitution into the European confederation eventually did not work, although ironically the divorce took place after a referendum intended to resolve intra-elite disagreement among the Conservatives. Twenty years ago, it had not been absurd to imagine the UK evolving in an informally quasi-federal manner within a confederalizing Europe. That vista has gone like the snows of yesteryear. Until England, and I mean England, constitutionalizes in a conventional manner by removing sovereignty from its imperious parliament, it will remain an awkward partner to its domestic neighbors, and its sovereign neighbors. “Awkward” is a polite adjective. Indeed, the dissolution of the two unions, that of Great Britain and that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, may occur before the English determine to join the club of genuinely constitutionalized democracies. The rules for the dissolution of the union with Northern Ireland are agreed in a treaty, the rules for the other union are not. The current Conservative Prime Minister reserves the right to determine when the people of Scotland may next decide on their self-determination.

Finally?

Finally—the late JK Galbraith advised that a speaker should always say “finally” to give hope to his audience. Finally, we must learn from our constitutional experiences. 1922 was a bloody year throughout much of the island; both emergent jurisdictions experienced civil war. Both initial constitutional orders were failures, by the evaluative standards of constitutionality used here. We still live with the consequences. The compromises of 1937 and 1998 did not definitively settle the constitutional orders of the South and the North. The terms and conditions for future referendums on the possibility of reunification. are specified in the 1998 Agreement—though not with the detail many would like to see. They are also protected by two treaties. However, adequate constitutional preparation for the possibility of the referendums has not begun. The nature of the UK state, and Northern Ireland’s lack of statehood, puts a particular onus on the Irish state to prepare for reunification. The minimal statecraft required of this cohort of deputies and senators in the Oireachtas is to start considering the optimal constitutional accommodations that would provide a soft landing to the possible losers in the referendums. The losers could be Ulster unionists; but they could also be Northern nationalists—though they will be entitled to another referendum seven years later if the conditions are met again. 12 I have been told that it is a bit rich for the Irish to demand that treaties be honored given that the independence of Ireland was accomplished through unilateral amendment or repudiation of a treaty’s articles. There is, however, an incomparable difference between voluntary treaties, freely negotiated and ratified, and coerced treaties imposed by the threat of “terrible and immediate war.” Similar comparative condemnation should attach to insincere treaty-making. Preserving constitutional order and avoiding any diminution in the protection of rights across the island is the immediate challenge faced by our politicians. Preparing all, South and North, for the possibility of reunification, so that it may occur as democratically, peaceably, and constitutionally as possible, is the larger and more demanding challenge, both for this political class, and those who will follow them. Acknowledgements. The kind invitation to make this address was received from President Michael D Higgins. He bears no responsibility for anything advanced here. I would like to thank Professors Shelley Deane, John Doyle, Oran Doyle, Steven Greer, John Hall, Breandán Mac Suibhne, Pól Ó Dochartaigh, and Etain Tannam for their comments on the first draft. They too are not responsible for anything contained here.

Machnamh 100: Class experience, state and identity, a Northern perspective - Professor Henry Patterson

26th May, 2022

1920 when he organised bands of unarmed volunteers to protect the premises of local Catholics and prevent rioting and looting.28

It was also manifest in the shop stewards’ movement which had developed during the War. In August 1969 when violence broke out in Belfast, it was the shop stewards who called a mass meeting of the workforce to successfully oppose attempts by loyalist militants to repeat the expulsion of the 1920s. In the words of Sandy Scott, the chief shop steward in the yard, ‘The shipyard men are determined to maintain the peace and set an example to the province.’36

For all the sectarianism that existed within the shipyards, without the class consciousness that was also rooted there, the Northern Ireland state would have been more like the ‘carnival of reaction’ that Connolly predicted.

 

1 Connal Parr, Inventing the Myth: Political Passions and the Ulster Protestant Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, 53-54.

2 Henry Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism: The Protestant Working Class and the Belfast Labour Movement 1868-1921, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1980, 94.

3 Patrick Maume, ‘Sir George Smith Clark 1861-1935’ in James Maguire and James Quinn, eds., Ulster Political Lives 1886-1925, Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2016.

4 Michael Moss and John R. Hume, Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of Harland and Wolff, Belfast 1861- 1986, Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 175.

5 David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, London, Penguin 2020, p.132.

6 In 1918 shipbuilding yards throughout the UK competed to set the world record for riveting.

7 S.J. Connolly ed. Belfast 400 People, Place and History, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2012, 17.

8 ‘Men expelled from Queen’s Island’, Irish Times, 26 April 1893.

9 ‘’You watched the big picture fade away down at Harland and Wolff You lived your life of quiet desperation on the side

Going to the shipyard in the morning on your bike” , Van Morrison lyrics from ‘Choppin Wood’.

10 D. H. Govan, ‘Towards a religious understanding of the Orange Order in Belfast, 1910-14’, Irish Studies Review, vol. 29 , issue 4, 2021.

11 Sloan was a semi-skilled worker in Harland and Wolff who held evangelical meetings in the platers’ shed during the lunch breaks: Moss and Hume, Shipbuilders, 127.

12 Alice Johnson, Middle Class Life in Victorian Belfast, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, 160.

13 Glenn Simpson, ‘William Pirrie, the Titanic and Home Rule’, History Ireland, volume 20, Issue 2, March/April 2012.

14 Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism, 142.

