Partition and the Railway

Twentieth-century Irish history often particularises the experience of partition, but partition was just one part of the extensive process of ‘borderisation’ across Europe after the First World War.Footnote ³ After 1922, the border became a dividing line between two polities whose leaders not only avoided direct engagement with each other but actively sought to define their own governance order against the other. From 1 April 1923, barriers to trade became extensive and quickly curtailed the now cross-border economy. The Common Travel Area enabled cross-border travel, but it did little to facilitate cross-border trade.Footnote ⁴ Railways, however, provided an enduring link across this boundary. They sometimes punctured this narrative of border-as-barrier altogether. The ‘condom train’ of 1971 demonstrated the absurdities of the Irish government’s ongoing efforts to restrict access to contraception,Footnote ⁵ whilst the ‘peace train’, which began in 1989, sought to generate pressure for the removal of Articles 2 and 3 of Ireland’s Constitution on the basis that they were being used to justify ‘a campaign of murder’ in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁶ But more often they became a rare point of interrelationship which both governments had to manage.

Not that this was welcome to the new administrations in Dublin and Belfast. From the earliest days of partition, Sir James Craig was preoccupied by the potential for his counterparts in Dublin to use the Government of Ireland Act’s Council of Ireland arrangements, intended to facilitate cooperation on a range of cross-border issues, to influence Northern Ireland’s internal affairs.Footnote ⁷ This concern was acute in the context of railways because Dublin had a particular interest in the rail connections into Donegal, which all traversed Northern Ireland’s territory.Footnote ⁸ The operation of the Council of Ireland was, however, delayed in 1922 and then dissolved following the agreement to set aside the Boundary Commission’s outcomes in 1925.Footnote ⁹ Liam Cosgrave’s administration wanted to have nothing to do with Northern Ireland or to be seen to rely on any part of the Government of Ireland Act’s arrangements.Footnote ¹⁰ The GNR(I) was also excluded from the statutory amalgamation of railway companies which operated entirely within the Free State.Footnote ¹¹

This is not to say that the GNR(I) was left to its own devices. Even as it recovered from attacks on railway infrastructure and rolling stock during the War of Independence and Civil War, its stations and practices needed to be adapted to handle customs checks from 1 April 1923 onwards. Goods trains were subject to complex arrangements, with dutiable goods having to be grouped together in separate wagons wherever possibleFootnote ¹² and some sealed wagons having to be excluded from customs processes if they were beginning and ending their journey in one jurisdiction but being trans-shipped through the other.Footnote ¹³ Passengers, however, were subject to unpredictable delays and schedules had to be adapted to accommodate customs checks on baggage at the first stop after trains crossed the border.Footnote ¹⁴ Apportionment of assets and profits for taxation purposes was also a work in progress in the inter-war decades. It took years for the railway to agree the necessary concessions with customs officials to exclude activity as banal as the sale of on-train refreshments from duty requirements,Footnote ¹⁵ and when it came to apportionment of company profits for taxation purposes, all that the Free State government could say was that ultimately this was ‘really a case of expecting the Commissioner to be reasonable in his demands on the railway company’.Footnote ¹⁶ All of this dislocation took its toll. In the same month the customs border came into effect, the GNR(I) instituted the first closure of a cross-border line; people and livestock were no longer travelling cross-border to the cattle fairs which had been so important to the operation of the Castleblayney–Armagh line. These challenges deepened in the 1930s, as the Ireland–UK trade war involved regular changes in tariffs, which then gave way to wartime rationing, with both generating incentives for smuggling.Footnote ¹⁷

