Contributor:

Dr Robert Lynch

Talk Title

Partition and the Anglo-Irish Treaty

Talk Synopsis:

This talk explores the background to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and its immediate (and lasting) effects. It suggests that ‘the most extreme paranoias of the Unionist psyche’ were reinforced by the events of the post-Treaty period, including as a result of growing unionist mistrust of the British government. And it explores how the Boundary Commission allowed ‘both sides to place radically different interpretations on the shape of any future settlement.’ It also looks at Sinn Féin’s attitude towards/understanding of unionist concerns and the extent to which these may have been predicated on a sense of unionism as ‘somehow inauthentic… and that conflict in Ireland was due fundamentally to the British presence’ rather than the ‘reality that there were almost one million people in Ulster who wanted nothing to do with their nationalist project.’ And it concludes by suggesting that ‘Ulster’s experience in 1922’ shaped the ‘rather draconian defensiveness’ of the Unionist government which emerged in its aftermath as well as creating disunity within the ‘northern Catholic minority’ and between northern and southern nationalists.

Short biography:

Dr Robert Lynch, University of Glasgow

Further Reading:

A State Under Siege. The Establishment of Northern Ireland 1920-1926 – Brian Follis