TOURING Donegal 100 years ago this month, during the August 1923 Free State general election campaign, the president of the Free State executive council, WT Cosgrave, took issue with the use of the name 'Ulster' within Northern Ireland, claiming Donegal was in Ulster and not the jurisdiction created under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, but in the most northern part of Ireland.
Of the nine counties of Ulster, he claimed three (Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan) were in the Free State and two others (Fermanagh and Tyrone), by a large majority, wanted to be included in the Free State too. He told his audience in Letterkenny that "we have carried out in good faith, and at great cost in money and blood, every article of the Treaty, save two – the Boundary clause and the clause dealing with financial adjustment".
He continued: "We maintain that these two clauses are just as vital as any other clauses in the Treaty, and we say before the people of Ireland in this election that these are vital clauses, that they require to be complied with in the spirit and in the letter."
While Cosgrave often talked a good game in how he proposed to end partition, to help the northern nationalist minority and ensure nationalist majority areas in the north would be included in the Free State, his and his government's actions and inactions suggested otherwise, always putting the primacy of 26 county interests over those of northern nationalist ones.
Much to Éamon de Valera's surprise and disgust, Cosgrave was a firm supporter of the December 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and its clauses, including Article 12 which held out the prospect of a Boundary Commission to determine the border's contours.
As Dáil minister for local government, Cosgrave spearheaded the decision by nationalist local bodies in the north to ignore northern institutions and declare allegiance to the Dáil instead while the Treaty negotiations were taking place in London in late 1921.
By April 1922, his stance had changed, believing by then "that the non-recognition campaign in local government threatened to rob whole nationalist tracts of effective representation in the face of the Boundary Commission".
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Stating that the "purse of Dáil Éireann is not a bottomless pit", he also opposed the policy of paying teachers who refused to recognise the northern jurisdiction in the long term. Free State financial concerns were also to the fore for Cosgrave in his reaction to nationalist refugees coming from Belfast to Dublin during the height of the sectarian violence in the first half of 1922, with historian Robert Lynch claiming that Cosgrave was "unsympathetic and suspicious of the reality of the northern refugee crisis, treating it as a political and financial problem rather than a simple humanitarian one".
Shortly after the most momentous month of his career, August 1922, when Cosgrave became president of the Dáil and chairman of the Provisional Government following the deaths of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, meeting a delegation of northern nationalists in Dublin in October, he articulated a complete reversal of Collins's policy on the north of non-recognition and obstruction.
He stated that this government took "very strong action" against people who "refused to give it their allegiance, and that if we were to discourage them from giving their allegiance to [Northern Ireland prime minister James] Craig's administration he would provide a weapon that could be used by his enemies in both the north and the south". Naturally, Cosgrave's primary interest was winning the civil war against the anti-Treaty IRA which by then was predicted to continue far longer than originally thought.
Once the civil war had started, there also was no longer a need for the government to be ambiguous in its support for the Treaty to avoid a conflict with anti-Treatyites, including on its clauses relating to partition.
Cosgrave's colleague Kevin O'Higgins, also addressing northern nationalists visiting Dublin, stated as much: "We have no other policy for the North East than we have for any other part of Ireland and that is the Treaty policy."
While myopically pinning all hopes on a boundary commission, which given its vague wording and British-skewed make-up, was always unlikely to deliver a satisfactory solution to nationalists, Cosgrave's government also supported a "peace policy" towards the northern government, including direct relations with it.
Although financial and political support for northern nationalists who boycotted Northern Ireland institutions practically stopped by the end of 1922, Cosgrave and his government did little to foster any positive relations with James Craig's government.
Instead, reflecting Sinn Féin's years-long misunderstanding of Ulster unionism's real and firm hatred of a united Ireland, believing it to be a mere political tactic exploited by Britain, Cosgrave's government attempted to pressurise Northern Ireland into Irish unity through significant loss of territory via the Boundary Commission and by highlighting the Free State's superior political status of nationhood over that of Northern Ireland's limited governance structures.
