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Post by irish observer on Feb 24, 2013 18:15:07 GMT
Sorry - since when has creating a made-up majority 'province' out of carved up counties to defy the democratic will of the majority of a population something that a democrat would want to applaud? Anybody with even an ounce of knowledge of the history of the island of Ireland would know that there was no such province as Northern Ireland before the enforced partition of the island by those who lost the democratic vote. Where we are is where we are but to pretend that the truth behind the gerrymandered creation we now call Northern Ireland is somehow to be dismissed as 'old horse-dust' is political cant of the worst kind. Come on then, you tell us the alternative. There is a majority (and certainly was in 1912/14/20) within what is now Northern Ireland for remaining part of the UK and not becoming part of an independent Ireland. Why should that majority be shunted out of the country they want to be part of and into one they don't? Simply adding them to the other 26 counties and declaring "Therefore, there's an Ireland-wide majority for independence" would have been a far more pernicious form of gerrymandering than creating the Province in the first place. And, a century on, whinging about Trevelyan's corn and what Bonar Law might have said to the Larne gun-runners and trying to use that as some sort of justification for supporting the Northern Irish pro-UK majority being moved into a different country is even worse. I don't like being misquoted anywhere by a friend or a fool. If you want to address my previous post then do so otherwise be a coward. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Feb 24, 2013 18:19:06 GMT
Just crunchd the numbers and there is a Catholic plurality in all but six of Fermanagh's 23 wards. Five of the wards without a Catholic plurality are in or around Enniskillen: Maguiresbridge (very close, 54.8% Protestant, 42.3% Catholic), Kesh Ederney and Lack, Lisnarrick, Lisbellaw, and Ballinamallard which is the most Protestant at 75%.
The final ward with a Protestant majority is Brookeborough, and I suspect a certain person would turn in his grave were it not so. Even so, it's close: 55.3% Protestant to 42.5% Catholic.
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Post by irish observer on Feb 24, 2013 19:07:19 GMT
All true, but the lines were drawn to grab as big an area as possible whilst keeping a Protestant majority for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly it would be unjust to force rural County Antrim into an Irish state its population really do not want. But it was just as unjust to put the western half of Derry into a state its inhabitants did not support. It wasn't about protecting the unionist population in the north. It was about protecting their political hegemony. Except it wasn't, really, was it? If it was about a Unionist ascendancy in Northern Ireland preserving its privileges and a supposed hegemony, then (if we're looking at it from a 2013 perspective) they would have just excluded Cos. Fermanagh and Tyrone and parts of Cos. Armagh and Down and of Co. Londonderry, as you say. In the current demographic set-up, it would have saved a lot of bother for any British 'hegemonists' to have a tightly-drawn province which even now would have been 75-80% Protestant/Unionist and where there would have been no issue about it remaining part of the UK. But at the time even Co. Fermanagh, as far as anyone really knew, was majority Unionist and there would have been no desire to move any county that was majority Unionist into Dev's 'Catholic theme park' (as someone memorably described pre-1939 Free State to me, but to my mind which would serve as a good epithet for the pre-Celtic Tiger Republic). The drawing of the 1920 border, even if it may look odd today, looks more like a genuine attempt to preserve those who wanted to be in the UK in the UK, than it looks like some dastardly plot to suppress as many Irish Catholics as possible under a barely majority British province. If they had wanted that at the time the entire province of Ulster could have been made Northern Ireland. In the 1911 census 1,580,242 people lived in the 9 counties of Ulster and 890,108 were Protestant and 690,134 were Catholic. This included Catholic majorities of 79%, 75% and 82% in each of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan. Fermanagh and Tyrone at that time had Catholic majorities of 56% and 55% and had 46% and 45% in each of Derry and Armagh. Carson and Craig came to realise that by restricting the definition to 6 counties this was "governable" while also being necessary to being sustainable as an entity. During the Treaty negotiations the British Secretary of War pressed his colleagues for the inclusion of Donegal in the north as he felt it could become an "Afghanistan" on the western border. Given their voting patterns in referenda and such like many may not have minded had they been taken.  During one of her dottier moments during the Troubles Maggie expressed dismay at the shape of the border and told her Generals could they not "straighten it out a bit" by giving bits back to ROI and taking other bits into NI. This prospect of a repartition provoked dismay among her people on the ground and she was persuaded from not pursuing it. Presumably you come from the school of blaming de Valera for every incident that went wrong in Irish history since 1922. This school of narrow-minded elitist revisionist drivel has been challenged in the past few years and is continuing at a pace but this is the wrong thread. |
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Post by irish observer on Feb 24, 2013 19:32:00 GMT
It's often forgotten that the creation of the Stormont Parliament was actually considered a concession to Nationalists as part of a way to get the ungovernable into an all Irish run entity.[/quote] Are you referring to the Government of Ireland Act here? Self-determination is a great concept until you have to work out who gets to determine who gets to self-determine. In a divided community one side cannot unilaterally impose its determination of nationhood and expect all on the other to accept it and the consequences that flow from it.[/quote] Especially when some people get the right to self-determine and others do not. |
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Post by irish observer on Feb 24, 2013 19:41:26 GMT
