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CHAPTER TWO

The Government of Ireland Act 1920

The genesis of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 came in the latter half of 1919, once Lloyd George was no longer constrained with the Paris Peace Conference, which lasted for most of the first six months of 1919. Home Rule was still on the statute book and had been since 1914; it could no longer be postponed.1 It was ‘scheduled to come into operation automatically when hostilities were formally concluded with the signature of the last of the peace treaties’.2 To stop the third Home Rule Bill from coming into effect by default, Lloyd George set up a committee chaired by Walter Long to draft the fourth Home Rule Bill, known as the Government of Ireland Bill.

Walter Long had a relationship with Ireland spanning his entire life. Born in Bath in 1854, his mother, Charlotte Anna, was the fourth daughter of Wentworth Fitzwilliam Dick of Humewood, County Wicklow, who had served as MP from 1852 to 1880.3 Long was a regular visitor to Ireland for fox hunting and other social events.4 He was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland in 1905 and subsequently became very popular amongst Irish unionists due to his trenchant unionist outlook. After losing his parliamentary seat in 1906, he became leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance and chairman of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1907.5 By 1918, as liaison officer between the war cabinet and the Irish administration, Long was the ‘most influential member of the government on Irish affairs’.6 He then favoured a settlement of the Irish question based on a federal solution for the entire United Kingdom. The federalism approach of the entire United Kingdom was seen by some within British political circles as a way of retaining the unity of the British Empire whilst recognising the differences within its boundaries. After the 1918 general election, Lloyd George appointed him first Lord of the Admiralty. Suffering from ill-health for prolonged periods of his life due to spinal arthritis, he was forced to delegate much of his work to his parliamentary secretary, James Craig, the leading Ulster unionist.7 Long wanted to resign from the Ulster Unionist Council but was convinced to stay on, and ‘thus remained an important linchpin between the cabinet and both the northern Unionists and the executive in Dublin’.8

Long was a staunch unionist and rabidly anti-Sinn Féin. As republican violence escalated in Ireland throughout 1919, it was Long who proposed the hiring of ex-servicemen to assist the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), a measure that would be adopted in 1920 with the recruitment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to serve in Ireland. ‘Ruthless men, he contended, could be countered only by ruthless policies, and by September [1919] he was prepared to recommend that Ireland be governed as a crown colony until such time as home rule became feasible.’9 Unsurprisingly, the make-up of Long’s committee was unionist in outlook. There was no nationalist representation whatsoever, nor were nationalists even consulted about the Government of Ireland Bill. James Craig and his associates were the only Irishmen consulted during the drafting of the bill.10 The first meeting of Long’s committee ‘was held on 15 October when a decision was made to create distinct legislatures for Ulster and the southern provinces linked by a common council, comprising representatives from both’.11 According to Nicholas Mansergh, ‘the starting point for a settlement was no longer unity, but division. This was to be the new departure.’12 This was the first time that a separate parliament was proposed for Ulster, as unionists to date had shown nothing but unyielding advocacy for remaining within Westminster. The reason given by Long’s committee for abandoning Ulster to remain fully integrated with the rest of the United Kingdom was that ‘Exclusion, whether of the entire province of Ulster or of the six north-eastern counties, would leave large nationalist majorities under British rule, which would clearly infringe the principle of self determination … British rule in the domestic affairs of Ireland has been the root of the Home Rule movement from start to finish.’13 The committee believed that the creation of two parliaments in Ireland

would meet ‘the fundamental demand of the overwhelming majority of Irishmen ever since the days of [Daniel] O’Connell’; it was ‘entirely consistent’ with majority resistance in Ulster to rule from Dublin and nationalist resistance in the rest of Ireland to British rule; it was also consistent with the government pledges to Ulster; it would ‘enormously minimise’ the partition issue, the division of Ireland being a far less serious matter if Home Rule were established in both parts of it and ‘all Irishmen’ therefore self-governing with ‘far the most convenient dividing line’ between the two parts being the historic frontiers of Ulster, which, with its comparatively even balance, would minimise the division of Ireland on purely religious lines. To complete the catalogue of merit, there would be a Council of Ireland with members from North and South to keep open the road to unity.14

