associated with the British Commonwealth by a free act and it will be able to cooperate fruitfully with Britain in matters of true common concern. A first-fruit of co-operation is exemplified as we have seen in the trade agreement. How unification will be achieved we not know, but we hope and pray that it will be the privilege of Eamon de Valera, Liberator and Peacemaker, to accomplish it; for this a reward that will fill that generous heart with such joy and thankfulness as no other Irish leader ever has enjoyed—and Eamon de Valera deserves it.
We are soberly hopeful that this consummation will come in the relatively near future; and we believe that the Taoiseach was justified when he declared himself confident that “it is only a matter of time.”
Here we must insert a brief note on how partition came about, and how it was fastened on our land. Passing over the Ulster revolt which a Dublin lawyer headed and English politicians provoked and financed, we come to 1920, when a Home Rule Bill was carried which proposed to erect two legislatures in Ireland. No Irish Member voted for this measure. The English Government of the day was solely responsible and it was this alien authority which decreed the segregation of the Six Counties, an area more than half of which is Nationalist, to be held by the Unionist bloc in Belfast. In the Treaty negotiations, the Irish delegates were asked by Lloyd George’s men what safeguards they would give the Unionists if a united Ireland was recognised. They answered that they would assent to the continuance of the local Northern Parliament, under the supreme Irish Government, but the autonomous area must be delimited in accord with the wishes of the people. At one stage, Lloyd George pledged himself to resign if Sir James Craig (as the Northern Premier was then) blocked this reasonable plan. It has been shown that Lloyd George was playing a double-hand and giving contrary encouragement to Craig. Years previously Craig was prompted to stand firm for exclusion from the Irish State, and did so. The draft Treaty provided that the Northern Government could “opt” out, but that a Boundary Commission would revise the boundary.
Now here is Lloyd George’s ultimate act of treachery. He secured the signatures of Griffith and Collins on the assurance that the revision of boundaries would reduce the exempt area to the Unionist core; and it was believed that such a small area soon would throw in its lot with Ireland.
The Hon. Frank Pakenham in his “Peace by Ordeal “quotes English statesmen as declaring (what every Irishman knows) that Griffith and Collins would not and could not sign the Treaty unless assured of “essential unity.” (On the strength of Lloyd George’s promise, the Treaty was signed—and its disastrous consequences brought upon us.)
The time came for the Boundary Commission to operate. Craig had “opted” out of the State on the very date that its Constitution came into force, December 6th, 1922, and now in 1925 the Commission was under Mr. Justice Feetham to revise the Border.
Feetham declared that the wording of the Treaty permitted only rectifications of the Border—the straightening out of corners in that tortuous frontier. He said that it did not allow transfer of substantial territory, such as the two Nationalist counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh and the great Nationalist areas of South Armagh, South and East Down, North Antrim, Derry City. In other words, the two great Irishmen who had accepted the Treaty on the score of ‘‘essential unity” and had given their lives, one to a broken heart and the other to death in battle, had been hoaxed. As long as men remember the name of Lloyd George, it will be to execrate the betrayer of Griffith and Collins and Ireland.
The Boundary Commission’s report was scrapped. The existing Border was confirmed. We are saddled with it still. Until it is wiped out by the unification of Ireland under the national Constitution—with local autonomy, perhaps, but that is another and a minor question— Ireland will be bitterly resentful against England that perpetuated the wro