The Post-War Challenges

The profitability of railways in the war years gave way to a sudden crisis for the three major railway companies operating in Northern Ireland. The tragedy of the Ballymacarrett crash in January 1945 undermined the financial stability of the Belfast & Co. Down Railway. The Unionist government planning for the UTA had involved the ambition of rolling together, in one step, all public transport services operating solely within Northern Ireland’s boundaries under a single public body.Footnote ¹⁸ But with the Belfast & Co. Down Railway ‘heading rapidly towards bankruptcy’, the government was obliged to expedite this element of its plan and roll it into the newly created UTA in October 1948.Footnote ¹⁹ The other parts of the puzzle were even more complicated. The Northern Counties Committee had already become part of British Railways when its parent company, the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, had been nationalised in January 1948. Sir Basil Brooke’s government, notwithstanding its aversion to collectivisations, could not countenance that such an important element of Northern Ireland’s transport policy would be directed from London, and promptly bought out British Railways for the grossly inflated figure of £2.7 million. With the UTA immediately saddled with extensive liabilities, the Transport Tribunal began the task of pruning unprofitable lines. In the same period the GNR(I) launched the ‘Enterprise Express’ as a non-stop service on the Belfast–Dublin route, designed to reduce mid-journey delays by ensuring that customs formalities were dealt with at either end of the line. The initial use of ageing steam locomotives, in part because the upheavals since the 1920s had deterred investment, meant that the service was beset by unreliability. The 1948 purchase of new steam engines was a backward step, with the company buying twenty new diesel railcars just two years later. These investments did not immediately restore confidence in the service, but did increase expenditure, and by 1950 the company was warning the governments in Belfast and Dublin that its losses were unsustainable.

In this period the Northern Ireland government found itself caught in a rail policy trap. Even after the nationalisation of most public transport services in 1948, Northern Ireland’s law continued to be designed to regulate private providers rather than to run a nationalised railway service. This was a visible manifestation of Unionist aversion to nationalisation; as late as 1943 the records of the Cabinet sub-committee show that Brooke ‘found some difficulty in understanding the force of the arguments put forward … in favour of fusion of the transport interests as opposed to co-ordination, as provided for in the act of 1935’.Footnote ²⁰ Northern Ireland’s Transport Act did not, for example, grant ministers powers to uplift fares equivalent to the legislation covering British Rail.Footnote ²¹ Even if ministers had such powers, and they had in essence eschewed the opportunity to include them in the legislation, the Northern Ireland government ordinarily baulked at the prospect of passing on increases in costs of public services to the electorate.Footnote ²² Whereas the British Transport Corporation spent the 1950s borrowing from the UK Treasury to manage its deficit, this was not an option that was open to the UTA, which was formally required, but always struggled, to operate in an economically viable manner. Industrial relations in the period were also strongly influenced by events in Great Britain. The year 1955 saw Northern Ireland rail workers undertake a prolonged strike alongside their British Rail counterparts, notwithstanding the distinct public bodies operating in Northern Ireland, and secure comparable wage rises.Footnote ²³ These challenges were exacerbated by the increasingly parlous state of Northern Ireland’s public finances; Northern Ireland was being pulled in policy directions it could scarcely afford. All of these concerns saw loud voices, including Sir Anthony Babington (a former Attorney General, appellate judge and now Chairman of the Transport Tribunal), argue for the prioritisation of road over rail in the 1950s.Footnote ²⁴ This invidious policy picture aligns with Patrick Buckland’s conclusion, with regard to Northern Ireland’s welfare policy, that the major beneficiary of devolution in the middle part of the twentieth century was London, ‘being relieved of direct responsibility for Northern Ireland’s social problems’.Footnote ²⁵

The GNR(I) crisis thus saw Brooke’s administration wrongfooted by a policy issue where its instincts pulled in contrary directions. Ministers were concerned that Dublin would buy out the railway and use it as an (expensive) way to embarrass the Unionist government. William McCleery, perhaps the most conciliatory of Brooke’s ministers, was thus dispatched to Dublin to try to feel out the coalition government’s position. In August 1950 the GNR(I) crisis thus precipitated the first ministerial meeting between Dublin and Belfast in a quarter of a century.Footnote ²⁶ But even when these concerns were allayed, with McCleery building up a rapport with his Dublin counterparts, the costs associated with the railway made financially conservative Unionist politicians blanch.Footnote ²⁷ The financial pressures generated by the inadequacies of the Government of Ireland Act’s terms, moreover, had recently seen it make extraordinary pleadings to the UK Treasury to enable Northern Ireland to match the nationalisation of healthcare provision.Footnote ²⁸ When McCleery first mooted the possibility of line closures west of the Bann in 1950 in response to the parlous state of the GNR(I), he faced an intense backlash from both Nationalists and Unionists in the Northern Ireland Parliament. Abandoning these lines invited considerable embarrassment, but the prospect of nationalising the GNR(I) could not be easily reconciled with Stormont’s straitened circumstances. For its part, the Irish government was concerned that it would get stuck with the costs of subsidising loss-making railway lines as Belfast’s public transport policy shifted from rail to road. Its favoured solution of an All-Ireland Transport Board, however, offended Unionist sensibilities.Footnote ²⁹

