Connal Parr gives his take on a recent book on Partition. 


With its official centenary looming, one senses that an avalanche of books will reach us addressing the partition of Ireland. Cormac Moore’s The Birth of the Border is well-placed to add to that ever-expanding area, offering a readable, wide-ranging, and insightful survey of the event and its ongoing consequences for social, political and cultural life across the island of Ireland.

It begins with an extract from Spike Milligan’s novel Puckoon (1963), establishing a certain tonal approach to the issue of the border. For the majority of writers on partition, the idea itself, along with its implementation and execution, is axiomatically absurd; absurd to the point of beginning a work with a great comedian’s ditty. This paradoxically negates the comprehensive approach Moore adopts in the rest of this book; but it speaks reflectively of an evident and inherent political interpretation of partition, accompanied by a rejection of the concept itself that explicitly resents the way the border has basically ‘strangled politics’ in Ireland since it was enacted.

This is more than understandable, and Moore is certainly not alone in his underlying portrayal and view. One of the challenges for authors researching partition – and, perhaps, Irish history generally – is the realization of different modes of thinking and streams of thought. To Moore, as for Robert Lynch, whose recent The Partition of Ireland 1918–1925 (2019) also offers notable recent analysis, the concept in inherently flawed, malevolent, and daft: all at the same time (the same half silly, yet half heinous tone – again a somewhat paradoxical combination – pervades Diarmaid Ferriter’s long essay The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics). Even a commentator as nuanced as Belfast-born Gerald Dawe, in his wonderful collection of essays The Sound of the Shuttle, refers to an ‘absurdly partitioned Irish state’, which ‘came to haunt the country with a vengeance, [ensuring] we have been paying for these bloody mistakes of the 1920s ever since and on all sides of the Irish Sea.’ For those of us who – until flights were grounded in March 2020 – live between Ireland and England, partition (and the border) is always liable to get personal.

The most striking quality of The Birth of the Border is its social and cultural range of history. After the first five chapters taking in the Government of Ireland Act, the Treaty, and the fiery birth of Northern Ireland, Moore offers a structural framing of the different areas of life and society marked by partition: Politics, Security, Law, Business and Trade, Religion, Education, Infrastructure and Services, the Labour Movement, and Sport. These sections combine to provide the core value of this book. The last two chapters are particularly assured, with a relevance in the themes raised: one by a movement with unitary potential that was badly split by partition (though also countered by the all-island basis of several large trade unions); the other which is many respects survived despite it, with several all-Ireland teams.

The focus on infrastructure tackles the fascinating, vexed issue of travel and railways in Ireland, which often foundered on the new northern state’s propensity to ‘assert its independence from Dublin in every feasible way’. Nevertheless, there were intriguing moments of cooperation too, with the Northern Irish government agreeing not to amalgamate northern railway companies with British ones, shortly before the Free State passed the Railways Act of 1924. As late as 1951 – amidst other objections – both governments agreed to rescue the Great Northern Railway, running it with a board nominated by the Irish and Northern Irish governments.

Moore is unafraid to dispense with a few sacred cows, including the old and incredible claim about the Gaelic Athletic Association being ‘non-political’. The Irish Free State’s introduction of a customs barrier at the border in 1923, with ‘lengthy form-filling and fee payments’, depressed GAA activities ‘possibly more than anything else’. This, of course, had a broader impact beyond sport, giving partition concrete expression in almost all the other areas discussed in Moore’s chapters. Though ‘vehemently opposed’ to partition, the three Ulster counties not in Northern Ireland got a considerably better GAA experience than the ‘six counties’ that were (Monaghan and Cavan reflected this with a dominance on the field of play with titles and championships). Moore’s description of a period of ‘hibernation’ for GAA enthusiasts in Northern Ireland is apt, while the sections on the all-Ireland sporting unisons may prove useful in future constitutional debates about how to reconcile northern ‘others’ to an Irish team. Particularly telling is that hockey, rugby and bowls were sports associated with upper middle-class Protestants in both parts of Ireland: the caste most securely able to withstand partition and engage on an all-island basis. Similarly, though soccer was partitioned, this was more on account of internal politics than national division.

