page_title: Northern Ireland
section_title: Partition of Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: Northern Ireland / History / Partition of Ireland
caption_attribution_description: The scene at Stormont in Belfast, for the opening of the new Northern Ireland Parliament Buildings by the Prince of Wales. It was his first visit to Ireland. According to the next day's Irish Independent, the prince's route from Donegall Quay was crowded with cheering citizenry, and also "2,000 police, thousands of Orange stewards, and units of the Royal Navy." However, no Nationalist or Labour public representatives took part... It's interesting to see the sheer volume of cars - at least 54 are snaking up the road in the back and middle ground of this photo. Date: Wednesday, 16 November 1932 NLI Ref.: IND_H_2620
context_page_description: Northern Ireland is variously described as a country, province or region which is part of the United Kingdom. Located in the northeast of the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland. In 2011, its population was 1,810,863, constituting about 30% of the island's total population and about 3% of the UK's population. Established by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters, while other areas are reserved for the British government. Northern Ireland co-operates with the Republic of Ireland in several areas, and the Agreement granted the Republic the ability to "put forward views and proposals" with "determined efforts to resolve disagreements between the two governments".
  On 11 January 2020, legislators in Northern Ireland formed a government for the first time since the Executive of the 5th Northern Ireland Assembly collapsed in January 2017, following the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal.
context_section_description: During the 19th century, legal reforms started in the late 18th century continued to remove statutory discrimination against Catholics, and progressive programmes enabled tenant farmers to buy land from landlords. By the close of the century, a large and disciplined cohort of Irish Nationalist MPs at Westminster committed the Liberal Party to autonomy—"Home Rule"—for Ireland, a prospect bitterly opposed by Irish Unionists. In 1912, after decades of obstruction from the House of Lords, and with a Liberal government dependent on Nationalist support, Home Rule became a near-certainty. A clash between the House of Commons and House of Lords over a controversial budget produced the Parliament Act 1911, which enabled the veto of the Lords to be overturned. The House of Lords veto had been the unionists' main guarantee that Home Rule would not be enacted because the majority of members of the House of Lords were unionists. In response, opponents to Home Rule, from Conservative and Unionist Party leaders such as Bonar Law and Dublin-based barrister Sir Edward Carson to militant working class unionists in Ireland, threatened the use of violence. In 1914, they smuggled thousands of rifles and rounds of ammunition from Imperial Germany for use by the Ulster Volunteers (UVF), a paramilitary organisation opposed to the implementation of Home Rule.
  Unionists were in a minority in Ireland as a whole, but in the northern province of Ulster they were a very large majority in County Antrim and County Down, small majorities in County Armagh and County Londonderry and a substantial minority in Ulster's five other counties. The four counties named, along with County Fermanagh and County Tyrone, would later constitute Northern Ireland. Most of the remaining 26 counties which later became the Republic of Ireland were overwhelmingly majority-nationalist.
  During the Home Rule Crisis, the possibility was discussed of a "temporary" partition of these six counties from the rest of Ireland. In 1914, the Third Home Rule Bill received Royal Assent as the Government of Ireland Act 1914. However, its implementation was suspended before it came into effect because of the outbreak of the First World War, and the Amending Bill to partition Ireland was abandoned. The war was expected to last only a few weeks but in fact, lasted four years. By the end of the war (during which the 1916 Easter Rising had taken place), the Act was seen as unimplementable. Public opinion among nationalists had shifted during the war from a demand for home rule to one for full independence. In 1919, David Lloyd George proposed a new bill be established by the cabinet's Walter Long Committee on Ireland, which by adopting findings of his (Lloyd George's) inconclusive 1917-18 Irish Convention would divide Ireland into two Home Rule areas: twenty-six counties being ruled from Dublin and six being ruled from Belfast. Straddling these two areas would be a shared Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who would appoint both governments and a Council of Ireland, which Lloyd George believed would evolve into an all-Ireland parliament.
  Events overtook the government. The pro-independence Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 parliamentary seats in Ireland at the general election of 1918, and unilaterally established the First Dáil, an extrajudicial parliament in Ireland. Ireland was partitioned between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland in 1921, under the terms of Lloyd George's Government of Ireland Act 1920, during the Anglo-Irish War between Irish republican and British forces. A truce was established on 11 July; the war ended on 6 December 1921 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Free State. Under the terms of the treaty, Northern Ireland would become part of the Free State unless the government opted out by presenting an address to the king, although in practice partition remained in place.
  
  As expected, the Houses of the Parliament of Northern Ireland resolved on 7 December 1922 (the day after the establishment of the Irish Free State) to exercise its right to opt out of
caption: Opening of Stormont in 1932
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