“A Deadly Moment in Our Life”

It is no secret that Winston Churchill resented deeply that the twenty-six counties of Southern Ireland remained neutral during the Second World War, or that Churchill despised the Irish leader Eamon de Valera and his government’s obdurate refusal to ally with the British Empire and openly declare war against the Axis powers in 1939. With equal levels of emotion, Churchill appreciated the six counties of Northern Ireland’s “Unionist” loyalty to the British Crown throughout the war. In the early years of the conflict, Northern Ireland Prime Minister Lord Craigavon (formerly Sir James Craig) offered a critical territorial stronghold and material support and was willing to do much more to prove his country’s allegiance and worth to the British Empire.

Troubled Roots

In a failed attempt to subdue the long-running Irish national independence movement and avert a civil war, the British Parliament in 1920 passed the Government of Ireland Act that created two distinct Irish political entities: the six counties of Protestant-majority Northern Ireland with a devolved parliament but still a member of the United Kingdom, and the twenty-six counties of Catholic-majority Southern Ireland, with British Dominion status. The radical nationalist political party Sinn Fein and its military wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), rejected partition and continued violent campaigns for an independent Irish Republic encompassing the whole of the island. When the IRA attacked Northern Ireland’s government authorities, eliciting bloody reprisals from Crown forces and Union loyalists in October 1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George assigned Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill to oversee negotiations to reconcile