Northern Ireland and the Irish Free
State, 1920-1932: A Comparative
Study
Pete Hodson1
In the wake of a bloody, protracted period of revolutionary upheaval, two provisional Irish States emerged in the
early 1920s. Constitutionally dissimilar, Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State nevertheless bore striking
political parallels. A comparative analytical approach
is adopted in an attempt to illustrate the political similarities of Irish unionism and nationalism in their pre1932 governmental guises. The transitional period was
fraught with remarkably similar political, economic and
cultural difficulties and overshadowed by the spectre of a
relapse into violence. The 1920s was a formative decade
which witnessed the two competing ideologies chisel-out
their respective governmental styles. Yet it also proved a
fleeting period of policy closeness before the Irish ‘Cold
War’ set in from the early 1930s. The Northern Ireland
Government, however, unlike the Irish Free State, failed
to grapple with – and exorcise – the structural problems
associated with majoritarian government in a polarised
society. This article analyses some of the major themes
manifest in the two nascent States during the 1920s and
expose the difficulties encountered and solutions utilised
by the two Governments.
1 Pete
Hodson is in the third year of his Modern History degree in the School of History
and Anthropology at Queen’s University, Belfast. The author can be contacted at: [email protected].