Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

140 THE EASTER RISING AND AFTERMATH
similar concessions as they were willing to make at the
Buckingham Palace Conference before the war. 63
Lloyd George, Minister for Munitions, was tasked by Asquith with
producing a new home rule settlement. The proposed heads of a
settlement, which he persuaded Redmond and Sir Edward Carson
to agree to, involved the 1914 Act being brought into operation as
soon as possible, with it not applying to the excluded Ulster
counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and
Tyrone, including the parliamentary boroughs of Belfast,
Londonderry and Newry. The excluded area was to be
administered by a British Secretary of State. It was also understood
that at the end of the war there should be an Imperial Conference,
consisting of the Dominion heads of government, with a view to
bringing the Dominions into closer co-operation with the Empire’s
government, and permanently settling the Irish Question. 64
During the negotiations with Lloyd George, the Irish Party had
been led to believe that the partition proposals were to be of a
temporary nature, with the final settlement of the Irish Question to
be arrived at after the war. It was on this basis that Devlin and
Jeremiah MacVeagh MP asked their followers in Fermanagh and
Tyrone, at a specially convened conference in Belfast, to surrender
their rights as a political majority in those counties. The terms
which Devlin laid before them were:
1 The arrangement was to be temporary.
2 Twenty-six counties would be given an Irish Parliament in full
working order at once.
3 The six counties temporally excluded would be controlled by
the Imperial Parliament pending a final settlement.
4 During the interval the Irish representation at Westminster
would be retained in full strength.
5 There would be no separate Parliament for the six counties. 65
Few supported the proposals with any conviction. The Cork County
Eagle felt that a native Irish parliament, free from the friction of an
unwilling, enforced Ulster, would allow a probationary period
for Ireland to prepare to take a worthy place in the Empire,
ultimately producing a situation in which Ulster would appear
before the proposed Imperial Conference asking it to ‘wed her in
an indissoluble union with Nationalist Ireland, old enmities
forgotten, evil memories wiped away’. 66 Although Joseph Devlin
still thought partition ‘unthinkable’, and that any Nationalist
devoted to the ideal of Ireland as a nation would reject the
removal of any part of Ulster from the ‘Fatherland’, he recognised