Ireland: the Dominion Settlement

Abstract

The Irish question in the form in which it had dominated the politics of late Victorian England passed into history with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the early morning of 6 December 1921. It had a threefold importance in its concluding phases. In English politics the Irish settlement was a principal cause of the break up of Lloyd George’s Coalition government and of the subsequent return to traditional party alignments at Westminster. In Irish history it represented the substantial but not the complete failure of English attempts to rule Ireland which had lasted some seven hundred years, the incompleteness deriving from the continuing inclusion of the six plantation counties of the north-east within the United Kingdom. Finally, the Irish question became a landmark in the history of the British Commonwealth of Nations because dominion status was conferred by the treaty for the first time on a country which was not in origin a colony of settlement and had not progressed by stages towards that politico-constitutional relationship with Britain. It is the last alone that has its place in Commonwealth history. But how and why it attained that place, against logic and historical probability, is not to be understood without consideration first of English and then of Irish political attitudes.¹