It is a real pleasure to be with you today to launch this excellent new book by Cormac Moore.
It is a work of deep scholarship which once again shows how we are living through a new era in the writing of Irish history. Cormac is part of a generation of young historians who have used the opening up of archives to give us a broader and deeper view of our past.
For those who want to move past partisan and ideological debates of previous decades, a body of work is being built up which challenges us to look for new ways of framing the questions we ask of our history. As Anne Dolan put it when speaking about the recent Decade of Centenaries “maybe history’s job is to make it harder to be so certain and so shrill.”
If all we see of the past is a reflection of our current beliefs then we are missing out on opportunities to find new ways forward and rejecting the need to challenge ourselves.
‘The Root of All Evil’ deals with an issue which has been at the core of modern Irish history for over a century, yet it succeeds marvellously in showing us that we still have much to learn.
It is the product of exhaustive and impeccable archival research which works hard to give a full picture of the three separate interests involved in the Irish Boundary Commission and the negotiations which surrounded it.
In this it passes the most important test for any work of history – it empowers the reader to engage with the issues and rejects the approach of the author requiring all to simply accept one interpretation.
And in this, Cormac has brought to the fore a number of themes which have received relatively little attention over the years.
The suppression of the Boundary Commission’s report and the manner in which the Dublin government was effectively humiliated as part of the entrenching of the Border as it remains today, was a defining moment in modern Irish history.
It marked the final outcome of the Treaty negotiations and showed the limits of what was likely to be achieved without a new agenda.
It was a radicalising moment central to the decision of a number of TDs elected for the 3rd Sinn Fein party to found a new party and end abstentionism.
The Boundary Commission did not create partition, but it demonstrated the entrenchment of a hardline approach defined by dominating as large a space as possible rather than constructing diverse societies.
Partition introduced a division on this island which had no precedence in this island’s history.
It ignored the reality of how most services and institutions worked – and of course it ignored the wishes of a strong majority as well as the wishes of large numbers of Border communities.
Partition broke apart a single, more diverse society and created states which were less diverse and more open to being dominated by one interest.
And by creating jurisdictions which were likely to diverge significantly, partition was designed to be intractable.
As we see in Cormac’s research, all three of the parties to the Commission’s work failed to engage with it in a manner which made a legitimate outcome more likely.
When you read the title “The Root of All Evil” most people’s reaction is to think that this is a comment from a nationalist – when in fact it is a statement by James Craig to Churchill in May 1922. It represented the fact that the Unionist majority had already moved its agenda to holding on to what were supposed to be temporary or conditional victories at all costs.
“Not an inch” was his rallying cry, and he succeeded comprehensively in this, while at the same time building a state which was proudly sectarian.
The Dublin Government was comprehensively outmanoeuvred on every substantive matter. The panic set off when the draft of the final report was circulated remains surprising given the evidence of how the Commission’s work had proceeded.
And there is no way of looking at the evidence of London’s behaviour and missing the consistent bad faith which it showed to both the Dublin government and majority of the Irish people.
This was evident from during the Treaty negotiations and the agenda of subsidising the new Northen Irish state in its creation of sectarian structures, especially in policing. Allowing the abolition of proportional representation and refusing to support minority rights did much to permanently alienate many communities from both Stormont and Westminster.
One of the most valuable aspects of this book is how we are shown in detail the contemporary European context for how inter-state boundaries were being set.
Central to implementing, at least in part, the Wilsonian doctrine of national self-determination, the standard way of handling border disputes was to use the concept of ‘the wishes of the inhabitants’.
In hundreds of cases this was done administratively by delegations participating in the Versailles Peace Conference – but where there was a doubt the accepted means of determining borders was a local plebiscite. A century later, the borders between Germany and Denmark, and Austria and Slovenia are still those which were determined by plebiscites over a century ago.
The refusal to acknowledge this core principle of setting boundaries according to ‘the wishes of the inhabitants’ made the Irish border unique in Europe at the time.
It was of course also the only case of new states and boundaries being created from within the territory of a victorious power – so this was inevitably going to lead to differences from the practice elsewhere.
And this was the first time since the Treaty of Paris in 1783 where independence was secured by any group from the British Empire.
It was still decades before London would learn to peacefully disengage from a colony – and the handling of partition in India in particular showed how things could be even worse than they were here.
However, irrespective of the lack of past experience in these matters, there was no credible or sustainable logic to the refusal to alter the boundary imposed in 1920 in any significant way.
The final report of the Commission ruled-out all potentially major transfers due to undefined and often contradictory economic concerns.
As a result the Commission reinforced the idea that this was a border which was going to be inherently divisive and potentially destabilising.
For all of this, the thing which I find most striking and significant is how, as Cormac notes at different points in the book, the different interests had very little understanding of each other and did almost nothing to accept the concerns of others as having any good faith.
In all of the debates about whether there should be a border and where it should be drawn nobody really developed an idea of either how to persuade others or how to manage what came next.
Craig succeeded in his ‘not an inch’ strategy but he and the unionist parties had no sustainable policy about how to develop a peaceful society or how to share an island with those they saw as enemies.
Equally, Dublin never came forward with an idea of how to build some common cause with those it viewed as Irish people.
Throughout the discussions on the Border in the 1920s there was mutual fear and the beginnings of a sustained period of growing apart.
When you look at the failures of 100 years ago to reach agreement, it’s impossible to miss the fact that the defining problem has been refusing to see the need for a new agenda.
As early as the mid-1950s, Seán Lemass, with the full support of de Valera wrote about the need for us to find different ways to overcome division – with the requirement for building engagement and understanding being the most urgent need. He argued that more of the same speeches, rallies and focusing on grievances would lead nowhere.
This is the spirit which informed his effort to reach-out across the border. It is the same spirit which is central to the Good Friday Agreement. And it is also the same spirit which lies behind the Shared Island Initiative.
For the first time in a hundred years we have a sustained effort underway to build understanding, engagement and mutual development.
The generosity of spirit with which individuals, groups and communities on both sides of the Border are engaging with the Initiative is one which has the potential to help us to break with failed approaches of the past.
The shelving of the report of the Irish Boundary Commission in 1925 was intended to be an end to the matter – but this was never going to be the case.
In the most detailed study of the Commission yet undertaken, Cormac Moore has shown how a short-term focus – a determination to win at all costs – was central to the tragic divisions of those times and its legacies.
I want to warmly congratulate Cormac on this excellent work and also Irish Academic Press, which has once again shown its important role as an Irish publisher committed to excellence and opening up advanced research to the broader public.