People in the Republic will one day need to offer apologies to northern nationalists for forgetting about them “for a very long time” after partition, former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.
Speaking in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, on Monday night, Varadkar said reconciliation was usually spoken about as if “it’s just about the two main communities of Northern Ireland becoming reconciled with each other”.
The South “went off and built our State and largely forgot about what happened up here for a very long time, certainly for decades. There’s a reconciliation process [needed], where we, to a certain extent, say sorry for the fact that that happened.”
During the Brexit years, he said, he had only truly understood the depth of feeling on the issue when he told “the nationalist people of Northern Ireland that they wouldn’t be left behind again.
“It was only after I said that and people contacted me that I really understood how deeply that’s felt by hundreds of thousands of people north of the Border, that they were pretty much left behind,” he said.
Northern nationalists are indeed hurt that they were abandoned to their fate to live in poverty and discrimination under repressive Stormont rule when they could have been living in poverty under the repressive regime of the catholic church and conservative insular protectionist nationalism in Ireland.
But seriously, partition was a tragedy for everyone in Ireland. I have been spending a lot of time in Donegal these past few months and it’s plain to see how it was affected economically and socially by being cut off from its natural hinterland of Derry and the rest of Northern Ireland.
I attended the Darcy McGee Summer School in Carlingford a few weeks ago and Wallace Thompson made the point that partition was also damaging to the Republic as they lost the most economically active and entrepreneurial part of Ireland.
When Ireland was partitioned in the early 1920s, the economic profiles of its two main cities presented a striking contrast. Belfast was a thriving industrial metropolis deeply integrated into the imperial British economy, whereas Dublin served primarily as an administrative, commercial, and distribution hub. Around eighty percent of all manufacturing production on the island was concentrated in the six northern counties centred on Belfast. This industrial dominance was reflected in the urban workforce, with over thirty five percent of Belfast workers employed in manufacturing compared to less than fifteen percent in Dublin.
Belfast earned a reputation as a global manufacturing giant, propelled by its world famous shipbuilding and textile industries. The massive Harland and Wolff shipyard alone employed over twenty thousand men, while the linen industry provided jobs for tens of thousands more across the city and surrounding areas. Belfast was also home to the world largest ropeworks and major engineering firms producing industrial machinery for export across the British Empire. Because its economic model relied on importing raw materials like coal and iron and exporting finished heavy goods, northern business leaders viewed free trade with Great Britain as essential to their survival.
By contrast, Dublin lacked heavy manufacturing and capital goods industries. Its industrial base rested on consumer goods and food processing, dominated by a few large firms such as the Guinness brewery at St James Gate, major whiskey distilleries, and Jacob Biscuits. The southern capital operated mainly as a port for the surrounding agricultural hinterland, handling cattle and dairy exports. Its economy depended heavily on transport, retail, and casual labour. The rapid rise of heavy industry had even allowed Belfast to temporarily surpass Dublin in population by the early twentieth century, highlighting the profound economic division that shaped the island at the moment of partition.
I fully understand the position of unionists but if you step back and look at it rationally, the Easter Rising, the Irish Civil War, and the subsequent partition were the worst thing that happened to us all (Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter). Reunification is the most sensible thing for us all but I fully appreciate not everyone is as pragmatic as me.
The tragedy of what could have been if we had had a peaceful transition to home rule?
It is an interesting thought experiment: how Ireland would look if we had independence and the country stayed as one. How would it have shaken out with the North having most of the economic activity or would it have balanced out over time? Or maybe Unionist economic fears would have come true and Dublin would have taxed Northern businesses into oblivion and prioritised investment into areas of the south instead. We shall never know.
There are echoes in all this today. Shall we work together for the mutual benefit of everyone in society? Feck that, lets be under dicks to each other and beggar us all instead. When it comes to politics the heart always rules over the head.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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