Against this complex policy backdrop, talks between Dublin and Belfast over the railway dragged on for months. Even as the collapse of the railway appeared imminent in January 1951, the shareholders added a further complicating factor, rejecting an emergency offer by the two governments to purchase the railway company for £3.9 million, and holding out for a valuation of over twice that amount.Footnote ³⁰ The governments’ initial purchase price offer, an average of the GNR(I)’s stock exchange value over the previous three years, substantially overvalued a company in decline. The Shareholders’ Protection Association lobbied representatives in the Dáil and Stormont throughout 1951, only accepting an improved offer of £4.5 million that November.Footnote ³¹ Following the shareholder agreement,Footnote ³² corresponding legislation was introduced in the Dáil and Stormont to give effect to the new arrangements, but would not be enacted until 1953, with the two governments subsidising over £2 million in losses in the interim whilst the complex negotiations on the management of the jointly nationalised entity proceeded.Footnote ³³ Although the Great Northern Railway Board (GNRB) was established to manage the railway, with the two governments each appointing five members to the Board, which was tasked with the priority of balancing the railway’s revenues and outgoings,Footnote ³⁴ there was a persistent gloom around the legislative debates. As Seán Lemass informed the Dáil, ‘one of the most difficult problems which arose during the negotiations’ was not over how to run cross-border services, but was instead ‘to devise a procedure for the termination of such common services’.Footnote ³⁵ Both ministers had to sign off on any termination of cross-border services, and if they did not, the matter was put to a Tribunal.Footnote ³⁶ Even as the agreement was signed to aplomb in Belfast in August 1953, McCleery sounded a cautionary note: ‘It is well to realize that the difficulties which overtook the company will not disappear overnight with the passing from the old to the new.’Footnote ³⁷ For Micheal Kennedy, the closer cooperation became to becoming a reality, the more the project assumed the appearance of ‘a long-term liquidation plan’, with tracts of the corresponding Great Northern Railway Acts providing the arrangements for winding down aspects of the GNR(I)’s operations.Footnote ³⁸ But if both governments were taking some notice of the pressure that the GNR(I) was under, and preparing for the worst, this cannot be read as meaning that the collapse of the joint ownership scheme was an inevitability. To do so would be to neglect the (admittedly fitful) efforts to make this experiment in intergovernmental cooperation work after 1953.

The Operation of Joint Ownership, 1953–1958

The Northern Ireland government had aspirations to run public transport in a manner comparable to Great Britain, thereby demonstrating that Northern Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom. Nationalising the GNR(I) was part of this ambition. McCleery appointed the former general manager of the GNR(I), George Howden, as Chairman of the UTA to help integrate and coordinate services.Footnote ³⁹ The most pressing problem, however, remained how to pay for the inflated cost of its acquisition. The Unionist government had some reason to expect that London might be receptive to providing financial backing for the Railway Agreement. It had already established a track record of ‘evading’ the strictures of the 1920 Act’s finance arrangements in order to sustain public service provision.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1939, the UK Treasury had made an extraordinary subvention to Northern Ireland, writing off a large element of the imperial contribution, in part to support public transport policy.Footnote ⁴¹ The Treasury had, at the start of the 1950s, written off £1.5 million of the debt related to the purchase of the Northern Counties Committee railway, amounting to more than half of the purchase price, when Belfast’s Ministry of Finance belatedly realised it had overbid for the asset.Footnote ⁴² These interventions gave rise to an expectation that the UK Treasury would support ‘relative parity’ in public service provision.Footnote ⁴³ Throughout the GNR(I) crisis, moreover, the UK government had been broadly supportive of Belfast and Dublin adopting a cooperative approach, and after the agreement was concluded the Home Secretary highlighted it in the Commons as the pre-eminent example of developments which ‘show a lessening of the tension, and that is very acceptable to everyone in this House’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Behind this public veneer of Home Office support, however, the Treasury seethed, and its senior officials had long awaited an opportunity to make ‘these parochial die-hards … face up to a touch of reality’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The events which unfolded have remained difficult to piece together because key archival holdings within Northern Ireland remain closed, and it is only by reviewing the records generated by the UK Treasury that an account emerges of the Unionist government’s efforts to defend the new arrangements.Footnote ⁴⁶

