Review of The Root of All Evil – Cormac Moore

Picture taken from https://www.irishacademicpress.ie/product/the-irish-boundary-commission-the-root-of-all-evil/

I’ve just finished reading Cormac Moore’s book on the Irish Boundary Commission (published this year, the 100th ‘anniversary’ – if that’s the right word – of the conclusion of the Commission’s enquiries). The broad facts behind the setting up of this body were already known to me: devised during the negotiations over the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) as a way of ‘parking’ the issue of Partition, it was delayed by the Irish Civil War and then the refusal of the Northern Irish government to appoint their representative. The notoriously poor and vague wording of the relevant part of the Treaty (Article 12) lent itself to wildly different expectations, with the Irish plenipotentiaries convincing themselves the Commission would shift most of Northern Ireland except its north-eastern corner into the Free State (a delusion British P.M. Lloyd George did nothing to dispel during the talks). From 1924–25 the three-man Commission undertook surveys, accepted depositions and statements, and toured border areas. When the British newspaper the Morning Post published a very close prediction of the Commission’s final conclusions, which envisaged only minor tidying up of border anomalies (it’s almost certain the Unionist on the Commission, Joseph R. Fisher, leaked the details), the Free State government panicked and appealed to the British to prevent publication, which was agreed to. As some sort of compensation, the Free State’s debt obligations to the British under Article 5 of the Treaty were dropped.

So what does a book-length treatment add to this? A lot of detail, of course, but also some important points I’d not thought much about before. Above all, Moore’s examination of the period between the treaty being passed and the actual setting up of the Commission shows how the British parliament and the British newspapers worked together to fix in everyone’s minds as much as they could the belief that Article 12 had always only intended small readjustments in the border between Northern Ireland and the Free state, not large-scale transfers of territory. By this stage both Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith were dead, and two of the other signatories of the Treaty had gone over to the anti-Treaty side, which left only Eamonn Duggan who could argue from first-hand experience against the British version of how Article 12 had been understood by the men who had negotiated it.

Most famously, the Treaty stipulates that “the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions” were to be used to decide the border. In practice, and in the understanding of the Commission’s chairman, Justice Richard Feetham, that meant that economic and geographic conditions could often trump the wishes of the inhabitants. As if that was not bad enough, Irish Nationalists now discovered to their horror that the wording chosen also seemed to imply that transfers from the Free State to Northern Ireland were equally possible. Finally, I hadn’t realised that the poor drafting of the Article meant that the new border would become effective immediately when the Commission’s report was published, with all the potential chaos attendant on that.

If asked, I would have described the performance of Eoin Mac­Neill, the Free State’s delegate, as ineffectual. Moore is harsher, calling it “bizarre”. He is equally scathing about W.T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council (i.e. Free State P.M.), and his attempts to negotiate a better deal. One wonders whether a more energetic and forceful personality could have made a difference. Kevin O’Higgins seems to have gone at things slightly more robustly when he was brought in at far too late a stage, but arguably the deck was stacked against the Irish from the start.

Admittedly, the Free State hadn’t helped its case by setting up customs posts and implementing a tariff regime along the existing 6/26-county border. Such facts “on the ground” spoke powerfully.

(Oddly enough, Northern Ireland’s representative J.R. Fisher had made comments prior to his appointment which indicated he was not in principle opposed to redrawing the dividing line, for example, by including some of north Monaghan in Northern Ireland while adding South Armagh to the Free State. Given how much of an IRA stronghold south Armagh was during the Troubles, that may not have been a bad idea…)

© Eric Jones (cc-by-sa/2.0) geograph.org.uk/p/4348792
Silent Valley Reservoir viewed from the dam, taken Thursday, 4 August, 2011

As a final snippet, I didn’t know that the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains (first planned in the 1890s) was quickly pushed ahead with by the new Northern Ireland government to provide an argument for keeping all of County Down in Northern Ireland, as that area now provided Belfast with most of its drinking water.

This is quite a niche interest book (personally, I’m fascinated by the redrawing of borders all across Europe after the First World War) but a well written and thoughtful one.