While for many Irish people, north and south, partition is self-evidently ludicrous, cruel and painful, the problem comes down to the group based in ‘the north’ for whom partition was seen as necessary and inevitable. It should be incumbent on historians and researchers to locate more respectable Unionist readings of partition, rather than dismissing them: especially if those same researchers look favourably on the future unification of the Ireland, seemingly on its way down the line. That future Irish unification which we are likely to eventually build will not have been well-served by historians that polemically dismissed partition because it was not an event they wish had happened. We should return with curiosity and critical faculty to the works of A.T.Q. Stewart, Richard Murphy, and Patrick Buckland.

It is striking, for this reason, that the best published study of partition appeared back in the mists of 1983: Michael Laffan’s The Partition of Ireland 1911–1925. While Laffan agrees ‘There was nothing predestined about the settlements of 1920-1’, he is tonally more comprehending of why partition occurred, its imperial backdrop, and what forces shaped its anomalous imposition in Ireland than recent offerings. This is achieved without the patronising tone of so many modern histories of partition and the border (to be clear: Moore’s book is not one of these and is far more impressive than such works). It seems strange, given the publication year of Laffan’s work, just two years after the emotive and volatile period of the Hunger Strikes, how much more detached its tone appears than several recent histories published in modern times by authors born since 1969.

Despite this overarching conceptual challenge, Birth of the Border provides an engaging and worthwhile overview of this contested and definitive moment in Ireland’s history. It is a book that reflects the awareness that many institutions and individuals in Irish life planned for an ending to partition that never arrived. Despite all the talk, they are still waiting.

Cormac Moore, 2019, Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland. Publisher @ Irish Academic Press. ISBN-13: 978-1785372933

Connal Parr is a Lecturer in History, Northumbria University.

The Birth Of The Border

Connal Parr gives his take on a recent book on Partition. 


With its official centenary looming, one senses that an avalanche of books will reach us addressing the partition of Ireland. Cormac Moore’s The Birth of the Border is well-placed to add to that ever-expanding area, offering a readable, wide-ranging, and insightful survey of the event and its ongoing consequences for social, political and cultural life across the island of Ireland.

It begins with an extract from Spike Milligan’s novel Puckoon (1963), establishing a certain tonal approach to the issue of the border. For the majority of writers on partition, the idea itself, along with its implementation and execution, is axiomatically absurd; absurd to the point of beginning a work with a great comedian’s ditty. This paradoxically negates the comprehensive approach Moore adopts in the rest of this book; but it speaks reflectively of an evident and inherent political interpretation of partition, accompanied by a rejection of the concept itself that explicitly resents the way the border has basically ‘strangled politics’ in Ireland since it was enacted.

This is more than understandable, and Moore is certainly not alone in his underlying portrayal and view. One of the challenges for authors researching partition – and, perhaps, Irish history generally – is the realization of different modes of thinking and streams of thought. To Moore, as for Robert Lynch, whose recent The Partition of Ireland 1918–1925 (2019) also offers notable recent analysis, the concept in inherently flawed, malevolent, and daft: all at the same time (the same half silly, yet half heinous tone – again a somewhat paradoxical combination – pervades Diarmaid Ferriter’s long essay The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics). Even a commentator as nuanced as Belfast-born Gerald Dawe, in his wonderful collection of essays The Sound of the Shuttle, refers to an ‘absurdly partitioned Irish state’, which ‘came to haunt the country with a vengeance, [ensuring] we have been paying for these bloody mistakes of the 1920s ever since and on all sides of the Irish Sea.’ For those of us who – until flights were grounded in March 2020 – live between Ireland and England, partition (and the border) is always liable to get personal.

The most striking quality of The Birth of the Border is its social and cultural range of history. After the first five chapters taking in the Government of Ireland Act, the Treaty, and the fiery birth of Northern Ireland, Moore offers a structural framing of the different areas of life and society marked by partition: Politics, Security, Law, Business and Trade, Religion, Education, Infrastructure and Services, the Labour Movement, and Sport. These sections combine to provide the core value of this book. The last two chapters are particularly assured, with a relevance in the themes raised: one by a movement with unitary potential that was badly split by partition (though also countered by the all-island basis of several large trade unions); the other which is many respects survived despite it, with several all-Ireland teams.

