University of Rochester
University of Rochester historian Stewart Weaver explains the causes and consequences of the partition of Ireland in 1921.
The year 2021 marks 100 years since the Government of the United Kingdom and Ireland divided the Emerald Isle into two self-governing political entities-Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland-under the Government of Ireland Act. What was intended as a temporary solution in the face of unrest, violence, and rebellion is still in effect a century later, as Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
According to Stewart Weaver, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, over time both sides developed two very different and incompatible conceptions of what it means to be Irish: One Catholic, republican, and nationalist, and the other Protestant, loyalist, and unionist. “Of course, they’re all Irish, but they just have fundamentally different conceptions of what that means,” says Weaver. “Conflicted meanings, ultimately, lie at the deepest roots of Ireland’s partition.”