Before the end of the war, the exclusion of Ulster, or at least some of Ulster, was the only option being considered in terms of the province’s special treatment. It is difficult to ascertain when exactly the option of providing a Home Rule parliament for Ulster was contemplated. The peace treaties after the war would certainly have been a factor. The treaties of ‘Versailles, Trianon and Saint Germain set new borders throughout central and southern Europe in the wake of the defeat of Germany, the collapse of Czarist Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires’.15 The creation of a border in Ireland was unusual, as it involved the division of one of the victorious countries of the war. It was, however, an early ‘example of imperial fragmentation and nation-state building’ that occurred in the twentieth century.16 The partition of Ireland was ‘the first major partition in which a British cabinet participated in territory which it had formerly controlled, but it provided a precedent for later partitions’, including of India and Palestine.17 According to John Kendle, Long was approached by John Atkinson on 6 June 1919:

who argued that neither the 1914 Home Rule Act nor home rule all round would work. He favoured a scheme that would place Ulster on a par with other provinces within a federal system that ‘would be government [sic] by her own Provincial Government plus the Imperial Parliament and Executive, not plus an Irish Central Parliament and an Irish Executive dependent upon it’. ‘It is this Central Irish Government’, Atkinson reminded Long, ‘that Irish Protestants fear’.18

Atkinson was a unionist politician, lawyer and judge from Drogheda in County Louth.19 On 24 July, The Times publicly advocated the two-parliament option for Ireland for the first time. It proposed two provincial or state legislatures, one for the three southern provinces and one for the nine counties of Ulster, with the ultimate aim of the ‘establishment of an All-Ireland Parliament’.20 Whilst acknowledging The Times’s proposal as ‘a whiff of freshness to the stale atmosphere of our ancient controversy’, the Irish Times feared ‘the scheme would end in that very calamity of permanent Partition which The Times properly denounces as the worst of all possible solutions’.21 At a meeting days later in Trowbridge in Wiltshire, Long claimed that The Times’s ‘carefully-thought-out scheme’ was worthy of close examination.22 Throughout the summer of 1919, Long made a number of visits to Ireland to consult on the Irish question with Lord Lieutenant John French and Chief Secretary Ian MacPherson. Long tended not to disembark from his yacht, the Enchantress, which was docked in Kingstown (present-day Dún Laoghaire) harbour. Instead, both French and MacPherson joined him on the boat to discuss Irish affairs. Based on those meetings, Long sent a memorandum to Lloyd George on 24 September recommending two parliaments for Ireland.23 This memorandum formed the basis of the subsequent Government of Ireland Bill.

The leading nationalist MP left in Westminster, Joseph Devlin, believed the creation of a parliament for Ulster would result in the ‘worst form of partition and, of course, permanent partition. Once they have their own parliament with all the machinery of government and administration, I am afraid anything like subsequent union will be impossible.’24 Carson, who ideally wished for no Home Rule anywhere in Ireland, saw some attractions of an Ulster parliament, stating ‘Once it is granted … [it] cannot be interfered with. You cannot knock Parliaments up and down as you do a ball, and once you have planted them there, you cannot get rid of them.’25

The common council proposed in the Government of Ireland Bill was a Council of Ireland, which would be composed ‘of twenty members from each Parliament. In the first year it would look after transport, health, agriculture and similar matters, afterwards working towards [the] unity of the country.’26 It was envisaged that the council would lead to ‘the peaceful evolution of a single parliament for all Ireland’.27 A degree of unity within the central Irish administration headquartered in Dublin would be maintained through a common supreme court, railway policy and other all-Ireland functions.28 Postal services were also reserved, to be administered by Westminster ‘until they could be transferred to an all-Ireland assembly’ if Irish unity was realised.29 It was hoped that further common services could also be handed over to the council.30 Eamon Phoenix contends that the stated aim of the Council of Ireland to unify Ireland was disingenuous, ‘since the details of the Bill were drawn up by a largely Conservative Cabinet in close collaboration with Craig and the Ulster Unionists’.31 It was an attempt to settle the Ulster question, not the Irish question.

