THE ULSTER CONFUCT PARTITION The I.R.A.' s sporadic raids and the economic boycott ensured that the British government would accept the principie of separating the six most Protestant Ulster counties from the rest of Ireland. The British regime no longer had any fixed assets in Ireland once the sale of the land to the paesants (from which it was supposed to derive an income in land annuities) had gone through, but there was no way that they could assimilate Ulster into the rest of Ireland. They were under great pressure from international opinion (particularly from Amrica where the Irish lobby was still powerful) to settle the Irish question. The outcome was an attempt at the usual British compromise with the 1920Government of Ireland Act which proposed separate parliaments in Dublin and Belfast with a Council of Ireland given limited rsponsibilities for the 3,2counties. Both sections of Ireland were to continue to have representatives at Westminster which reserved to itself powers like defence, foreign policy and the coining of money. Eventually the Council might become a unified all-Ireland parliament federated to the Westminster parliament. The Ulster Unionists were willing to abandon their fellow unionists in the Southern provinces and also in the three most heavily Catholic counties of Ulster (Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan) because the six counties left constituted a state which was two-thirds Protestant and thus a formidable redoubt. Ulster Unionist leaders in later years were often to claim that they had never wanted a parliament of their own, that they had merely wished to remain a part of the United Kingdom ruled from Westminster, but they were very quick, under the leadership of James Craig (who had been the organizational genius behind the rhetoric of Carson) to establish the power of their semi-autonomous state and to consolidate the interests of their class. In the "siege" atmosphere the election for the new Ulster House of Commons (at which voting was by the usually fissiparous proportional representation system, an innovation in British electoral practice which has still not been adopted on the mainland, and which the new Ulster parliament under the Unionists was to reject for future use) produced a sharp division between 40 Unionists on the one side and 12 Sinn Fein and old-style Nationalists. The Sinn Fein and Nationalist representatives, although disagreeing violently over political 53
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==