Irish MPs celebrate failure of Lloyd George’s partition plans

Westminster, 16 August 1916 - Members of the Irish Parliamentary Party have expressed delight that proposals to partition Ireland have been abandoned.

The proposals emanated from negotiations conducted by the British government minister David Lloyd George who was attempting to find a constitutional settlement in Ireland in the wake of the Easter Rising.

Arthur Lynch MP has described the failure to impose partition as 'a good thing for Ireland. (Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA)

The failure to agree to a scheme for partition was declared ‘a good thing for Ireland’ by Arthur Lynch MP, who said that there was no guarantee that excluded counties would ever come under a Home Rule parliament:

‘By consenting to partition Ireland would have lost her grip, and in place of compelling action there could only be a vague trust in the future.’

Irish people should rejoice, he continued, that ‘the plans of the cunning little Welshman had been shattered’.

Collection of confidential Dublin Castle documents relating to a proposed visit of Laurence Ginnell MP to Cork to attend an anti-Partition event. Click to enlarge. (Images: National Archives of Ireland, CSO RP 1916)

Mr Lynch predicted that the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, would soon lose his job:

‘Asquith has been a disastrous man for his own party, but he will not last long now, and Ireland will have no cause to regret his departure. He had neither the grit nor pluck nor the quality of being able to keep his word.’

Across the Irish newspapers, the claims that David Lloyd George had given secret assurances on partition to Sir Edward Carson were greeted with outrage by nationalists.

[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]