Easter Rising Stories

ON THIS DAY

13 October

1920. Partition takes shape

Edward Carson, in a portrait published in 1919. He is not recorded at the Belfast meeting. He led the Unionist refusal of an all-Ireland parliament.

On 13 October 1920 Sir Hamar Greenwood, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Sir John Anderson, the under-secretary, went to Belfast to meet a deputation from the standing committee of the Ulster Unionist Council. There was no ambush and no proclamation. The Government of Ireland Bill was already before Parliament. It proposed two Home Rule parliaments, one for six north-eastern counties and one for the rest of Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Council had already chosen six counties rather than nine. The Act passed in December. The southern parliament never worked, because Sinn Féin would not recognise it. The northern parliament opened in June 1921. The Treaty, later that year, had to deal with a border that was already law.

The same government was trying to do two things at once. It was fighting the IRA, and it was drawing a new map. Unionists pressed for a northern jurisdiction they believed could last. Nationalists saw a permanent minority left on the wrong side of it. The meeting did not settle that. It shows the settlement being built while the war went on.

1797. William Orr’s last full day

On 13 October 1797 William Orr was still alive in Carrickfergus gaol. He was a Presbyterian farmer from County Antrim, and a United Irishman, convicted of giving the oath to a soldier of the Fifeshire Fencibles. The trial was bitterly disputed. Jurors afterwards asked for mercy. Orr would not sign a confession. The government had postponed the hanging twice, and it would not postpone it again. The next morning he was taken to the gallows at the place called the Three Sisters, outside Carrickfergus. That execution belongs to 14 October. What belongs to this day is the waiting.