Does anyone think a population exchange (with modified borders) would have worked?
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Harmful in the short term to those being exchanged, but beneficial in the long term for peace and stability. Has to be complete though.
Consider the exchange of populations in Balkans/Asia Minor back in those days.
Yes though it would have been painful for all involved. However it is impossible now, Northern Ireland has too many Catholics for such a policy to work, you can't "deport" that many people and there are very few "Southern" Protestant Irish who would want to go in the opposite direction.
What would that mean for the Irish in Great Britain? In Liverpool and so on.
Can't imagine they would have been invovled. Doubt the UK would have wanted to send them all home either, they made up a large % of the labour force.
The thing is, the exchange wouldn't have been all that gigantic if the Republic had been given the Irish-majority counties (Tyrone, Fermanagh and possibly Derry). The rump NI would have been tiny but it would have been viable.
It's more likely that some counties would have been split East-West and North-South.
That would have made more sense, but we can see by the actual division, both sides were fairly keen on sticking to country borders. For two reasons
Ireland wanted to keep a reasonably big Irish minority there so one day we could have it back
The British wanted to keep cheap labour around so the statelet would be economically viable
so I'm not sure anyone would have been in favour of that. All hypothetical of course
The point of a population exchange is that there would be no "reasonably big Irish minority". I also don't think that we might have agreed to hand over all of Tyrone but not South Tyrone on its own.
My understanding is that the division along county borders was originally a purely provisional one, and it was expected that a bipartisan border commission would then make adjustments. However, neither side could agree, and in the end it was decided to quietly drop the idea and make the provisional border a permanent one.
Pretty much this. The Border Commission's initial plans were to give some changes, but ones that weren't nearly as favourable to the Free State as would have been hoped, this got leaked by a newspaper, the whole thing became a fiasco, and then the respective governments decided to just stick with the initial borders.
Or a British one. In Tyrone, it would have been easier for all concerned (except the British there) to give it to the Republic and throw the British out. In Belfast, for example, it would have been easier to give it to the UK and throw the Irish out*
*I'm not advocating this, just thinking of the logistics of it
Not sure why, fairly solid Iruish majority IRRC, no economic or strategic reaosns ot keep it. In this context, I think we would have gotten all of it
There were some tiny adjustments. I'm not sure major ones were ever realistically envisioned.
Yes, but there is nothing particular sacred about the Irish county boundaries, particularly since the British government scrapped them and replaced them with districts. Tyrone generally might have had a Catholic majority but for instance South Tyrone (the parliamentary constituency) had a big unionist majority. Easier to have moved Catholic / nationalists out of areas like South Tyrone and Unionists out of Mid Tyrone etc.
Solutions with deportation actually work surprisingly well - assumed some basic measures are taken to prevent return of the removed populations. There are many examples. Poland, Croatia, Circassia - in every case it was a complete success, making completely arbitrary borders work reasonably well with little(Germans from Poland who are still somewhat politically active 70 years later, not that anyone takes them seriously) to no political consequences. However of course such a solution is unthinkable in the case of Ireland. Noone would have the responsability/the authority to carry it on.
It's unthinkable because we now have a very different concept of human rights. Deportations worked well but they were painful for those exiled. We aren't prepared to pay that price any more. Added to which when both the UK and ROI are EU member states, it would be impossible to prevent people from returning.
Nor do I think either side would want the respective others to leave. All things considered, we really aren't that different, and both communities contribute positively to the other society.
I don't like the idea of a population exchange in the 20s, it would have been immoral. But the historical solution satisfied absolutely nobody.
Immoral? They (the UK) had no problem maneuvering Greece/Turkey to do this in the 20s.
I'm not sure what your point is. Unless you're insinuating Ralph was British Prime Minister at the time, the fact that it happened isn't really relevant to him thinking it's immoral.
Seems to me that his point is that it's all Britain's fault. Even though the British government said that the idea of the population exchange was "a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come", and it was actually imposed by the Greek and Turkish governments under the supervision of a Norwegian diplomat appointed by the Swiss-based League of Nations, it's obviously all Britain's fault.
What? I'm saying that both the Irish and British governments were right to not do it. How on Earth did you read that into it? The UK govt probably could have done it and saved themselves a lot of trouble, but I commend them for not doing so.
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