‘The Government of Ireland Act: making the world safe for hypocrisy’ by Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh (30 June 2021)

The Government of Ireland Act: 

making the world safe for hypocrisy

by Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh (30 June 2021)

During the GOIA’s second reading at the end of March 1920 the Ulster Unionist leader, Edward Carson, gave full-throated expression to partition’s imperial rationale and the general disdain for subject peoples struggling for independence. Recently returned from Belfast, where the Ulster Unionist Council [UUC], formed to resist Home Rule, had accepted their own version in a six-county Pale provided they held the whip hand, Carson poured scorn on ‘sham phrases’ like ‘self-determination in Ireland, for nobody proposes to give self-determination.’ He proceeded to mock other ‘ridiculous phraseology’ such as Woodrow Wilson’s ‘make the world safe for democracy!’, which he dismissed as making ‘the world safe for hypocrisy’. Within this imperialist mind set, self-determination provided a ‘lever to your enemies by which they may, under the guise of constitutional law, attain results which you know in your hearts will be absolutely fatal to your whole Empire.’ Indeed, Carson rejected the one, never mind two, nation theory, declaring that ‘Ireland never was a nation’![iii] During the same debate, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, freely admitted he had ‘absolutely no doubt’ that ‘an emphatic majority’ in Ireland would demand ‘independence and an Irish Republic’ if granted self-determination. Nevertheless, the Empire would never consent, as it threatened its self-interest.[iv] As de Valera would later memorably say of Churchill’s attitude to Irish neutrality: ‘Britain’s necessity would become a moral code and that when this necessity became sufficiently great, other people’s rights were not to count.’[v]

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