Selling the Border for Financial Freedom
Description
This episode centers on the crisis created by the leaked award of the Irish Boundary Commission in November 1925, which was abysmal for nationalists as it suggested the Free State would lose parts of Donegal and Monaghan, leading to the resignation of Free State Commissioner Eoin MacNeill and creating the biggest crisis Cosgrave’s government faced since the Civil War.
President Cosgrave rushed to London to attend conferences with British Premier Stanley Baldwin and Northern Premier Sir James Craig, determined to bury the report because the findings were politically unacceptable, despite being in a weak negotiating position.
Free State negotiators, particularly Kevin O'Higgins, leveraged the threat that their government’s collapse would result in a Republican regime to shift the negotiation focus towards shelving the boundary issue (Article 12) in exchange for waiving the Free State’s substantial financial contribution to imperial debt under Article 5.
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