All true, but the lines were drawn to grab as big an area as possible whilst keeping a Protestant majority for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly it would be unjust to force rural County Antrim into an Irish state its population really do not want. But it was just as unjust to put the western half of Derry into a state its inhabitants did not support. It wasn't about protecting the unionist population in the north. It was about protecting their political hegemony. The original proposed partition predated the Stormont proposal. The six counties were chosen in 1914 for exclusion from Home Rule as a starting point, on the basis that these were the ones still returning Unionist MPs, and it was expected that the bounday would subsequently be refined. This was harder to achieve in practice to the satisfaction of all parties and brought down the Buckingham Palace conference in 1914. But the idea didn't go away and the final settlement of 1921-2 came with plans for a Boundary Commission to tidy things up once everything else had settled down. However this was a classic case of each side having a different view of what it signed up to and in the end the various governments settled for the status quo with all its messes. Those 1914 proposals were rejected by John Redmond hence the dreary steeples comment. The fact that Cosgrave ended up agreeing to the result of the Boundary Commission resulted in so much criticism, as it was something Redmond had not even agreed to, would encourage de Valera to break with Sinn Féin and set up Fianna Fáil. |
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Post by irish observer on Feb 24, 2013 19:45:35 GMT
That rather elides the story of the Boundary Commission which is a fascinating story of British government naivety, Ulster Unionist obstructionism, Irish nationalist misplaced optimism, and some remarkably successful strategic leaking and manipulation. Many on the Nationalist side assumed (wrongly) that the Boundary Commission would remove so much terratory from Northern Ireland that the rump would be unsustainable and would soon come into the Free State. The split in the Republican camp and the subsequent civil war was more to do with signing the oath of loyalty than partition This is also true. It is bizarre when thinking of it but only three TDs raised the partition issue during the Treaty debates; Seán Moylan and Seán MacEntee, who were both later Fianna Fáil Ministers, and Erskine Childers who was executed during the Civil War. |
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Post by timrollpickering on Feb 24, 2013 20:15:53 GMT
To deal with the point of Stepney the reason for Fermanagh's inclusion was on purely economic grounds as the Unionist Party felt, and persuaded British opinion, that the Northern state needed six counties to be sustainable. North Fermanagh had returned either Unionist or Russellite MPs since 1892, hence in 1914 Fermanagh ended up on the list of counties with Unionist MPs that was the starting point for partition with the intention of smoothing things out with a refined border through the dreary steeples of Fermanagh & Tyrone (that particular term comes from a speech remembering the failure on this very issue). There is a tendency with partition to focus on 1918-1922 when really the key moments were 1914 and 1925. |
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Post by irish observer on Feb 24, 2013 21:23:26 GMT
To deal with the point of Stepney the reason for Fermanagh's inclusion was on purely economic grounds as the Unionist Party felt, and persuaded British opinion, that the Northern state needed six counties to be sustainable. North Fermanagh had returned either Unionist or Russellite MPs since 1892, hence in 1914 Fermanagh ended up on the list of counties with Unionist MPs that was the starting point for partition with the intention of smoothing things out with a refined border through the dreary steeples of Fermanagh & Tyrone (that particular term comes from a speech remembering the failure on this very issue). There is a tendency with partition to focus on 1918-1922 when really the key moments were 1914 and 1925. I'm aware of that. That North Fermanagh constituency contained almost all of the wards mentioned by David Boothroyd which remain protestant majority. I still feel my point holds as I said on the previous page that there was a long established Nationalist majority in the county. You make a good point regarding the 1914 and 1925 dates. |
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Post by Andrew_S on Mar 3, 2013 18:47:33 GMT
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Mar 3, 2013 19:09:06 GMT
There was almost nothing in the local press about it, but the turnout was near to 90% and there were complaints that it was bad form to hold a byelection in a farming seat at the time of the harvest.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2013 7:11:43 GMT
BBC Breakfast just did a rather humdrum 30-second "report"
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2013 16:49:41 GMT
And in 1956, 1969 and 1986 also. |
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Mar 5, 2013 17:10:27 GMT
So this is the fifth since WW2, I assume - is that a record for any Westminster constituency??
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Post by Andrew_S on Mar 5, 2013 17:16:08 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2013 17:19:12 GMT
So this is the fifth since WW2, I assume - is that a record for any Westminster constituency?? That would probably be Rotherham. |
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Post by The Bishop on Mar 5, 2013 17:32:20 GMT
Nope, 4 since the war(1963, 1976, 1994 and last year)
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Post by maxque on Mar 5, 2013 17:33:46 GMT
So this is the fifth since WW2, I assume - is that a record for any Westminster constituency?? That would probably be Rotherham. Rotherham is at 4 (1963, 1976, 1994 and 2012 (but 4 others before WWII)). |
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Post by timrollpickering on Mar 5, 2013 20:31:45 GMT
Belfast South is also at 4 - 1952, 1963, 1982 & 1986 but I can't think of any others that have had 5.
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Post by AdminSTB on Mar 6, 2013 15:55:43 GMT
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Post by irish observer on Mar 6, 2013 22:58:53 GMT
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During one of her dottier moments during the Troubles Maggie expressed dismay at the shape of the border and told her Generals could they not "straighten it out a bit" by giving bits back to ROI and taking other bits into NI. This prospect of a repartition provoked dismay among her people on the ground and she was persuaded from not pursuing it.
