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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and this week I'm talking to Neve Gallagher who teaches history at Cambridge. Her book, Ireland and the Great

War was published in 2019, and she has a piece in the current issue of the paper on the partition of Ireland.

It's a review of a book by Charles Townsend called The Partition, Ireland Divided 1885 to 1925.

Hello, Neve and thank you very much for joining me.

Hi, Tom. Pleasure. Thanks for asking me on the show.

As you're writing your piece, the Irish border is once again a subject of general concern because of Brexit, and we'll get to that a bit later in the discussion. But let's talk first about how the border came to be there in the first place. Because I'd always ignorantly imagined or assumed that it was as an artefact of Irish independence. But actually the border was created first.

Is that right?

The partition of Ireland came before the Irish restate.

Correct.

And don't worry.

It's not your ignorance, Tom.

It's a common mistake many people make.

So the border was created in Ireland in December 1920 as part of the Government of Ireland Act.

And that was passed by David Lloyd George,

who of course was liberal prime minister at the aftermath of the First World War. He'd been

prime minister since December 1916 in a largely unionist dominated cabinet. So it was passed in

December 1920 and it came into being, I suppose, when, well, one can choose many different

...