Birth of the Border. Cormac Moore

Councils’, Tyrone and Fermanagh. It considered withholding grants, selecting specific members to act as the ‘whole County Council’ or appointing ‘a special Commissioner to take over the responsibilities’.25 It chose the latter option and suspended both councils, with the police taking over the headquarters in Omagh and Enniskillen and impounding their records.26 Faced with suspension, the ‘ever pragmatic nationalist politicians’ from Tyrone County Council, ‘temporarily and under protest, accepted the northern government’. When W.T. Cosgrave, the Dáil local government minister, queried the council’s U-turn, it replied that ‘in view of the altered political situation, and with a desire to promote a peaceful settlement’, all communication would ‘for the present’, be sent ‘to the Northern Minister of Local Government’.27 Fermanagh County Council, on the other hand, remained defiant and suspended for a year.28 The suspensions coincided with the signing of the treaty on 6 December. A day later, a northern nationalist delegation met Eoin MacNeill, the Dáil speaker and Sinn Féin MP for Derry, in Dublin’s Mansion House to discuss the implications of the treaty for the nationalists in the north.29 MacNeill assured ‘his fellow Ulstermen that although the danger they faced “is a real danger, it is an artificial one. It has not got the strength of permanency”. He expanded on this by asking them to pursue a fully-fledged policy of non-engagement with the northern parliament to include non-payment of taxes and non-recognition of the courts.’30

      This stance saw a public split for the first time between the Nationalist Party and Sinn Féin ‘during their time in control of Londonderry Corporation’. The Sinn Féin councillors put forward a motion in January 1922 to pledge allegiance to the Dáil. Opposing the motion, the mayor, Hugh O’Doherty, ‘held the view that declared allegiance to the Dáil was counterproductive while the constitutional situation remained in a state of flux. To do so now would alienate unionist opinion, split the nationalist bloc in Derry and bring the full force of the Northern Ireland government down on the corporation.’31 He used his right as chairman to bypass the motion by not aligning with the Dáil whilst still repudiating the Belfast parliament. This pleased neither Sinn Féin nor the northern government. In total, twenty-one nationalist-controlled authorities, including those of Newry, Armagh, Strabane, Cookstown, Downpatrick, Magherafelt and Keady were suspended by April 1922.32