“I See All Your Difficulties”

The Whole Map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The mode and thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. ¹

This oft-cited quotation was delivered in a speech given by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on 16 February 1922, a speech in which he defended the Anglo-Irish Treaty that had been signed two months previously and of which he was one of the British signatories. While Churchill and the other British signatories may have wished for the “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” to subside with the signing of the treaty, the inclusion of a potential boundary commission in the treaty to determine the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland ensured that counties Fermanagh and Tyrone would remain in full view of Churchill and British governments for at least four more years.

Much changed on the island of Ireland from the time of the signing of the treaty in December 1921 to the signing of the tripartite agreement between the British, Irish Free State, and Northern Ireland governments in December 1925 that shelved the boundary commission report and retained the border as it was in 1921, as it is to the present day. There was much change in Churchill’s political career in that period too. He went from being a key Liberal member of David Lloyd George’s government, which negotiated the Treaty in 1921, to being, within a year, “without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix,”and then to returning from exile to re-join the Conservative Party and becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924, placing him in a key