The first year of the GNR(I)’s existence as a jointly owned public body allowed for a review of its operations by the new Board, which completed an extensive report on the challenges facing the railway in September 1954.Footnote ⁴⁷ It made for unhappy reading; much of the GRN(I) network was loss-making – to the tune of £457,000 in the 1953/54 financial year – and had been subject to prolonged underinvestment. Much of the historiography of subsequent events – insofar as analysis has touched upon this largely forgotten episode at all – has combined the Northern Ireland government’s immediate efforts to cut GRN(I) costs alongside the previous cuts to the UTA rail network, indicating that it had never been committed to making a success of the joint venture.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Northern Ireland government’s response to this bleak assessment, however, was to attempt to back the GNRB, and seek additional financial support from London. Finance Minister Brian Maginess was instructed to approach the UK’s Conservative government in July 1955 on the basis that ‘much of the railway system in Northern Ireland should be retained’, including the two different mainlines between Belfast and Derry-Londonderry (the one running south of Lough Neagh being the GNR(I) line), ‘and be equipped with new motive units using diesel traction, and other rolling stock’, which would require ‘a very substantial sum of money’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The justification for this policy was threefold. First, it would protect the employment of 4,800 railway workers. Second, the removal of rail facilities would impact upon ‘Northern Ireland’s prospects of future economic development’. Third, extensive closures would ‘isolate’ western parts of Northern Ireland ‘severing their links with the capital’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Maginess’ overture was expected; indeed, it had already been undermined. Just over a week before his letter arrived at the Treasury, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, and Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Douglas Harkness, had made one of his regular visits to London to liaise with his UK government counterparts. There he had informed the Third Secretary, Edmund Compton, of all the weaknesses he perceived in the GNR(I) plan, and in particular that much of the required outlay of £5 million ‘will be invested South of the Border where the main workshops and facilities of the G.N.R. are’.Footnote ⁵¹ Any capital expenditure on the GNR(I) was thus dismissed as ‘throwing good money after bad’.Footnote ⁵² These conclusions set the tone for the memorandum prepared for the Chancellor of the Exchequer the following month, which concluded that the rail system was a mess and that much of the existing capital expenditure would have to be written off: ‘Strictly financial considerations would indicate that the railways ought to be closed altogether; but this does not really seem to be practical politics, and it is fairly clear that some sort of railway system will have to be kept in Northern Ireland.’Footnote ⁵³

The memorandum advocated the closure of almost all of the GNR(I) network other than the mainlines between Dublin and Belfast and potentially Portadown and Derry-Londonderry, on the basis that these lines ‘serve sparsely populated country … and they might well be replaced quite adequately by road transport’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This, however, had implications regarding the joint ownership of the GNR(I): ‘The lines in question are probably of greater importance to the Government of Ireland since … they offer the only direct rail link between the Republic and Donegal; in that case let the Government of the Irish Republic exercise its right to keep them open and meet the losses incurred in running them.’Footnote ⁵⁵

Treasury officials also took a dim view of the lack of control that the Northern Ireland government was exercising over public transport fares and charges.Footnote ⁵⁶ Overburdened by the pressing issue of speculation over UK exchange rate policy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, R. A. Butler, only weighed into the discussions in mid-August. He held out the potential for some ‘fresh capital’ and that some of the existing losses might be ‘written off’, but only on the implicit basis of Treasury officials taking a lead on these decisions.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the resultant meeting, the Treasury officials delayed any conclusion on dieselisation until line closures had taken effect.Footnote ⁵⁸

