The Government of Ireland Act and Time to end Partition

Léargas: A Podcast by Gerry Adams

The Government of Ireland Act was signed into British Law by a British King on 23 December 1920. In 1998 Sinn Féin succeeded in having this act scrapped - I will write about that process and its implications in the New Year.
Partition was born out of violence and the threat of greater violence by unionism supported by the British government. In July 1920 nearly five thousand Catholics who were working in the two Belfast shipyards were expelled from their jobs. Over the following days more Catholic workers were expelled from the engineering works and many of the textile mills across the city.
Around 93,000 Catholics lived in Belfast at that time, many existing in poverty and in overcrowded unsanitary conditions. The financial and human impact on families and communities of so many Catholic workers losing their jobs was devastating.
In October 1920 unionist paramilitary organisations were recruited almost to a man into the Ulster Special Constabulary of A, B and C Specials – which eventually formed the bulk of the Royal Ulster Constabulary RUC). Michael Farrell, in his definitive ‘Arming the Protestants of Ulster’ concludes: “The USC was effectively a Protestant force from the very beginning and the British government made no effort to avert this …”
Those who built the Southern State turned their backs on the North. They turned their backs also on the ideals of independence and a genuine republic. As James Connolly predicted, a carnival of reaction followed partition.
In the decades after the signing into law of the Government of Ireland Act and the establishment of two states the Unionist establishment in the North solidified its control through the imposition of an apartheid regime in which nationalists and republicans were reduced to the status of non citizen. This was done through the systematic gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, the denial of the vote to hundreds of thousands of Catholics in local government elections, and the extensive use of structured sectarian discrimination in housing and employment.
In every decade in the North there was conflict; internment and repression.
In July 1966, as the English Queen visited Belfast, the Sunday Times wrote a rare article about the north. Under the headline ‘John Bull’s political slum’ the article described the northern state as ‘a part of Britain where the crude apparatus of political and religious oppression, ballot rigging, job and housing discrimination and an omnipresent threat of violence co-exists with intense loyalty to the Crown.’
In the 1960s groups like the Campaign for Social Justice, the Wolfe Tone Societies, the Derry Housing Action Committee and then the Civil Rights Association campaigned against the injustice of the unionist regime at Stormont.
The Unionist government responded with violence against the civil rights campaign. The first people killed in 1966 and in 1969 at what some define as the start of the so-called troubles were killed by the RUC, the B Specials and Loyalists.
Today the adverse political, economic and societal consequences of partition and of those policies are still with us. They exist in the poor state of the northern economy; the disproportionate number of Catholics on the housing waiting lists; unionist resistance to the construction of new housing in nationalist areas; the denial of Irish language rights; the continued opposition by political unionism of basic human rights for all citizens; a biased approach to the issue of victims; and resistance to the full implementation of all aspects of the Good Friday Agreement.
This is partition. A disastrous British government policy. It is time for a new Ireland, a new future - a United Ireland.