Visions of Ireland, North and South: An Historical Perspective

W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Partition’ offered a resounding critique of colonialism. Written in 1966, as the British Empire finally collapsed, it immortalised how the Boundary Commission, presided over by an inept London lawyer called Cyril Radcliffe, who knew nothing of India, settled, using out-of-date maps and inaccurate census returns, ‘the fate of millions’. How, after a few hot weeks in 1947, Radcliffe’s incompetence left ‘a continent for better or worse divided’. How Radcliffe then scuttled back to England ‘afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.