The focus on infrastructure tackles the fascinating, vexed issue of travel and railways in Ireland, which often foundered on the new northern state’s propensity to ‘assert its independence from Dublin in every feasible way’. Nevertheless, there were intriguing moments of cooperation too, with the Northern Irish government agreeing not to amalgamate northern railway companies with British ones, shortly before the Free State passed the Railways Act of 1924. As late as 1951 – amidst other objections – both governments agreed to rescue the Great Northern Railway, running it with a board nominated by the Irish and Northern Irish governments.

Moore is unafraid to dispense with a few sacred cows, including the old and incredible claim about the Gaelic Athletic Association being ‘non-political’. The Irish Free State’s introduction of a customs barrier at the border in 1923, with ‘lengthy form-filling and fee payments’, depressed GAA activities ‘possibly more than anything else’. This, of course, had a broader impact beyond sport, giving partition concrete expression in almost all the other areas discussed in Moore’s chapters. Though ‘vehemently opposed’ to partition, the three Ulster counties not in Northern Ireland got a considerably better GAA experience than the ‘six counties’ that were (Monaghan and Cavan reflected this with a dominance on the field of play with titles and championships). Moore’s description of a period of ‘hibernation’ for GAA enthusiasts in Northern Ireland is apt, while the sections on the all-Ireland sporting unisons may prove useful in future constitutional debates about how to reconcile northern ‘others’ to an Irish team. Particularly telling is that hockey, rugby and bowls were sports associated with upper middle-class Protestants in both parts of Ireland: the caste most securely able to withstand partition and engage on an all-island basis. Similarly, though soccer was partitioned, this was more on account of internal politics than national division.

While for many Irish people, north and south, partition is self-evidently ludicrous, cruel and painful, the problem comes down to the group based in ‘the north’ for whom partition was seen as necessary and inevitable. It should be incumbent on historians and researchers to locate more respectable Unionist readings of partition, rather than dismissing them: especially if those same researchers look favourably on the future unification of the Ireland, seemingly on its way down the line. That future Irish unification which we are likely to eventually build will not have been well-served by historians that polemically dismissed partition because it was not an event they wish had happened. We should return with curiosity and critical faculty to the works of A.T.Q. Stewart, Richard Murphy, and Patrick Buckland.

It is striking, for this reason, that the best published study of partition appeared back in the mists of 1983: Michael Laffan’s The Partition of Ireland 1911–1925. While Laffan agrees ‘There was nothing predestined about the settlements of 1920-1’, he is tonally more comprehending of why partition occurred, its imperial backdrop, and what forces shaped its anomalous imposition in Ireland than recent offerings. This is achieved without the patronising tone of so many modern histories of partition and the border (to be clear: Moore’s book is not one of these and is far more impressive than such works). It seems strange, given the publication year of Laffan’s work, just two years after the emotive and volatile period of the Hunger Strikes, how much more detached its tone appears than several recent histories published in modern times by authors born since 1969.

Despite this overarching conceptual challenge, Birth of the Border provides an engaging and worthwhile overview of this contested and definitive moment in Ireland’s history. It is a book that reflects the awareness that many institutions and individuals in Irish life planned for an ending to partition that never arrived. Despite all the talk, they are still waiting.

Cormac Moore, 2019, Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland. Publisher @ Irish Academic Press. ISBN-13: 978-1785372933

Connal Parr is a Lecturer in History, Northumbria University.

13 comments:

  1. Connal - thanks for this strong review. Partition is a very thorny concept that doesn't always get the cold light of day stare that it requires. But even as far back as 1954 we can find John V. Kelleher commenting that a political problem is rarely solved by those who ‘tend to see it as it first existed and not as time and society continually refashion it … the history of the problem is nearly irrelevant to its solution.…’

    I always found something in that and in the challenge it throws down to static perspectives. Partition is a serious problem but obligatory nationalism is no better and republicanism as pursued and practiced by ourselves in the Provisional IRA failed absolutely to make a dent in it.

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  2. This looks like an interesting book which might be worth the effort.
    I hope it will be easier to read than this review which had so many negative and positive inversions that I had to read it four times to catch a ride on the sine wave before it disappeared under a floor of noise.

