The Northern Ireland Question: Nationalism, Unionism and Partition by Patrick Roche

Author:Patrick Roche [Barton, Brian & Roche, Patrick J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783240043
Publisher: Wordzworth Publishing
Published: 2014-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter began with a comment on the near completeness of partition after 1921, and the rapid abandonment of the Council of Ireland, that ‘bond of union’ between north and south enshrined in the Government of Ireland Act. This was followed by the broadening gulf between the two parts of the island up to the end of the Second World War. But at the same time a non-political unity of sorts was preserved by people away from politics and government. In 1925 the Belfast unionist newspaper, The Northern Whig, commented in an editorial that at partition ‘Ulster did not surrender its title as part of Ireland, nor renounce its share in those Irish traditions in art, in learning, in arms, in song, in sport and in science that were worth preserving in a united form’. 53 To that list could be added all the churches, trade unions, and many specific organisations and learned and professional bodies.

These pockets of non-political unity survived as the two political entities on the island moved further apart, and most citizens north and south knew and thought increasingly little about each other. From the 1950s on, however, developing commercial contacts and vastly improved personal mobility for tourism and travel, began to open new paths for many across the north/south divide, a trend crudely interrupted by the worst of the ‘troubles’, but resumed with renewed vigour over the past several years. 54 In many ways, therefore, conditions are more appropriate now than they ever have been since 1925 for the creation of formal links between north and south which could serve practical purposes to benefit both, and which could symbolise the non-political unity of the island. But Irish nationalism still appears to cling to cross-border bodies as symbols of, and possibly gateways to, political unity. This in turn makes it easier for unionists to ignore the non-political unity of the island, recognition of which, by both sides, would provide the only sure foundation for new structures of mutual practical benefit.

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