Through all of these back and forward discussions between Belfast and London, the GNRB waited. In the middle of July 1955, after the Northern Ireland Cabinet had agreed to back modernisation, the Ministry of Commerce had sought to immediately give the green light to diesel purchases to help stem operating losses. They were promptly rebuffed by Harkness in the Ministry of Finance, on the basis that any decision rested with London:

Harkness, of course, was well aware of the direction that the Treasury would take. The discussions between the UK Treasury and the Northern Ireland government, however, were taking place in a closed box, with neither the Irish government nor the GNRB having any impression of the true position. A month later the Chairman of the GNRB made it clear to Lord Glentoran, in the most extraordinarily frank terms, that this was no way to run a railroad:

He would continue to wait.

Another year was lost as line closures were announced and put to the respective transport tribunals for consideration without any movement on questions of investment for modernisation. Compton concluded that the £3 million paid by the Northern Ireland government for its share of the GNR(I) was a ‘dead loss’ and ‘more loses are in prospect unless branch lines are closed down and more capital is put up (mainly in the form of diesel engines) to make the surviving main line (Dublin to Belfast) pay’.Footnote ⁶¹ These losses would, he fumed, eventually fall on the UK Treasury because of Northern Ireland’s now-negative imperial contribution. The solution was intense Treasury oversight of all decisions around the GNR(I). The UK government would agree no further investment, and would certainly not sign off on the diesel engines from Germany which the GNRB had sought to purchase, without the Northern Ireland government following through with swingeing cuts. As the Second Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Herbert Brittain, confirmed: import ‘[d]uty must be charged on the German locomotives’ if they were to operate on GNR(I) lines, even if they were formally based in Dublin.Footnote ⁶² This particular public procurement saga would rumble on into 1957, when even under a fresh tender process the German-manufactured engines remained cheaper and would be available more promptly than their British-manufactured competitors. The Northern Ireland government cavilled that ‘if we disagree and say “buy British” (in part!) the South are likely to ask us to foot the bill’ and wondered whether ‘the U.K. declared intention of association … with the proposed European free market’ had any impact on the Treasury’s position.Footnote ⁶³ The Treasury remained implacable in its opposition, and until the 1970s the Enterprise service would largely be left to run using a hodgepodge of diesel railcar sets, designed for commuter rather than intercity services.

Having exerted such pressure on the Northern Ireland government to cut costs, the UK Treasury were unsurprised when the North and South transport tribunals, tasked with making decisions on the future of GNR(I) lines under the 1953 Acts, split over whether branch lines west of the Bann should be closed. Sir Douglas Harkness (newly knighted) is described as having a ‘wicked gleam in his eye’ as he reported that the Treasury’s pressure was having its desired effect in terms of the retrenchment of the GNR(I) network in 1956: ‘The next stage is for the N.I. Government to proceed with the closure, it being open to the Eire Government, if they wish to prevent it, to provide the extra finance.’Footnote ⁶⁴ By 1958, as a result of the cuts required by the UK government, the Dublin–Belfast GNR(I) mainline was the only remaining railway to cross the Ireland/Northern Ireland border. The Portadown–Derry/Londonderry mainline was also slated for closure, but would receive a series of short-term reprieves until the final axe fell after the Benson report of 1963.Footnote ⁶⁵ The final GNRB annual report bemoaned the lack of response from the governments in Dublin and London to its efforts to ‘rehabilitate and modernise’ the railway, but these complaints do not reveal the role that the UK Treasury was playing behind the scenes.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Treasury’s careful choreography, calibrated to shift some of the public blame for the closure of so much of the network onto Dublin, nonetheless came unstuck in June 1957 when Lord Glentoran, Belfast’s Minister of Commerce, announced that the Northern Ireland government intended to terminate the railway agreement at the five-year review point stipulated in the 1953 Agreement.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a result, Seán Lemass could inform the Dáil that ‘even if the Government here were prepared to meet the heavy cost of subsidising rail transport within the Six-County area, the termination of the agreement made that course impossible’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even at this point, the files indicate that the Brookeborough government’s direct dealings with Irish ministers were limited; the most prominent element of intergovernmental discussion related to realising Northern Ireland’s share of the value of the GNRB’s most significant fixed asset, the Dundalk engineering works.Footnote ⁶⁹ On 1 October 1958, what was left of the GNRB was dissolved and, under an agreement between Dublin and Belfast, its assets were split between CIÉ and the UTA and liabilities divided between the two governments.Footnote ⁷⁰ In a final indignity for efforts to modernise Northern Ireland’s rail transport, the UTA was obliged to purchase some of the ageing, former-GNR(I), steam locomotives from CIÉ in 1963 to maintain its services.Footnote ⁷¹