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  3. Anthony,
    In something I wrote here a while back I used quite a few sentences to try and explain what has been compressed into this,
    'a political problem is rarely solved by those who ‘tend to see it as it first existed and not as time and society continually refashion it … the history of the problem is nearly irrelevant to its solution'.

    Thanks for this!

    I know that none of us have a crystal ball, but do you think that if you had read and understood what John V Kelleher was saying, back in the '70s would you still have joined in the war?

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  4. Mike - yes, I would have. Not because it was the right thing to do but because it was the thing to do at that age. Having reflected on things over the years and written quite a bit about it, I have come to the view that the insurrectionary energy that fuelled the Provisional IRA was less about the British being here and more about how they behaved while here. Had the 26 Counties flooded and sank beneath the waves, ruling out Irish unity, the conditions for violent conflict were in place.
    Mohammed Ali made a great observation: if you think at 50 what you thought at 20 you have wasted 20 years of your life.
    The most relevant aspect of republicanism to me today is secularism.

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  5. Yes I agree that the conditions were there and I think I always did.
    From my field of vision when I was 20, and not long married into a republican family at the time, I saw no secularism in republicanism, in fact exactly the opposite, so I wasn't getting involved in a war that I saw as both sectarian and futile.
    In the years since, I have learned that it was never quite as simple as this, although i still think that that war cut across any potential for class unity.

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  6. Mike - I had no interest in secularism back in the day. Nor had republicanism for that matter. It is one of the five isms of republicanism and the one I probably feel strongest about today. I don't believe the war inhibited class unity - class unity is disrupted everywhere. The war didn't cause Roy Link and his UDM to fracture class unity during the miners' strike in the UK. Class fragmentation is a perennial feature of class politics.

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  7. Anthony,
    Your link didn't appear in your comment, but I imagine it's the late Roy Johnston you were leading me to. Please post the link again.

    I never quite agreed with his thinking on the issue, but I'll also have to agree to disagree with you on it as well.

    You have written here recently that there was a period in the 70s where the Provos carried out sectarian attacks, among other more 'legitimate' actions. It is was in this particular period which formed my initial opinion on the conflict. It took a while for me to broaden my view, probably during the first Hunger Strike.

    That period shaped the views of a lot of people who did not support what the British had done and were still doing, and they just became neutral.

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  8. Mike - LOL. I spelt Lynk wrong so that is what confused you - it was Roy Lynk I was referring to - I wasn't trying to place a link!!
    As I'm not sure what you disagree on I'll wait until you come back. Sorry for the confusion.

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  9. Anthony,
    Trust me, Duh. LOL

    If I can recall what I was thinking this morning. I disagree that one can just say that in the early 70s was disrupted everywhere. It certainly is now.
    The scabs who undermined the Miners' Strike were not driven by differences in national identity or religion, so there's no direct comparison. They were just scum!

    There were many working class people here in the early 70s who supported the civil rights movement, who weren't from a Catholic or nationalist background. That they might not have been out on the streets was due to fear of reprisals by the sectarians. They didn't see the answer in a united Ireland, and many helped to elect Bernadette Devlin.

    Once the narrative was changed from civil rights issues to Brits out and war they weren't interested. After that everything was perception - 'all Catholics support the IRA and they are killing people who had no part in the discrimination'. I heard this many times. This is how the war cut across class unity.


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    Replies
    1. Mike - in saying the scabs miners were not driven by differences in national identity and religion you tend to illuminate the point I made - just as armed activity was not the cause of working class disunity there, neither was it in the North. There were factors extraneous to it. The working class is divided everywhere for a whole host of reasons. I resort to Poulantzas who in arguing that the state is somewhat autonomous from the capitalist class explains the function of such autonomy: it unites the dominant class; disunites the dominated class and mediates the relationship between the two. It is an imperative of capital that it does so. So there are very solid explanations for a divided working class that are not to be explained away by an armed campaign.

      How would we quantify the "many" working class who supported the civil rights movement or helped elect Brnadette? Where did it manifest itself outside of a smattering of individuals and the CP (referred to as red unionists)?

      I think the making of a more compelling reason is to be found in your comment that "They didn't see the answer in a united Ireland."

      Why did the narrative shift?

