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time, laid the ground for a decision of a later Irish government, led by de Valera’s opponents, and in which Mr Seán McBride was Minister for External Affairs, not to join NATO in 1949 – a decision that subsequently hardened into a commitment to neutrality that has survived until the last decade of this century.
    This commitment has since been strongly held by many who have forgotten the ‘partition’ factor that had been presented as the initial ra­tionale of this policy, and who know nothing of the pragmatic basis for war-time neutrality – the fear of a renewal of civil war. There are indeed many today who would wish Irish neutrality to be maintained even if north and south were to be brought together politically.
    What is more generally recognised by historians, however, is the extent to which the consensus on neutrality (as well as the entry to the army of many children of the leading members of both political parties) healed the divisions of the Civil War, uniting all in a common cause.
    The Northern Ireland question
    But, to return to de Valera’s concern to legitimise the Irish state in the eyes of republicans, there was a price to be paid for this, for it was in­evitable that the single-mindedness with which de Valera felt it nec­es­sary to pursue this goal would impinge unfavourably on the attain­ment of certain other objectives.
    First of all, by pressing ahead to remove the crown from the con­stitution – while avoiding at that stage declaring the state to be a Repub­lic – and by the insertion in the new constitution of certain provisions designed to secure the assent of as many republicans as possible, and of other provisions designed to head off any potential opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, de Valera certainly made the resolution of the problem of Northern Ireland more difficult – to an extent greater than he himself perhaps recognised.
    From the outset, the Northern Ireland entity had been based on shaky foundations. First of all, its boundaries were, of course, arbitrary – chosen to maximise the territory involved within the limits imposed by a con­cern to limit the Catholic, nationalist minority to one-third of the popu­lation.
    And second, whatever may have been said publicly at that time there is, I believe, evidence that the most that many unionists then hop­ed to secure out of this arrangement, was a temporary postponement of the united Ireland that had been clearly envisaged as an outcome in the British act establishing a Northern Ireland parliament in 1920.
    The survival of Northern Ireland for eighty years, and the determi­na­tion of the majority of its unionist population today to resist unifica­tion, obscures the possibility that if the Irish state had evolved differently, the north-south relationship might also have turned out dif­ferently dur­ing this period. Even in 1937, when de Valera presented his new constitu­tion to the people, the sense of the temporary character of the arrange­ment under which Northern Ireland remained part of the United King­dom was still an underlying feature of northern unionist opinion – des­pite the rhetoric of ‘no surrender’. This is, I believe, an under-research­ed element of the history of this island – partly, of course, because it is not docu­mented, belonging as it does more to the minds rather than to the words and actions of those involved.
    The constitution of 1937 helped to harden northern unionist atti­tudes in three respects.
    First, the elimination of the crown from the constitution offended the monarchist sentiments of most northern unionists.
    Second, they were upset at the inclusion in this constitution of provi­sions which had found no place in the 1922 constitution, which seemed to involve a claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland on behalf of the government and parliament elected in the truncated Irish