James A. Cousins - Without a Dogs Chance

WITHOUT
A DOGS CHANCE

James Cousins holds a PhD in history from Simon Fraser University, Canada, and masters degrees in political science and Indigenous public policy. James is originally from the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, and he currently works as a Senior Policy Advisor for the Ontario Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, specialising in matters related to Indigenous governance and self-determination.

WITHOUT
A DOGS CHANCE

THE NATIONALISTS OF NORTHERN IRELAND AND
THE IRISH BOUNDARY COMMISSION,
19201925

JAMES A. COUSINS

First published in 2020 by

Irish Academic Press

10 Georges Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.iap.ie

James A. Cousins, 2020

9781788551021 (Paper)

9781788551038 (Kindle)

9781788551045 (Epub)

9781788551052 (PDF)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Typeset in ITC New Baskerville 11/14.5 pt

Cover front: Searching civilians in Belfast, 13 March 1922.
Photograph courtesy of Belfast Telegraph .

Cover back: Incendries set fire on Talbot Street, picture shows back of Messrs J.P. Corry, 22 May 1922. Photograph courtesy of Belfast Telegraph .

For my wife, Dr K. Nicole Power,
and my parents, Roy and Helen Cousins

Contents

Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to the many people who have helped with the research and writing of this book. First and foremost, I would like to thank John Stubbs, Willeen Keough and Leith Davis who read multiple drafts of my research and offered advice and encouragement throughout the long process of writing the chapters that follow. My work also benefitted from thoughtful comments and criticisms provided by Alec Dawson, John Craig and the late Peter Hart. Thank you all, for the time you have invested in me and the kindness you have shown.

I wish to acknowledge Irish Academic Press and express my gratitude to Publisher and Managing Director Conor Graham, Managing Editor Fiona Dunne and Marketing Manager Maeve Convery for the faith they have shown in this project and the incredible support they have given me. I am grateful to Latte Goldstein of River Design for designing the books cover art and while any errors that remain are exclusively my responsibility, I would like to thank copy editor Heidi Houlihan and the reviewers, proofreaders, indexers, typesetters and others who have left their mark on the pages that follow through the publishing process and made this work better as a result.

Compiling the source material for this research required me to visit a number of record repositories in Ireland where I was given the privilege to view and quote from various manuscript collections. I would like to thank the Deputy Keeper of the Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and the donors of the Cahir Healy Papers and the J.H. Collins Papers for granting me permission to quote from these valuable sources. I am grateful to the Board of Trinity College Dublin for allowing me to cite materials from the E.M. Stephens Papers. The University College Dublin Archives has kindly permitted me to quote from the Eoin MacNeill Papers and the Ernest Blythe Papers. I was able to view the Papers of the Irish Boundary Commission at the National Library of Ireland. These documents contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and I am thankful to the National Archives of the United Kingdom for helping me to navigate the UK Government Licensing Framework.

This book contains a number of maps and photographs and I would like to thank the people and institutions that have allowed me to reproduce these materials in my book. The cover photograph was made available courtesy of the Belfast Telegraph and I am grateful to the National Library of Ireland and the National Portrait Gallery for permitting me to reproduce photographs appearing in the plates. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Kevin OSullivan for drawing the maps, and I would like to acknowledge that these maps were based on work previously produced by Sarah Gearty and Kieran Rankin and are used here with their kind permission.

I deeply appreciate the assistance that was given to me by the staff members of all of the institutions that I visited and I would like to offer a special word of thanks to the Interlibrary Loans division of the Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University, for tracking so many of the rare printed materials that I requested. I am also grateful to the numerous individuals who were kind enough to answer my emails and were willing to share information. These include: the late A.C. Hepburn, University of Sunderland; Richard Kirkland, Kings College London; Charles K. Matthews, George Mason University; Mark OBrien, Dublin City University; Marianne Elliott, University of Liverpool; Kieran Rankin and Jane Maxwell, Trinity College Dublin; Rebecca Geddes and Heather Stanley, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland; Glenn Dunne, Justin Furlong, James Harte and Berni Metcalfe, National Library of Ireland; Lisa Olriche, National Portrait Gallery; Aideen Ireland and Patricia Fallon, National Archives of Ireland; Judy Nokes, National Archives UK; Mrs Ebrahim, of the British Library; newspaper historian Hugh Oram; Irish News Librarian Kathleen Bell; Darren Farnan of the Derry Journal ; Kris Brown of the Linen Hall Library; Mary Gallagher, Company Secretary of Independent News & Media PLC, and Martin Hill, Associate Editor of the Belfast Telegraph .

I am thankful for the many friends, colleagues, classmates and co-workers across the spectrum of my personal, academic and public service life who have contributed in some way to the completion of this book. They include: Theresa Mulligan and Arilea Sill, who were there from the beginning of this project, and Adam Kamp, Dana Hollick-Kenyon and Rob Lutener who encouraged me to see it through. I also wish to thank Alejandra Espinosa, Kaitie Hoffman, Amanda Horn-Hudecki, Sarah Toole, David Tortell, Beatrice DAngelo, Melanie Gennings, Arie Molema, Devon Martin and Donna LaPointe for the advice and technical assistance they provided, and fellow travellers Alison Norman and Daniel Laxer for establishing a Manuscript Writers Group at the Ontario Ministry of Indigenous Affairs

I am blessed to have had many mentors who have contributed to my professional development, and whose example I have endeavoured to emulate. I wish to offer an especially warm note of gratitude to Professors Barry Moody, Bruce Matthews, Greg Pyrcz and Doug MacArthur, as well as my OPS role models Kate Stewart, Stephanie Prosen, Trish Malone and Alan Kary. I recently heard Kate say that We are all the sum of our relationships. I think this is true and I know that I am a better person, scholar and public servant because of that arithmetic.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the unconditional love of a chocolate lab named Russell R. Stewart (200718), who always had much more than a dogs chance of never being forgotten by the people he touched, as well as my bipedal family. In particular, I would like to thank those for whom this book is dedicated: my parents, Roy and Helen Cousins, who have always supported my academic pursuits, and my wife Dr K. Nicole Power, a chemist who has absorbed much Irish history over our time together and encouraged me in every stage of my work to revise, edit and publish this book. This dedication does not begin to describe the debt that I owe to each of you, but I offer it with love and appreciation.