Long’s committee also advocated that all nine counties of Ulster be included in the northern parliament. Long knew the proposals would not placate Sinn Féin, ‘But nothing short of the setting up of a Republic would satisfy Sinn Fein. Therefore, why not recognise the fact and say so frankly?’32 It was never the intention of the Government of Ireland Bill to do so. Another committee member, Lord Birkenhead, admitted something similar when he said, ‘I assent to this proposed Bill as affording an ingenious strengthening of our tactical position before the world. I am absolutely satisfied that the Sinn Féiners will refuse it. Otherwise in the present state of Ireland I could not even be a party to making the offer.’33 The British government was only interested in securing the support of Ulster unionists, but initially, there were numerous objections from Ulster. The main objections were the admission of Home Rule, something they had never sought before; the reduction of Ulster representation in Westminster to just twelve seats; and the abandonment of many Protestants and unionists to the southern jurisdiction.34 There also was a problem with the area to be included in the Ulster parliament. Ulster unionists sought the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone, not the nine counties of Ulster, as this was the maximum area they felt they could dominate without being ‘outbred’ by Catholics.35

This decision of the Ulster Unionist Council was deeply unpopular amongst the 70,000 Protestants of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, who were sacrificed to the southern administration.36 At a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council on 10 March 1920:

Lord Farnham of Cavan moved, and Michael E. Knight of Monaghan seconded, a resolution that the UUC would not accept anything other than the exclusion of the ‘whole geographical province of Ulster’. The resolution was rejected. Monaghan unionists condemned the ‘selfish policy’ of the UUC, worse still, in their eyes the Covenant had been shown to have been nothing more than ‘a mere scrap of paper’, brushed aside by the UUC so as ‘not to endanger their precious six-county safety’.37

Others believed there would be no threat to the unionist majority with nine counties, believing six counties would present a ‘ridiculous boundary … Donegal would be cut off from its harbours and rivers and there would be no access to it except through the six counties’.38 Thomas Moles, Westminster MP, explained that the three counties had to be abandoned in order to save the six counties: ‘In a sinking ship, with life-boats sufficient for only two-thirds of the ship’s company, were all to condemn themselves to death because all could not be saved?’39 Another meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council on 27 May decided by a margin of 310 to 80 to support a six-county Northern Ireland parliament instead of a nine-county one.40 Ulster unionists from outside of the six counties resigned from the Ulster Unionist Council.41 Many members of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council from Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan also resigned.42 Outside of Ulster, southern unionists left the Irish Unionist Alliance and formed the Unionist Anti-Partition League, in opposition to the impending partition of Ireland.43 Led by William St John Fremantle Brodrick, Earl of Midleton, amongst its membership were people from the ‘largest commercial interests in Dublin, including Lord Iveagh, Sir John Arnott, Andrew Jameson, and Marcus Goodbody’.44

The British government only agreed to accede to the Ulster unionists’ wishes to confine the northern parliament to six counties in the spring of 1920, just as the bill was being brought before the House of Commons.45 The Long committee’s original argument, that the nine-county proposal ‘will enormously minimise the partition issue … it minimises the division of Ireland on purely religious lines. The two religions would be not unevenly balanced in the Parliament of Northern Ireland’, was exactly the reason why Ulster unionist leaders preferred six counties.46 They had no intention of minimising partition. To avoid a nine-county parliament, Craig had even

suggested the establishment of a Boundary Commission to examine the distribution of population along the borders of the whole of the six Counties, and to take a vote in those districts on either side of and immediately adjoining that boundary in which there was a doubt as to whether they would prefer to be included in the Northern or the Southern Parliamentary area.47

By conceding to the demands of the unionists, the British government showed that its commitment to Irish unity was somewhat flexible.

Even though the Ulster Unionist Council reluctantly endorsed the Government of Ireland Bill, many Ulster unionists eventually ‘concluded that the scheme proposed in the Government of Ireland Act would cause the least diminution of their Britishness’.48 Some, such as James Craig’s brother Charles, began to see the benefits Ulster unionists would garner from having their own parliament:

The Bill practically gives us everything that we fought for, everything we armed ourselves for, and to attain which we raised our Volunteers in 1913 and 1914 … We would much prefer to remain part and parcel of the United Kingdom … but we have many enemies in this country, and we feel that an Ulster without a Parliament of its own would not be in nearly as strong a position as one in which a Parliament had been set up, where the Executive had been appointed and where, above all, the paraphernalia of Government was already in existence … We should fear no one and … would then be in a position of absolute security.49

He also claimed that ‘I would not be fair to the House … if I lent the slightest hope of that union [of Ireland] arising within the lifetime of any man in this House’.50 Once it was realised that partition was being attempted through the creation of two parliaments, many commentated on the practical implications of such a massive undertaking.

