This review first appeared in The Andersonstown News
If the title THE ROAD TO PARTITION (BBC ONE) sounds familiar, that’s because it has echoes of The Road to Perdition, a book and a movie about a mob enforcer and his son. And as I expect you know the word ‘perdition’ means ‘complete and utter ruin’. You say partition, I say perdition, let’s call the whole thing off. Alas, they didn’t.
The first episode of THE ROAD TO PARTITION included a lot of black-and-white footage from the early twentieth century, along with a lot of ominous music. And with a lot, a very big lot, of historians.
Most of the historians were shot (if that’s the appropriate word) in very big halls.
Diarmuid Ferriter of UCD sat in one such and explained how 1921 Belfast developed out of the Plantation, the settlers bringing “a different identity” to Ulster. Margaret O’Callaghan of QUB explained how the Easter Rising made Home Rule “a dream of yesterday.” Roy Foster, a former Oxford prof explained that the Rising changed everything except the British governing mind – “It takes a long time to catch up.”
Eamonn Phoenix of Stranmillis University College spoke of Sinn Féin “emerging from the ashes of the GPO” to sweep the polls in 1918. In that election, Sinn Féin got 73 seats – almost 70% of available seats. This, we were told, was counterbalanced by the Irish Unionist party, which got 22 seats. Well yes, counterbalanced in that, at an all-Ireland poll, Sinn Féin got nearly four times as many seats as unionists. Not that the programme makers dwelt on that. In THE ROAD TO PARTITION, the 22 unionist seats were a resounding success. Slippery customer, history. So many ways of presenting it.
For example, most of us have heard of Cumann na MBan and Countess Markievicz; maybe not so many of the Ulster Unionist Women’s council and Lady Londonderry. The programme, ever alert for balance, corrected that.
In the south the Sinn Féin Tomás MacCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork, was killed by RIC men before his wife and children on 22 March 1920. A prominent participant, DI Ross Oswald Swanzy, was smuggled out of Cork and up to Lisburn. On Sunday 22 August, Swanzy was shot dead by a Cork IRA unit as he emerged from church; they used Lord Mayor Mac Curtain’s gun. The assassination prompted the expulsion of the entire Catholic population of Lisburn and the burning of their houses. Including the parochial house, with the fire-starters prancing around outside wearing priest’s vestments.
Was there a political way out?
In the election of May 1921 to the northern parliament, unionists won 40 out of 52 seats. Nationalists and Sinn Féin refused to take their seats and the unionists had free rein. And so the northern state was established. ‘What we have we hold’, was the message from James Craig’s government.”
Partition and perdition had arrived.
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