Leo Varadkar said in Dungannon that people living south of the Border may one day have to apologise for abandoning Northern nationalists after partition. The former taoiseach made the remarks earlier this month, reopening a question that has shadowed relations across the Border for generations.
He said the south had “went off and built our State and largely forgot about what happened up here for a very long time”. Varadkar’s line points to a political memory gap, not a formal apology process, and the article places it against the longer history of partition, the Boundary Commission and the hardening of the Border.
Western and Irish partition
The argument is complicated by the article’s own account of how partition came about. It says southern Irish nationalists did not create partition, which was created by Westminster, and that no Irish nationalist wanted it. On that reading, Varadkar is not assigning original blame to the south for drawing the line; he is pointing to the later decision to turn away from the people left on the other side of it.
The piece says no Irish nationalist was consulted about the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, except a tiny number of Irish Parliamentary Party MPs. By the time Anglo-Irish Treaty talks began in late 1921, Northern Ireland was already a fait accompli, and London made clear from the off that its status was not up for negotiation.
Boundary Commission and customs posts
Arthur Griffith won a Boundary Commission to redraw the Border in line with inhabitants’ wishes, but the article says the process proved a disaster for nationalists. The Cumann na nGaedheal government appointed Eoin MacNeill as negotiator, then established customs posts in 1923, which reinforced the hard Border.
In November 1925, the Boundary Commission’s findings leaked and showed only modest adjustments, with parts of the Free State ceded. The British government then agreed to write off Ireland’s share of the UK imperial debt in return for keeping the Border in place, a deal the article says was worth 80 per cent of the new State’s annual GDP at the time.
Stormont Castle in January
William T Cosgrave and James Craig promised a new era, but they never met again after the debt write-down. The two jurisdictions did not meet again for 40 years, until Seán Lemass and Terence O’Neill met in Stormont Castle in January 1965.
The article also places Varadkar’s remarks in the wider pattern of southern politics. It says Éamon de Valera was obsessed with partition and that Articles 2 and 3 of his 1937 Constitution refused to recognise it, showing how the issue remained embedded in Ireland’s constitutional politics long after the Border was set.
What Varadkar means by an eventual apology is left open. The most direct reading is symbolic: a recognition that the south built its own state while Northern nationalists felt abandoned, rather than a promise of any specific legal or political act.
