the opening session of the Dáil. Unsurprisingly, no one apart from the Sinn Féin MPs accepted.63 Sinn Féin’s policy on partition was almost non-existent from the outset, and it essentially chose to ignore it. Soon after the formation of Dáil Éireann, Louis J. Walsh, a Ballycastle solicitor and one of the leading northern Sinn Féiners, proposed in April 1919 that ‘attention should be given to Ulster, for he thought the organisation had not sufficiently grappled with that question’.64 According to Charles Townshend:
There were some signs in 1919 that the seriousness of this problem was recognised. A pushy Ulster Protestant, adoptive Canadian and Sinn Féin convert, William Forbes Patterson, was asked by Sinn Féin in June to investigate the northern situation. His verdict on republicanism there was bleak: it was effectively stillborn. But he believed that unionism was vulnerable to the (slowly) growing labour movement, and Sinn Féin could do worse than support labour. There were signs of cross-communal industrial action – notably the general strike in Belfast early in 1919 – although, as he saw, the British Labour party was unlikely to escape from its ‘English outlook’ … The prospects for military confrontation were grim, Forbes Patterson thought. If faced with a ‘pogrom’, republicans could not cope.65
Sinn Féin, of course, was not in the House of Commons to debate the Government of Ireland Bill. As the bill was making its way through parliament, the British government was waging a war with Sinn Féin and its military wing, the Irish Volunteers (later renamed the IRA). Sinn Féin leaders stuck steadfastly and naively to the view that Ulster would readily join an all-Ireland parliament once Britain was removed from the island. As well as having its own parliament, Sinn Féin also set up a counter-state with its own legal system, police force and local government. That the Government of Ireland Act came into law as Britain was at open war with Sinn Féin, who was supported by a considerable majority on the island, shows the total air of unreality that surrounded the act.66
Sinn Féin built on its 1918 general election mandate by taking control of the majority of local authorities in Ireland after the local elections of January and June 1920. The local elections of 1920 were a major disappointment for Ulster unionists, and this may explain part of their reasoning for insisting on Northern Ireland consisting of six instead of nine counties. It was the first time that the proportional representation (PR) system of voting was used in Ireland.67 PR involves a single transferable vote to be cast in multi-seat constituencies. The introduction of PR ‘was intended to protect the unionist minority in the south, but it had the added effect of putting unionist domination of Derry and other parts of the north under threat’.68 It was also hoped that PR would end systematic discrimination in local government. Jeremiah MacVeagh, nationalist MP for South Down, claimed that in Dungannon there ‘were only two Catholic employees under the Unionist council. Out of a total salary and wages list of £575, only £36 goes to Catholics, and that goes to two street scavengers.’69 In the six-county area, nationalists won control of ‘Derry City, Fermanagh and Tyrone County Councils, ten urban councils, including Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen, Newry and Strabane, and thirteen rural councils’.70 Unexpected nationalist and Labour Party victories in places such as Lurgan, Dungannon, Carrickfergus, Larne, Limavady, Cookstown and Lisburn were seen by nationalists as ‘a rebuff to plans for partition’.71 In Belfast Corporation, the local government for Belfast, unionists went from having fifty-two to thirty-seven members; Labour won thirteen seats; Sinn Féin and the Nationalist Party won five seats each.72 Many unionists had a great ‘fear of socialism’ and were ‘concerned at the success of Labour candidates in 1920’ who, on top of winning thirteen seats in Belfast, ‘won control of Lurgan’ and received representation for the first time in Lisburn and Bangor.73 According to Michael Farrell, it was the ‘first serious challenge to Unionist hegemony in the area’.74
The result in Derry City was particularly galling for unionists. Of the forty seats, unionists won nineteen, Sinn Féin and the Nationalist Party won ten seats each, and Hugh C. O’Doherty, an independent nationalist, won the final seat. Margaret Morris was elected for Sinn Féin as the first female member of the Derry Corporation. O’Doherty became ‘the first nationalist mayor of the city, and the first Catholic to hold the position since Cormac O’Neill was appointed by James II in 1688’.75 O’Doherty, a Derry solicitor, ‘who, along with removing the name of Lord French from the list of Derry Freemen, also refused to attend any functions where an oath of allegiance was made to the Crown’.76
Tensions in the city soon boiled over. In April and May, street riots began, with skirmishes taking place between the IRA and the revived Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).77 The violence escalated in June, leading to the deaths of twenty people and many more wounded. Two children were amongst the dead – George Caldwell, a ten-year-old orphan, and Joseph McGlinchey, aged fifteen. Adrian Grant claims that ‘there is evidence of deliberate sectarian targeting by both unionists and nationalists, despite efforts of the IRA leaders to contain such action by the latter’.78 The violence in the city only abated once 1,500 British troops were deployed to Derry on 23 June.79 Within days, the violence moved further east.
