A report on Irish nationalism and Partition of Ireland

The national flag of the Republic of Ireland, which was created to represent all of Ireland

Result in Ireland of the December 1910 United Kingdom general election showing a large majority for the Irish Parliamentary Party.

The green harp flag was first used by Irish Confederate troops in the Eleven Years War, and became the main symbol of Irish nationalism from the 17th to the early 20th century.

Ulster Volunteers marching in Belfast, 1914

"Daniel O'Connell: The Champion of Liberty" poster published in Pennsylvania, 1847

Result of the 1918 general election in Ireland showing the dramatic swing in support for Sinn Féin

A flowchart illustrating all the political parties that have existed throughout the history of Northern Ireland and leading up to its formation (1889 onwards). Nationalist parties are in green.

Catholic-owned businesses destroyed by loyalists in Lisburn, August 1920

Poster for a 1913 anti-Carson meeting, hosted by Protestants of Ballymoney. Speakers included Roger Casement and Robert Glendinning.

Crowds in Belfast for the state opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament on 22 June 1921

Members of the Irish negotiation committee returning to Ireland in December 1921

North East Boundary Bureau recommendations May 1923

James Craig (centre) with members of the first government of Northern Ireland

The Boundary Commission's proposed changes to the border

A republican anti-partition march in London, 1980s

At the time of the partition of Ireland most of the island was Roman Catholic and largely indigenous, while a sizeable portion of the country, particularly in the north, was Protestant and chiefly descended from people from Great Britain who colonised the land as settlers during the reign of King James I in 1609.

- Irish nationalism

However, it also had a significant minority of Catholics and Irish nationalists.

- Partition of Ireland

15 related topics with Alpha

Éamon de Valera

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Prominent statesman and political leader in 20th-century Ireland.

De Valera addressing a crowd on the steps of Ennis Courthouse, County Clare, in July 1917

The Kilmainham Gaol cell of Éamon de Valera

De Valera in academic dress to receive an honorary degree from College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts in 1920

De Valera on the cover of Time magazine in 1932

De Valera (right) with Mayor of Boston John F. Collins and his wife Mary

De Valera in the 1960s while President of Ireland

Éamon de Valera's grave in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. His wife, Sinéad, and son, Brian (who was killed in a horse-riding accident in 1936) are buried there also.

Éamon de Valera's heraldry as knight of the Supreme Order of Christ

Nationalists expected its report to recommend that largely nationalist areas become part of the Free State, and many hoped this would make Northern Ireland so small it would not be economically viable.

Hence neither the pro- nor anti-Treaty sides made many complaints about partition in the Treaty Debates.

Parliament Buildings at Stormont, in Belfast, seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly

Good Friday Agreement

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Chéasta or Comhaontú Bhéal Feirste; Ulster-Scots: Guid Friday Greeance or Bilfawst Greeance), is a pair of agreements signed on 10 April 1998 that ended most of the violence of The Troubles, a political conflict in Northern Ireland that had ensued since the late 1960s.

The offices of the North/South Ministerial Council on Upper English Street, Armagh, Northern Ireland

A 'Yes' campaign poster for the Good Friday Agreement during simultaneous referendums in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland.

Anti-Northern Ireland Protocol poster. Main Street, Larne March 2021

Two were broadly labelled nationalist: the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and Sinn Féin, the republican party associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

As part of the agreement, the British parliament repealed the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (which had established Northern Ireland, partitioned Ireland and asserted a territorial claim over all of Ireland) and the people of the Republic of Ireland amended Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland, which asserted a territorial claim over Northern Ireland.

Arthur Griffith

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Irish writer, newspaper editor and politician who founded the political party Sinn Féin.

Griffith seen in July 1922, a month before his death

Griffith's grave in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin

Richard Mulcahy and Michael Collins at Arthur Griffith's funeral

Arthur Griffith and three of the four other members of the Irish delegation (George Gavan Duffy, Erskine Childers and Robert Barton) for the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921

After a short spell in South Africa, Griffith founded and edited the Irish nationalist newspaper The United Irishman in 1899.

However, this idea was never really embraced by later separatist leaders, especially Michael Collins, and never came to anything, although Kevin O'Higgins toyed with the idea as a means of ending partition, shortly before his assassination in 1927.

Liberal Party (UK)

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One of the two major political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Liberal politicians David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill enacted the 1909 People's Budget which specifically aimed at the redistribution of wealth.

Liberal poster c. 1905–1910, clockwise from the left: Joseph Chamberlain (satirised as an unmarried mother leaving her baby at a Foundling hospital) abandons his commitment to old age pensions; Chancellor Austen Chamberlain threatens duties on consumer items which had been removed by Gladstone (in the picture on the wall); Chinese indentured labour in South Africa; John Bull contemplates his vote; and Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour (who favoured retaliatory tariffs) wearing top hats. The heading "ratepayers money for sectarian schools" refers to the Education Act 1902.

Cartoonist John Bernard Partridge depicts Lloyd George as a giant with a cudgel labelled "Budget" in reference to his People's Budget while "a plutocrat" cowers beneath the table, Punch 28 April 1909. The caption, not shown, reads "Fee Fi Fo Phat, I smell the blood of a plutocrat. Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread,"

$Share of the vote received by Conservatives (blue), Whigs/Liberals/Liberal Democrats (orange), Labour (red) and others (grey) in general elections since 1832 shows that following success as the successor to the Whig party, the party's share of the popular vote plummeted after the First World War as it lost votes to the new Labour party and fractured into groups such as the National and Coalition Liberals$

A crowd waits outside Leeds Town Hall to see them elect a Liberal Party candidate during the 1880 general elections.

Leeds and County Liberal Club blue plaque

Irish nationalist reaction was mixed, Unionist opinion was hostile, and the election addresses during the 1886 election revealed English radicals to be against the bill also.

Asquith had offered the Six Counties (later to become Northern Ireland) an opt out from Home Rule for six years (i.e. until after two more general elections were likely to have taken place) but the Nationalists refused to agree to permanent Partition of Ireland.

Curragh incident

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The Curragh incident of 20 March 1914, sometimes known as the Curragh mutiny, occurred in the Curragh, County Kildare, Ireland.

Sir Arthur Paget, GOC Irish Command in March 1914

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.