A report on Partition of Ireland, Irish nationalism and Ulster Volunteers

This, and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, led to the partition of Ireland.

Most Irish nationalists object to the use of Ulster in this context.

This movement also set up the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

Northern Ireland was created in 1921, when Ireland was partitioned by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, creating a devolved government for the six northeastern counties.

Meanwhile, the majority in Southern Ireland (which became the Irish Free State in 1922), and a significant minority in Northern Ireland, were Irish nationalists and Catholics who wanted a united independent Ireland.

In 1914, unionists smuggled thousands of rifles and rounds of ammunition from Imperial Germany for use by the Ulster Volunteers (UVF), a paramilitary organisation formed to oppose Home Rule.

In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned under British law by the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland.

Since the 1870s, Irish nationalists in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had been demanding Home Rule, or self-government, from Britain.

The demand for Home Rule was eventually granted by the British Government in 1912, immediately prompting a prolonged crisis within the United Kingdom as Ulster unionists formed an armed organisation – the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) – to resist this measure of devolution, at least in territory they could control.

At the outbreak of the war, most Irish people, regardless of political affiliation, supported the war in much the same way as their British counterparts, and both nationalist and unionist leaders initially backed the British war effort.

During the War of Independence, the British government partitioned Ireland.

In 1913, they had formed an armed militia, the Ulster Volunteers, to resist the implementation of Home Rule or to exclude Ulster itself from the settlement.

As the overwhelming sentiment of Ireland's Protestant minority, following Catholic Emancipation (1829) unionism mobilised to keep Ireland part of the United Kingdom and to defeat the efforts of Irish nationalists to restore a separate Irish parliament.

Since Partition (1921), as Ulster Unionism its goal has been to maintain Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom and to resist a transfer of sovereignty to an all-Ireland republic.

Joined by loyalist labour, on the eve of World War I this broad opposition to Irish self-government concentrated in Belfast and its hinterlands as Ulster Unionism, and prepared an armed resistance—the Ulster Volunteers.

It is now seen as a key moment in modern Irish history because it saw the overwhelming defeat of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which had dominated the Irish political landscape since the 1880s, and a landslide victory for the radical Sinn Féin party.

This was due to the failure to have the Home Rule Bill implemented when the IPP resisted the partition of Ireland demanded by Ulster Unionists in 1914, 1916 and 1917, but also popular antagonism towards the British authorities created by the execution of most of the leaders of the 1916 rebels and by their botched attempt to introduce Home Rule on the conclusion of the Irish Convention linked with military conscription in Ireland (see Conscription Crisis of 1918).

Unionist fear of Home Rule, or worse, separation, solidified after the Rising, and the Unionist vote was enhanced in Ulster by the increased electorate. It was the first election since the Ulster Covenant, the formation of the Ulster Volunteers (UVF), and the Battle of the Somme.

With Irish Home Rule due to become law in 1914, the British Cabinet contemplated some kind of military action against the unionist Ulster Volunteers who threatened to rebel against it.

The Home Rule Bill was passed but postponed, and the growing fear of civil war in Ireland led to the British government considering some form of partition of Ireland instead, which eventually took place.

The politicians later claimed that at the meeting when Paget arrived in London, they merely gave verbal amplification to orders which he had already received from the War Office, but Asquith later admitted that this was untrue; at the meeting Paget was also told to send troops to Newry (an old, empty barracks with no stores) and Dundalk, both in Irish nationalist areas and so unlikely to be seized by the UVF, but of strategic importance in any move to bring Ulster under military control.