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The Boundary Commission was the year’s central political drama. Article 12 of the 1921 Treaty had promised that a three-person commission would determine the boundary between Northern Ireland and the Free State, taking account of inhabitants’ wishes where compatible with economic and geographic conditions. Many nationalists expected substantial areas with Catholic and nationalist majorities, particularly in Fermanagh, Tyrone and south Armagh, to move into the Free State. Such expectations were politically important: they helped make partition appear temporary, or at least corrigible.
The year’s most dangerous domestic confrontation came not from the defeated anti-Treaty IRA but from within the National Army that had fought for the Free State. The wartime force was expensive, oversized for peacetime and internally divided. Demobilisation threatened the positions and expectations of officers who had entered the army from different revolutionary organisations and personal networks. For a government attempting fiscal restraint, a smaller, disciplined military answerable to civilian ministers was essential. For officers who believed the army’s revolutionary standing gave it a special political role, retrenchment seemed both a practical injustice and a betrayal.
The parliamentary setting was the Home Rule crisis. The Government of Ireland Bill, introduced in 1912 by the Liberal government at Westminster, proposed an Irish legislature while reserving ultimate authority to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party remained committed to securing this constitutional settlement. Its prospects had improved because the Parliament Act of 1911 had curtailed the House of Lords’ absolute veto. Nevertheless, the bill had to survive repeated passage through the Commons before it could become law.
On 13 February Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister, sought leave in the House of Commons to introduce a Government of Ireland Bill. It was the second Home Rule bill of his career, following the defeated measure of 1886. This was not a declaration of Irish independence. Its central purpose was to establish an Irish legislature for Irish domestic business while preserving the legal supremacy of the Westminster parliament and the Crown.
