Diarmaid Ferriter: Ireland should learn from 1921 treaty to avoid future problems with Brexit deal

On this day in 1921, the British House of Commons emphatically endorsed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, amid much self-congratulation about imperial generosity and forgiveness and the contention from one speaker that “the curse of Ireland has been the length of her memory”.

That memory will be needed in the coming months and years as the Brexit process evolves. In the aftermath of agreement between the EU and UK on moving to stage two, there have been assertions on the Irish side about “cast-iron guarantees” in relation to the Irish Border and the extent to which the agreement is “bullet-proof”. In contrast, Brexit secretary David Davis referred to it as a “statement of intent” before he was forced to backtrack.

The history of Anglo-Irish relations is a reminder of how agreements and phrases can be read in different ways, and there is much in last week’s EU-UK report that falls into that category along with, on the report’s cover, “the caveat that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”.

One of the reasons British parliamentarians were smug this time 96 years ago was because they had outmanoeuvred the Irish signatories of the treaty; in particular, prime minister David Lloyd George had ensured the negotiations did not break down on the question of partition, by getting Arthur Griffith to promise he would not scupper the talks on this matter. He did this after the promise of a future Boundary Commission which Sinn Féin believed, and was led to believe, would recommend large parts of the northern state brought into being the previous year be transferred to the new southern Free State, ultimately making Northern Ireland economically and politically unviable.

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Economics and geography

That the Irish delegates were sold a pup on this issue was apparent on this day 96 years ago when Lloyd George insisted in the House of Commons he had never suggested Tyrone and Fermanagh would be transferred to southern Ireland “if Sinn Féin had a majority in the two counties . . . on the contrary all I had ever suggested was that the character of the population should be taken into account as well as economic and geographic conditions”. That, he said, was the Boundary Commission’s task.

The alarm bells should have been ringing in Dublin, but at that stage, Sinn Féin was understandably preoccupied with getting the Dáil to ratify the treaty at a time when this newspaper warned that “every hour’s delay is pregnant with danger”. The Dáil eventually ratified the treaty the following month; such was the widespread belief the Boundary Commission would “deliver” for the new Free State that the Border question hardly featured in the treaty debates.

The relevant article of the treaty stated that the extent of the “boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland” would be decided “in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions” by a three-man commission. The ambiguities were, of course, calculated. How were the wishes of the inhabitants to be ascertained? Did it hold out the possibility of a two-way transfer? The chair would be appointed by Britain and the Irish side had shown a remarkable lack of judgment in leaving such hostages to fortune. Their view that Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh as well as large transfers of South Armagh and Newry and Derry City were the prizes on offer were delusional. When the commission was eventually appointed in 1924, its chairman, British-born South African jurist Richard Feetham, refused to consider plebiscites for Irish Border counties even though other post-first World War commissions redrew borders in Europe based on plebiscites.

Fool’s paradise

When the commission’s report was leaked in 1925, it not only revealed the big prizes north of the Border were not on offer; it also recommended that a part of east Donegal be transferred to Northern Ireland. As head of government, WT Cosgrave had to rush to London to get the report suppressed and the Border remained as it was. Northern Ireland’s prime minister James Craig was greatly strengthened and he accused the Free State, hardly inaccurately, of having lived in a “fool’s paradise” in believing the commission would hold out the prospect of Irish unity. Northern nationalists regarded it as a travesty and the reverberations of this are still felt today, which is why Taoiseach Leo Varadkar pointedly promised northern nationalists last week that “no Irish Government will ever again leave northern nationalists behind”.

A measure of the weakness and isolation of Cosgrave was that he could only cry foul because Lloyd George had “given the impression” of changes to the Border favourable to Irish nationalists. Impressions and aspirations mean little; during the next phase of the Brexit process what matters is legal clarity and the dispelling of deliberate ambiguity and contradiction. At least today, Irish negotiators, unlike in 1921, are not isolated and are carrying more than just the weight of memory.