Border lines
NICHOLAS MANSERGH
Report of the Irish Boundary Commission, 1925 Introduction by Geoffrey Hand (Irish University Press 65s) The Trish Boundary Commission met for the first time on 6 November 1924, and for the last on 3 December 1925. It produced a draft award and a report expounding the prin- ciples on which the award was based but neither award nor report was published. All the public had to go on, therefore, was a forecast in the Morning Post of 7 November 1925 professing to be based on inside knowledge of the terms of the award, and a letter from the 'neutral' chairman of the commission, Mr Justice Feetham, to Stanley Baldwin explaining the principles on which he had acted and published in the Times on 18 December 1925.
Inevitably there was speculation and suspicion. Was the Morning Post disclosure authentic in its detail? Did Feetham, erstwhile member of Milner's kindergarten, act as impartial arbiter or was he unduly influenced in his interpretation of his responsibilities inter alia by Lionel Curtis? Why precisely did the Irish representative on the commission, Professor Eoin MacNeill, a distinguished mediaeval historian, resign precipitately, shortly after the Morning Post disclosures? These are some of the questions which can now be answered, if not in every case conclusively, then at any rate upon the basis of knowledge of essential facts. This book provides, so to speak, the documentary history of the mystery, and others, more political and more polemical in content, will doubtless follow. But Dr -Hand, himself a mediaeval historian, has edited a con- troversial record, rightly but also generously made available by the Public Record Office under the thirty year rule, with scholarly care and detachment.
And what in brief are the answers to the questions listed above? The first presents no problem—the disclosure with accompanying map, showing that the award contemplated only minor adjustments both ways in the boundary, was substantially correct, and all that remains in some, though hardly in much, doubt is who made it. The second, however, is shown to have been too weighted in its implications and too circumscribed in its terms. What mattered, irrespective of any external influence, was how Feetham con- ceived the responsibilities laid upon the com- mission. That is now revealed to be the crucial aspect of the whole affair.
Article XII of the Anglo-Irish Treaty had provided that in the event of the Northern Ireland Parliament exercising its freedom to opt out of the Irish Free State, as inevitably it did, then a boundary commission was to be set up 'to determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic or geographic conditions' the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. The Irish signatories to the treaty, Collins foremost among them, believed that a radical revision of the border in favour of the Irish Free State was implicit in these provisions and such a possibility was not, at the least, ex- cluded by Lloyd George. But Feetham, focusing his attention upon the actual wording of the article, interpreted it in a restrictive sense. The commission, in his view, was not called upon to determine a boundary—that already existed—but to ad- just it.
'The wishes of the inhabitants', in his view, meant not 'bare majorities' but a large con- sensus and plebiscites Were excluded because the treaty had made no provision for the holding of them. The phrase 'economic con- siderations' was also narrowly regarded, while as for the Free State contention, that the onus of proof for the maintenance of the existing frontier in disputed areas rested with the seceding counties, be rejected it out of hand. In sum, Feetham's reasoning had a unity and cohesion which expressed the mind of the man, and if external influence was exerted it can only have strengthened a bias already there. That in effect is Dr Hand's conclusion and I find it convincing.
On this view the crucial decision lay in the choice of chairman. Even MacNeill—to turn to the third question—who resigned essen- tially because he did not seize early enough upon the implications of Feetham's restric- tive interpretations, might have had no occa- sion to do so with a politically oriented chairman. As it was, the political dynamite that was known to reside in Article XII was defuzed by a lawyer's didactic definitions and the government of the Irish Free State left to set off economic compensation against political frustration. But the essential prob- lem remained and the information gathered by the commission on the nature of it con- tinues to be of lasting interest. This is an historical source book of importance,
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