Irish Unity: Some Societal Consequences

While the political car crash associated with the Irish Boundary Commission in 1925 passed quickly into oblivion, its consequences lived on. The agreement between the Free State, Northern Irish, and British governments on 3 December 1925 to bury the commission’s report put the commission out of its misery but also ‘formally entrenched the partition of Ireland’.1 By the time the Good Friday Agreement sought to normalise relations between states and communities in 1998, the impact of partition was profound, posing a major challenge for those seeking to reverse its more divisive features.