Edward Carson used his 12 July 1920 speech to 25,000 Orangemen at a field in Finaghy to deliver an incendiary message: ‘We must proclaim today clearly that come what will and be the consequences what they may, we in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin – no Sinn Féin organisation, no Sinn Féin methods … And these are not mere words. I hate words without action.’80 According to Alan F. Parkinson:
the sheer force of external influences in the summer of 1920 – the spread of death and destruction throughout the south and west of Ireland, including many attacks on Protestants, the ongoing passage of the Better Government of Ireland Bill and the increasing proximity of violence to Belfast, as witnessed by events in Derry – combined to create a most threatening situation in Belfast.81
By 1920, the war in the south and west of Ireland had reached Ulster. Before then, ‘difficulties experienced by even the most militant IRA units in acquiring weapons and the resolute opposition presented by large sections of both the unionist and nationalist communities meant that the first phase of the War of Independence had virtually no impact in the north-east’.82 As well as the violence in Derry, there were many IRA attacks on RIC barracks in Monaghan, Cavan, Armagh, Tyrone and Down.83 Ambushes on railways in Ulster were becoming almost daily occurrences. At Easter 1920, the IRA Belfast Brigade ‘took part in a countrywide campaign of arson attacks on tax offices ordered by GHQ [General Headquarters] to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Rising’.84 The increased activity in Ulster led to Carson’s claims of a Sinn Féin ‘invasion of Ulster’.85 Days after his 12 July speech, the RIC divisional commissioner of Munster, Gerard Smyth, a native of Banbridge in County Down, was killed by the IRA in Cork.86 Loyalists were ‘further outraged when the southern rail crew assigned to transport the police chief’s body back to his home town of Banbridge refused to do so’.87 His death and funeral were the catalysts for the violence that spread to Belfast in late July 1920. After his burial in Banbridge, local Catholics and their property were viciously attacked there, as well as in nearby Dromore and Lisburn, with many Catholics driven from their jobs and their homes burned.88
The violence then spread to Belfast. Returning from the 12 July holiday on 21 July, shipyard workers were greeted with notices calling for a meeting of ‘all Unionist and Protestant workers’ during their lunch hour outside Workman Clark’s yard.89 The meeting called for the expulsion of all ‘non-loyal’ workers from the shipyards. Straight after this, a mob ‘armed with hammers, iron bars, wooden staves and, reportedly, revolvers’ went on the rampage, looking for potential victims. Some workers, fearing the worst, left before lunchtime. Others escaped, suffering only verbal abuse. Some of the unluckier ones were stripped to their undergarments in the search for Catholic emblems, such as rosary beads. Many were severely beaten. Others, whilst swimming to safety across the Musgrave Channel, ‘were pelted by a fusillade of “shipyard confetti”, consisting of iron nuts, bolts, ship rivets and pieces of sharp steel’.90 Catholics were soon expelled from their jobs by numerous employers, such as the Barbours, Musgraves, Mackies, Gallahers, the Sirrocco Works, McLaughlins and Harveys.91 Most ‘Protestant employers looked on with tacit approval’.92 According to the Catholic Protection