To drive home this superiority in status, Cosgrave insisted on bringing in fiscal autonomy for the Irish Free State in April 1923 even though he was cautioned to wait until the border issue was settled, as a direct consequence of fiscal autonomy were customs barriers and a hard land border. Always with an eye on Free State financial interests, Cosgrave was prepared to 'stereotype' the border by erecting customs barriers before the Boundary Commission convened, partly because the Free State desperately needed money due to the ongoing economically crippling conflict in the south.
Cosgrave and others within the Free State government did take the Boundary Commission seriously. The government established the North-East Boundary Bureau in October 1922, tasked with collecting and compiling data for the commission, promoting and publishing the Free State case, and liaising with northern nationalists. Cosgrave also consistently refused to countenance a border solution outside of the Boundary Commission, despite severe pressure from different British governments and from Craig to do so.
However, as referenced here previously, Cosgrave blundered greatly by appointing Eoin MacNeill as Free State boundary commissioner, a decision that undid any positive work the Free State completed in preparation for the commission.
In many ways, Cosgrave's actions, once the Morning Post published its largely accurate leaked report of the Boundary Commission in November 1925, which saw very little transfer of territory with some of it in fact being lost by the Free State to Northern Ireland, best encapsulates his whole approach to the north.
To save face from opponents in the Free State – and to benefit it financially – he pleaded: for the Boundary Commission report to be shelved; for the border to remain as it was delineated under the Government of Ireland Act 1920; for the one structural mechanism to cultivate closer cooperation between north and south, the Council of Ireland, to be scrapped; for an abandonment of safeguards being introduced to help the nationalist minority in the north; all ditched for what could be easily construed as a bribe of the Free State being allowed to waive its commitments under Article 5 of the Treaty to contribute to the public debt of the United Kingdom.
Cosgrave was fooling few people by calling the December 1925 tripartite government agreement a "damn good bargain". Wilfred Spender, head of the Northern Ireland civil service, later claimed that Cosgrave did not believe it was a good bargain himself, when meeting with Craig, he "burst into tears and said that Lord Craigavon had won all down the line and begged and entreated him not to make things more difficult for him".
In justifying the agreement to the Dáil, Cosgrave claimed: "It stabilises our financial position. It secures that we are deprived of none of our citizens."
When talking of "our citizens", he was of course only referring to citizens of the Free State. When, at the same time, a delegation of northern nationalists asked to address the Dáil, Cosgrave emphatically refused, stating the Northern Ireland parliament was the "legitimate assembly" to deal with their complaints.
For northern nationalists, it confirmed what many had felt since Cosgrave took power in August 1922: that they were not his obligation nor his concern.
Cosgrave's talk of the agreement facilitating Irish unity through goodwill and closer cooperation came to nothing either. While there were some ministerial and civil service meetings between north and south subsequently, and there was cooperation over policing and postal services members being allowed to cross the border for practical reasons to avoid long journeys, these meetings and agreements were not advertised.
Cosgrave's government was fearful of being identified as "partitionist" by its political opponents in the Free State for engaging with the northern government.
The loose agreement suggested by Craig as a replacement for the Council of Ireland of joint meetings of both Irish governments "at an early date" never materialised, with Cosgrave and Craig never meeting each other again.
The next meeting between the heads of both Irish governments occurred 40 years later when Seán Lemass met Terence O'Neill in 1965. Even the suggestion by EM Stephens, secretary of the North-East Boundary Bureau, for the Free State government to appoint a northern policy coordinator (preferably him) to facilitate closer cooperation between north and south, which in turn would assist in bringing about Irish unity, was dismissed by the Free State government, with each government department allowed to continue their own separate policies (if they had any) towards the north.
Cosgrave may have publicly espoused a united Ireland, but his actions and lethargic approach in bringing it about suggests his only real concern was for the territory under his control, the Irish Free State.
Dr Cormac Moore is author of Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland (Merrion Press, 2019)
