The Border Diarmaid Ferriter is one of Ireland’s best-known historians. He is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD and a columnist for the Irish Times. He is a regular broadcaster on television and radio. His previous books include The Transformation of Ireland (2004), Occasions of Sin (2009), Ambiguous Republic (2012), A Nation and Not a Rabble (2015) and On the Edge (2018). Author photo © Bobbie Hanvey Also by Diarmaid Ferriter On the Edge: Ireland’s Off-Shore Islands: A Modern History A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913–23 Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Éamon De Valera For my beloved brother, Cian The Border The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics Diarmaid Ferriter Contents 1 The Long Gestation 2 An Entrenched Partition 3 Old Fantasies, New Perspectives and a Gentle Thaw 4 Violence and Containment 5 Kinks, Wiggles and Diplomacy 6 No Victory for Either Tradition 7 Brexit, Backstops and Brinkmanship Bibliography of Sources Cited Notes — 1 — The Long Gestation The island of Ireland was partitioned in 1920, partly due to a combination of British duplicity, the insecurities, fears and desires of Ulster unionists and the delusions and dashed hopes of southern Irish republicans and partly because the likely alternative to a border was civil war. In subsequent decades the border was cemented by aggressive political ideology, economic policy and harrowing violence before its potency was tempered by a peace process and economic and political pragmatism. Its future, since the British electorate voted to leave the EU in June 2016, has been under a focus not witnessed in decades, as it is the UK’s only land border with another European country. Ideological partition was long a reality in Ireland before the physical border was imposed owing to the distinctive development of Ulster, the most northern of the four historic Irish provinces, comprising nine of the island’s thirty-two counties and amounting to roughly 8,950 square miles, just over a quarter of the island of Ireland’s total area. Until the seventeenth century Ulster was isolated as a part of a Gaelic Ireland that had been more resistant than the three other Irish provinces to Norman and English rule since the twelfth century. The vast social engineering of the seventeenth century, however, resulted in the seizure of property and the removal of people on the basis of their religion, making the province a bastion of Protestant settlement and British influence. Plantation resulted in the seizure from Catholic natives of 5,600 square miles in Ulster, transforming the province with the arrival of English and Scottish settlers who differed in terms of religious affiliation (the English belonging to the established Anglican Church and the Scots Presbyterian) but had a common bond of ‘Britishness’, a term novel at that stage and one ‘especially applied to those engaged in colonial endeavour’.1 But full ‘British’ control of Ulster was not achieved; while there was some assimilation and accommodation between these settlers and the Catholic natives, any possibility of permanent harmony was shattered by the Ulster rebellion of 1641, spearheaded by Catholics who retained land and status, with Ireland for the next ten years ‘a theatre of war in the War of the Three Kingdoms; and for the ten years after that she found herself a laboratory for Cromwellian experiments’.2 This included atrocities on a grand scale with the killing of soldiers, civilians and Catholic clergy. With the restoration of monarchy in 1660 there were hopes for a Catholic resurgence that were scuppered at the battles of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691), which confirmed Protestant dominance. Presbyterians were also excluded from the fruits of victory. But the Catholic question reignited in the late eighteenth century and rebellion in 1798 by a combination of radical Catholics and Protestants seeking the removal of English influence in Ireland stoked further enmities and fears about the stability of the Anglo-Irish connection. In response, the Act of Union was passed in 1800 creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and providing that Ireland be represented at Westminster by 100 MPs. Over the course of the nineteenth century increasing Catholic and nationalist confidence and demands were manifest in southern Ireland; by 1861 just 8.9 per cent of the population of the three southern provinces was Protestant while the figure in Ulster was 49.5 per cent, a figure that steadily increased to 55.8 per cent by 1901.3 The industrialisation of Belfast and the Lagan Valley in the nineteenth century also set it apart from a country that was overwhelmingly agrarian; there was consensus that Belfast as it thrived and expanded was more ‘British’, and that Ulster was ‘different’ from the rest of Ireland.4 By 1886 the British prime minister, William Gladstone, had decided home rule for Ireland was feasible and convenient from both the British and Irish perspectives; by then, iconic nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell had built a formidable Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) demanding Irish self-government within the empire and was now a key player in British as well as Irish politics. Unionists, however, island wide, were determined to resist this in defence of unity of the UK, and so began a four-decade struggle that ended in partition. Gladstone did not succeed with his Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893, but home rule demands continued. Irish Nationalist MPs, somewhat adrift after the death of Parnell in 1891 but reunified under the leadership of John Redmond in 1900, continued to remain a thorn in the side of the British political establishment and the IPP held the balance of power in Westminster in 1910. By 1912, following an alliance between the British Liberal Party and Irish nationalists against the wishes of Conservatives and unionists, and helped by the eradication of the House of Lords veto on legislation from the House of Commons, home rule was a distinct likelihood without any solution to unionist resistance, now being spearheaded by Dublin-born lawyer Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party from 1910. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, lacking real conviction about the merits of home rule but in debt to the IPP for their support of reform of the House of Lords, duly introduced the third Home Rule Bill in April 1912, declaring it would give Ireland ample scope for the development of