A great deal of confusion surrounded the Government of Ireland Bill. The Freeman’s Journal described it as a complex problem, especially when one considered that ‘The whole scheme of Irish administration is based on recognition of Ireland as a national entity with its centre in Dublin’. There would be a need to have the ‘Local Government Board, the Department of Agriculture, the Insurance Commission, the Department of Education, the Estates Commissioners and Congested Districts Board and the Board of Works’ to be divided between ‘Ulster’ and the rest of Ireland.51 The newspaper deridingly named the bill ‘The Dismemberment of Ireland Bill’.52 The Irish News proposed some names for the new jurisdiction, including Carsonia and Craigdom, after the two most prominent unionists, Edward Carson and James Craig.53 The unionist-leaning Dublin Chamber of Commerce also condemned the bill, saying partition would negatively affect banking by restricting the free flow of business and making it more difficult and expensive to collect debt; dual government would mean increased taxation; political differences would be accentuated; the development of the country would be impeded whilst the creation of a second judiciary would be utterly unfavourable. It concluded by claiming that ‘one of the most regrettable effects of partition would be that it would deprive the Southern Parliament of the steadying influence and business training of the men of Ulster’.54 The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and Provost of Trinity College Dublin, Dr John Henry Bernard, speaking in his capacity as provost, insisted that Trinity College Dublin was ‘an Irish institution, that they stood for the whole of Ireland, that their men came from all parts of Ireland, and that, so far as they were concerned, they would resist by all lawful means any partition of Ireland’.55 One lawyer believed the withdrawal of legal business from the majority of Ulster counties would greatly diminish the standing of the Four Courts in Dublin.56 Staff members in the Four Courts agreed, with over a dozen based in Dublin applying for better-paid jobs in the future Northern Ireland.57

It has often been cited that the Government of Ireland Bill was allowed to pass relatively unchallenged due to the lack of nationalist representation in Westminster. Instead of eighty Irish nationalist MPs, there were just seven remaining in Westminster (six from Ireland and T.P. O’Connor from Liverpool) after the 1918 general election.58 It could be argued that even eighty nationalist MPs would have made little difference when one considers the make-up of the House of Commons after the election. The Conservative Party, Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals and Irish unionists won over 500 seats, an overwhelming majority. The British Labour Party, with fifty-seven seats, opposed the Government of Ireland Bill with little effect.59 Former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his vastly reduced Liberal Party (of just thirty-six seats), also opposed the ‘cumbrous, costly, unworkable scheme’.60 His opposition also failed to make an imprint on the final act. It is doubtful that Sinn Féin’s presence would have made a difference either. What little voice the seven nationalist MPs remaining in Westminster had was further diminished by the Catholic Church’s belief that they should not participate in the committee stages of the Government of Ireland Bill or suggest amendments to the bill.61 The Catholic Church was virulently opposed to partition and believed that participating in the framing of the ‘Partition Bill’ would be seen as a sign of its acceptance. The leading nationalist MP in Westminster, Joseph Devlin, condemned the bill as ‘conceived in Bedlam’, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘fantastic’. He voted against it but did not in any way contribute to its final form.62

Sinn Féin, the leading nationalist movement after the 1918 general election, abstained from Westminster. It formed its own constituent assembly, Dáil Éireann, in the Mansion House in Dublin in January 1919. All Irish MPs, including unionists and members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, were invited to attend the opening session of the Dáil. Unsurprisingly, no one apart from the Sinn Féin MPs accepted.63 Sinn Féin’s policy on partition was almost non-existent from the outset, and it essentially chose to ignore it. Soon after the formation of Dáil Éireann, Louis J. Walsh, a Ballycastle solicitor and one of the leading northern Sinn Féiners, proposed in April 1919 that ‘attention should be given to Ulster, for he thought the organisation had not sufficiently grappled with that question’.64 According to Charles Townshend:

There were some signs in 1919 that the seriousness of this problem was recognised. A pushy Ulster Protestant, adoptive Canadian and Sinn Féin convert, William Forbes Patterson, was asked by Sinn Féin in June to investigate the northern situation. His verdict on republicanism there was bleak: it was effectively stillborn. But he believed that unionism was vulnerable to the (slowly) growing labour movement, and Sinn Féin could do worse than support labour. There were signs of cross-communal industrial action – notably the general strike in Belfast early in 1919 – although, as he saw, the British Labour party was unlikely to escape from its ‘English outlook’ … The prospects for military confrontation were grim, Forbes Patterson thought. If faced with a ‘pogrom’, republicans could not cope.65