15 F.S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, 136.

16 Aidan Campbell, Ballymacarrett, An Illustrated and Spoken History of Ballymacarrett, East Belfast, self- published, 2016, 56.

17 ‘Lord Pirrie was generally considered to be one of Belfast’s most unloved citizens..’, George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, London, Serif, 2012, 84.

18 Moss and Hume, Shipbuilders, 157.

19 Moss and Hume, Shipbuilders, 225.

20 This paragraph is based on Sam Robinson, There’s a Green Sward Called the Oval: The Life and Times of a Football Stadium, Belfast, self-published, no date,

21 John Foster and Charles Woolfson, The Politics of the UCS Work-In, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1986, 134

22 James Connolly wrote of the loss of 17 workers during the construction of the Titanic: ‘Our shipyards offer up a daily sacrifice of life and limb on the altar of capitalism.’ quoted in John Lynch, ‘The Belfast Shipyards and the Industrial Working Class’ in F. Devine, F. Lane & N. Purseil, Essays in Irish Labour History, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2008, 141.

23 Richard P. De Kerbrech & David L. Williams, Harland and Wolff and Workman Clark; A Golden Age of Shipbuilding in Old Images, Cheltenham, The History Press, 22.

24 Emmet O’Connor, ‘Labour in Ulster and the Formation of Northern Ireland’, in Labour and Northern Ireland Foundation and Development , Proceedings of a Conference held in The Mac, Belfast on 5 October 2019, Belfast, Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 20-21.

25 An important exception is Connal Parr, Inventing the Myth Political Passions and the Ulster Protestant Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.

26 ‘Disturbances in Belfast….Men beaten on Queen’s Island’, The Weekly Irish Times, 29 April 1893.

27 ‘The Queen’s Island Workmen’, Irish Times, 6 May 1893 and Austen Morgan, Labour and Partition The Belfast Working Class 1905-1923, London, Pluto Press, 1991, 136.

28 Brian M. Walker, ‘Outreach in the Midst of Conflict: The Revd John Redmond in 1920s Belfast’, Archive of the Month 01 August 2020, ireland.anglican.org

29 Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism, 105.

30 Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism, 127-128..

31 Austen Morgan, Labour and Partition , 270.

32 Philip Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013, 128.

33 Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, 123-125.

34 Sean Byers, Sean Murray Marxist Leninist and Irish Socialist Republican, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2015, 146.

35 On the 22 July 1920, the day after the shipyard expulsions, James Stewart, an eighteen year old apprentice engineer from Clydebank, was walking down the Newtownards Road with his cousin, Nellie McGregor and John Doyle , a friend, when they were shot and fatally wounded by soldiers dealing with rioters further down the road near St Matthews Catholic church. Stewart was on holiday from Scotland staying with his cousin who lived in Frome Street, the next street up from Dee Street towards the city centre. There is no suggestion that they or Doyle were involved in rioting. Eunan O’Halpin and Daithi O Corrain, The Dead of the Irish Revolution, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2021, 153.

36 Michael McInerney, ‘The Vital Battle for Peace in Belfast Shipyards’, Irish Times, 30 December 1969.

‘Institutionalising Exclusion in Modern Ireland’ - Lindsey Earner-Byrne

26th May, 2022

1 ‘Patient’s escape magdalen asylum’, Connacht Tribune, 25 August 1928.

2 ‘His Eminence Cardinal Logue’s Lenten Pastoral. Demoralisation of Youth. Lamentable Events,’ Irish Independent, 12 February 1923.

3 See, Maude Royden, ‘Religion, and Modern Sexuality’, Journal of British Studies 52 (2013), pp. 153–78

4 I am greatly influenced the work of a whole host of scholars here, but most particularly Jacqueline Rose, Patrick Joyce, Kingsley Scott, etc.

5 ‘Evil Tendency: Immorality in Galway Deplored by Bishop: Warning to Girls – Influence of Dancing and Bad Literature, Freemans Journal, 11 April 1924.

6 Ibid.

7 See J. Smith’s, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Manchester, 2007); L. Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922-60 (Manchester, 2007).

8 A Door of Hope’, Church of Ireland Gazette, 21 November 1924.

9 We know women were incarcerated for reasons as broad as ‘fears’ their moral safety, reporting sexual assault, incest and pregnancy outside marriage.

10 I am influenced by Sara Ahmed’s work on categories of existence see, in particular, Ahmed, ‘A Willfulness Archive’, Theory & Event, 15: 3 (2012), pp. 1-22.

11 Military Service Pensions Collection: MF54PatrickPerry.

12 Miniter for Finance refused the pension, the Minister for Defence would have granted it. Department of Finance Memo, 28 April 1924. MF54PatrickPerry.

13 Mary S. Kettle, Chairman of the Joint Committee of Women Societies, 10 May 1937

14 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in two acts’, Small Axe, 26 (12: 2), June 2008, pp. 1-14, p. 4.

Representative government: the electoral systems - Theresa Reidy

26th May, 2022

Pringle, D.G., 1980. Electoral systems and political manipulation: A case study of Northern Ireland in the 1920s. Economic and Social Review, 11(3), pp.187-205.

Singer, M.M., 2013. Was Duverger correct? Single-member district election outcomes in fifty-three countries. British Journal of Political Science, 43(1), pp.201-220.

Taagepera, R. and Qvortrup, M., 2012. Who Gets what, when, how–through which Electoral System?. European Political Science, 11(2), pp.244-258