      That had a lot to do with the British militarising the conflict, failing to introduce direct rule the day they brought the troops in (leading to the Provisional IRA founder to claim that had the British done that the Provisional IRA could never have been formed).

      Even the NILP in the 60s was not beyond playing the sectarian card.

      Working class unity in the North was wishful thinking on the part of reductionist thinkers, was how I came to view it.

      Not that the IRA campaign did not entrench the divide. It very much did. But it did not in my view create it.

      I think Rolston and Munck did very well in their work on the ODR in the 30s - working class unity on certain issues did not displace sectarianism but functioned parallel to it.


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  10. Mike

    The mkiners strike may well have succeeded had there been a national ballot. Miners from areas like Nottinghamshire may well have opted to stay on strike. Arthur Scargill should have been aware from labour history that the experience of the Spencer unions in the 1926 General Strike that callling the mkiners out on stike without their consent.

    It is easy to dismiss returning miners as scabs and scum without considering the personal pressures they and their famillies would have been under. Not haviong ever been in that position mmyelf, I would try and avoid being judgemental.

    Margerdet Thatcher provoked the mioners' strioke which the Tories had been preparing for ever since the "Who Governs" election of February 1974 and, unfortunately, Scargill fell into the trap set for him by not calling a national ballot.

    Rrgarding woprking class unity in NI; never a possibnility becaiuse of the ovderarching ethnic and cultural differdences. Best build non-sectarian solidarity around something that is not as chimerical as class and class unity. Sorry.

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  11. Was doing practical stuff today so away from the computer.

    Anthony

    The thing is that a lot of Catholics didn't see the answer in a united Ireland either. There are many videos of interviews carried out at the time when Catholic areas were being attacked by sectarians. None of the people interviewed proposed Irish unity, and none of my Catholic friends or their families were of that opinion either.

    It's ok for McStiofain to say that on hindsight, but did he say that at the time?. Maybe it's my memory, but I do recall that his every utterance was televised at the beginning, and I don't remember him giving that line, if he had done my parents would have been talking about it, considering what a contradiction it is. I'm quite willing to be educated on this of course.

    '
    'Not that the IRA campaign did not entrench the divide. It very much did. But it did not in my view create it.'

    It didn't create it but in my view the leadership of the new group saw an opportunity and used it and that this is the real reason for the split, - not on the issue of defence. After all, the IRA's only reason to exist was to remove the British from Ireland.
    Small groups can wield massive influence, -the Bolsheviks changed world history.
    Those non-sectarian Prods (I can only offer anecdotal evidence, not quantify how many supported the CRM) might have widened their influence if things hadn't taken another direction.
    The PIRA was a small group when it broke away from the movement, the British reaction expressed in increased repression to its every action allowed it to recruit more volunteers and increase its influence.

    Yes the NILP was made up of some strange characters, from self-described Republicans who were actually interned, (I became good friends with one such guy years later, sadly passed away now), to former members of BICO who changed their allegiances as often as their shirts (this lot supported the UWC strike in '74).

    I agree that it is an imperative of Capitalism to divide in just the way you describe, it's not however imperative that we assist it in this task.

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    1. Most Catholics/nationalists probably favoured a united Ireland but did not see the answer to the problems of partition in an armed campaign. There is a difference between wanting a united Ireland and supporting a violent campaign to achieve it.

      Nor was I referring to MacStiofain but the Belfast republican who basically formed the PIRA. Republicans were all too eager to take the penalty kick the British handed them but the republican's statement is a clear awareness of the obstacles to any armed campaign.
      The primary reason for the split was defence in Belfast. The other reasons were less compelling.
      That the IRA was able to make the case for a united Ireland being a way to solve the Northern problem lay in its ability to tap into a common sense chord I=within nationalism - the NI state was irreformable. State forces behaviour in Derry and Belfast in 69; the Falls Curfew; Internment and Bloody Sunday were all crucial moments in the Provisional IRA becoming a mass insurrectionary movement.
      Yet as you point out there was not a lot of republican sentiment. So what caused the change?
      To compare the Provos with the Bolsheviks is very tenuous - the Provos were not some vanguard forging nationalist consciousness but were the beneficiaries of British state strategies.





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