Sinn Féin, of course, was not in the House of Commons to debate the Government of Ireland Bill. As the bill was making its way through parliament, the British government was waging a war with Sinn Féin and its military wing, the Irish Volunteers (later renamed the IRA). Sinn Féin leaders stuck steadfastly and naively to the view that Ulster would readily join an all-Ireland parliament once Britain was removed from the island. As well as having its own parliament, Sinn Féin also set up a counter-state with its own legal system, police force and local government. That the Government of Ireland Act came into law as Britain was at open war with Sinn Féin, who was supported by a considerable majority on the island, shows the total air of unreality that surrounded the act.66

Sinn Féin built on its 1918 general election mandate by taking control of the majority of local authorities in Ireland after the local elections of January and June 1920. The local elections of 1920 were a major disappointment for Ulster unionists, and this may explain part of their reasoning for insisting on Northern Ireland consisting of six instead of nine counties. It was the first time that the proportional representation (PR) system of voting was used in Ireland.67 PR involves a single transferable vote to be cast in multi-seat constituencies. The introduction of PR ‘was intended to protect the unionist minority in the south, but it had the added effect of putting unionist domination of Derry and other parts of the north under threat’.68 It was also hoped that PR would end systematic discrimination in local government. Jeremiah MacVeagh, nationalist MP for South Down, claimed that in Dungannon there ‘were only two Catholic employees under the Unionist council. Out of a total salary and wages list of £575, only £36 goes to Catholics, and that goes to two street scavengers.’69 In the six-county area, nationalists won control of ‘Derry City, Fermanagh and Tyrone County Councils, ten urban councils, including Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen, Newry and Strabane, and thirteen rural councils’.70 Unexpected nationalist and Labour Party victories in places such as Lurgan, Dungannon, Carrickfergus, Larne, Limavady, Cookstown and Lisburn were seen by nationalists as ‘a rebuff to plans for partition’.71 In Belfast Corporation, the local government for Belfast, unionists went from having fifty-two to thirty-seven members; Labour won thirteen seats; Sinn Féin and the Nationalist Party won five seats each.72 Many unionists had a great ‘fear of socialism’ and were ‘concerned at the success of Labour candidates in 1920’ who, on top of winning thirteen seats in Belfast, ‘won control of Lurgan’ and received representation for the first time in Lisburn and Bangor.73 According to Michael Farrell, it was the ‘first serious challenge to Unionist hegemony in the area’.74

The result in Derry City was particularly galling for unionists. Of the forty seats, unionists won nineteen, Sinn Féin and the Nationalist Party won ten seats each, and Hugh C. O’Doherty, an independent nationalist, won the final seat. Margaret Morris was elected for Sinn Féin as the first female member of the Derry Corporation. O’Doherty became ‘the first nationalist mayor of the city, and the first Catholic to hold the position since Cormac O’Neill was appointed by James II in 1688’.75 O’Doherty, a Derry solicitor, ‘who, along with removing the name of Lord French from the list of Derry Freemen, also refused to attend any functions where an oath of allegiance was made to the Crown’.76

Tensions in the city soon boiled over. In April and May, street riots began, with skirmishes taking place between the IRA and the revived Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).77 The violence escalated in June, leading to the deaths of twenty people and many more wounded. Two children were amongst the dead – George Caldwell, a ten-year-old orphan, and Joseph McGlinchey, aged fifteen. Adrian Grant claims that ‘there is evidence of deliberate sectarian targeting by both unionists and nationalists, despite efforts of the IRA leaders to contain such action by the latter’.78 The violence in the city only abated once 1,500 British troops were deployed to Derry on 23 June.79 Within days, the violence moved further east.

Edward Carson used his 12 July 1920 speech to 25,000 Orangemen at a field in Finaghy to deliver an incendiary message: ‘We must proclaim today clearly that come what will and be the consequences what they may, we in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin – no Sinn Féin organisation, no Sinn Féin methods … And these are not mere words. I hate words without action.’80 According to Alan F. Parkinson:

the sheer force of external influences in the summer of 1920 – the spread of death and destruction throughout the south and west of Ireland, including many attacks on Protestants, the ongoing passage of the Better Government of Ireland Bill and the increasing proximity of violence to Belfast, as witnessed by events in Derry – combined to create a most threatening situation in Belfast.81

