Repartition of Ireland

As the border currently stands, Northern Ireland contains a slight Catholic — generally correlative with Irish nationalist — plurality,[1] mostly in the south and west, but with significant numbers in Belfast and other communities concentrated particularly in the Glens of Antrim and around the shores of Lough Neagh.

[2] The leaked report included, accurately, the Boundary Commission recommendation that parts of east County Donegal would be transferred to Northern Ireland, plus several other small tracts (see list here).

[3][4] The three governments, however, determined another agreement on 6 December 1925 (subject to parliamentary approval) which confirmed the existing boundary of Northern Ireland, along with other matters.

In 1972, the Conservative MP Julian Critchley published a pamphlet for the Bow Group advocating repartition, titled Ireland: A New Partition.

[11][12] In late 1974 and early 1975, the Irish government believed a British withdrawal was being contemplated, and feared that this would lead to a full civil war in the north.

[15] A 1976 discussion paper for the Irish government, declassified in 2023, considered scenarios for redrawing the border based on local plebiscites, with ensuing voluntary repatriation to be jointly subsidised by Dublin and London.

[17] Research by Paul Compton of Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) fed into a secret 1984 briefing paper prepared by the Northern Ireland Office for then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which examined various repartition schemes, the most extensive transferring to the Republic half of Northern Ireland's territory and one-third of its population, with West Belfast a "walled ghetto" enclave.

In early January 1994, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) released a document calling for repartition combined with ethnic cleansing or even genocide, with the goal of making Northern Ireland wholly Protestant.

The vastly Irish Catholic and nationalist areas would be handed over to the Republic, and those left stranded in the "Protestant state" would be "expelled, nullified, or interned".

[19] Sammy Wilson, then press officer for the Democratic Unionist Party and later the MP for East Antrim, spoke positively of the document, calling it a "valuable return to reality" and lauded the UDA for "contemplating what needs to be done to maintain our separate Ulster identity".