Ireland: the Government of Ireland Act

Abstract

Any real understanding of how partition developed in the twentieth century must take the Government of Ireland Act as its starting-point. Although the Act has rightly been dismissed as having little relevance to the realities of the bitter struggle Sinn Fein was waging against the forces of the British Crown in 1920, its evolution not only fundamentally determined the division of Ireland but also opened up a whole area of debate about the nature of partition which anticipated later arguments over Palestine and India.¹ The issues of conflicting national aspirations and of the intermingling of populations which vexed every discussion of partition in the 1930s and 1940s were very much to the fore as the Government of Ireland Act made its constitutional progress in the years 1919–21. Not least important, perhaps, was the precedent it set for other territories under Britain’s control.