By 1920, the war in the south and west of Ireland had reached Ulster. Before then, ‘difficulties experienced by even the most militant IRA units in acquiring weapons and the resolute opposition presented by large sections of both the unionist and nationalist communities meant that the first phase of the War of Independence had virtually no impact in the north-east’.82 As well as the violence in Derry, there were many IRA attacks on RIC barracks in Monaghan, Cavan, Armagh, Tyrone and Down.83 Ambushes on railways in Ulster were becoming almost daily occurrences. At Easter 1920, the IRA Belfast Brigade ‘took part in a countrywide campaign of arson attacks on tax offices ordered by GHQ [General Headquarters] to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Rising’.84 The increased activity in Ulster led to Carson’s claims of a Sinn Féin ‘invasion of Ulster’.85 Days after his 12 July speech, the RIC divisional commissioner of Munster, Gerard Smyth, a native of Banbridge in County Down, was killed by the IRA in Cork.86 Loyalists were ‘further outraged when the southern rail crew assigned to transport the police chief’s body back to his home town of Banbridge refused to do so’.87 His death and funeral were the catalysts for the violence that spread to Belfast in late July 1920. After his burial in Banbridge, local Catholics and their property were viciously attacked there, as well as in nearby Dromore and Lisburn, with many Catholics driven from their jobs and their homes burned.88

The violence then spread to Belfast. Returning from the 12 July holiday on 21 July, shipyard workers were greeted with notices calling for a meeting of ‘all Unionist and Protestant workers’ during their lunch hour outside Workman Clark’s yard.89 The meeting called for the expulsion of all ‘non-loyal’ workers from the shipyards. Straight after this, a mob ‘armed with hammers, iron bars, wooden staves and, reportedly, revolvers’ went on the rampage, looking for potential victims. Some workers, fearing the worst, left before lunchtime. Others escaped, suffering only verbal abuse. Some of the unluckier ones were stripped to their undergarments in the search for Catholic emblems, such as rosary beads. Many were severely beaten. Others, whilst swimming to safety across the Musgrave Channel, ‘were pelted by a fusillade of “shipyard confetti”, consisting of iron nuts, bolts, ship rivets and pieces of sharp steel’.90 Catholics were soon expelled from their jobs by numerous employers, such as the Barbours, Musgraves, Mackies, Gallahers, the Sirrocco Works, McLaughlins and Harveys.91 Most ‘Protestant employers looked on with tacit approval’.92 According to the Catholic Protection Committee – a welfare agency established by Dr MacRory, the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor – a total of 10,000 male and 1,000 female workers were expelled (about 10 per cent of the nationalist population of Belfast).93 Protestant socialists (‘rotten prods’) were also expelled from their jobs.94 During the two years of intense sectarian violence in Belfast, from 1920 to 1922, over 1,000 Protestants were forced out of their homes.95

The unrest travelled from the workplace to the streets of Belfast, resulting in nineteen dead and many more wounded or homeless within just five days.96 ‘Retaliation from the Catholic community was not long in coming, provoking yet more retribution from the loyalists.’97 As the city was besieged by sectarian violence, the Government of Ireland Bill was still manoeuvring its way through the House of Commons. Devlin summed up the incredulity felt by many nationalists in relation to the British government’s insistence on proceeding with the bill whilst Ireland was in a state of unrest, with the vast majority of its citizens totally opposed to the proposed settlement. He accused the government of not inserting

a single Clause … to safeguard the interests of our people. This is not a scattered minority. Will the House believe we are a hundred thousand Catholics in a population of four hundred thousand? It is a story of weeping women, hungry children, hunted men, homeless in England, houseless in Ireland. If this is what we get when they have not their Parliament, what may we expect when they have that weapon, with wealth and power strongly entrenched? What will we get when they are armed with Britain’s rifles, when they are clothed with the authority of government, when they have cast round them the Imperial garb, what mercy, what pity, much less justice or liberty, will be conceded to us then? That is what I have to say about the Ulster Parliament.98

Rather than listening to Devlin or those whom he represented, the British government took two steps in late 1920, on the advice of James Craig, that showed the inevitability of partition and highlighted that the only voices being listened to in Ireland were those of the Ulster unionists. Before the Government of Ireland Bill even became law in December 1920, Craig’s proposals to commission an official policing force – the Specials – for the area that would become Northern Ireland and create the post of assistant under-secretary for the same area were granted.99 The machinery of the new northern jurisdiction was being put in place. The partition of Ireland was taking a tangible form.