The Aftermath

It has become an easy answer to attribute the general failings of devolution in the aftermath of the Second World War in the main to the sectarianism of successive Unionist governments. This thesis was neatly summarised by Patrick Buckland: ‘the power of the government was used in the interests of Unionists and Protestants, with scant regard for the interests of the region as a whole’.Footnote ⁷² John Whyte, however, was notably sympathetic to the Northern Ireland government when it came to transport policy:

When the line it chose to preserve went through Unionist heartlands and maintained the connectivity and employment benefits for these areas, it is easy to see why sympathy for the Unionist government’s predicament was in short supply. What the archival holdings illustrate, however, is the efforts of the Unionist government to keep large parts of the GNR(I) network in place. These were doomed by the UK Treasury’s determination to make an example of railway cuts to force them, in the words of (the soon to be knighted) Edmund Compton, to ‘pursue the path of financial rectitude’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The financial settlement for devolution had undermined Northern Ireland’s governance since the 1920s, and the scarcity of public resources only served to bring sectarianism in their allocation into sharp relief. These financial challenges also precipitated the decline in relations between the Conservative Party and Northern Ireland’s Unionists, with the ennobled Lord Brookeborough even threatening Harold Macmillan with more equivocal support from Unionist MPs at Westminster in 1960 in order to secure more funding.Footnote ⁷⁵

The dysfunctional cooperation through the GNRB had lasted a mere five years. Even had the two governments been more minded to cooperate effectively, they would still have found themselves caught between a profound financial squeeze and the UK government’s heavy-handed imposition of a shift towards a more road-centred transport policy. Notwithstanding the setback of 1958, Seán Lemass, who had effectively fronted the Irish government’s efforts during the joint ownership of the GNR(I), would become synonymous with the high-profile efforts to reset relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland in the 1960s. He built on the GNR(I) experience with the olive branch of selective reductions in tariffs for products from Northern Ireland after he became taoiseach.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even these initiatives were viewed with suspicion by Brookeborough’s Cabinet, as being intended to ‘differentiate Northern Ireland goods from those made in Great Britain’, which they refused to encourage ‘for political and constitutional reasons’.Footnote ⁷⁷ It was not until Brookeborough was replaced as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by Terence O’Neill that the Stormont administration became more receptive to these overtures. Lemass’ January 1965 meeting with O’Neill rapidly acquired the reputation of having inadvertently stoked intercommunal tensions within Northern Ireland which spiralled into the conflict.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although such accounts set rather too much store on the Lemass–O’Neill dialogue as a catalyst for the conflict, Lemass’ track record of dealings with the Northern Ireland government is a significant part of why the administrations thought they could achieve something substantive in 1965.

The failure of the GNRB initiative has had impacts which have persisted to the present day. Its legacy is keenly felt in the deficiencies in the transport infrastructure in the north west of Ireland. The Enterprise service was maintained, under an operating arrangement negotiated between the CIÉ and UTA, but it would remain subject to sustained underinvestment, and from the start of the conflict, intense security disruption, until 1997.Footnote ⁷⁹ This lack of joined-up policy continues to be reflected in the Enterprise sharing tracks with the Dublin–Malahide Dublin Area Rapid Transit (DART) service, limiting the number of Enterprise trains and slowing the intercity service to a crawl as it nears Dublin.Footnote ⁸⁰ The whole GNR(I) experiment thus has the feel of an idea out of time; it would become easier to run a cross-border railway against the backdrop of EU law,Footnote ⁸¹ which negated the need for complex customs arrangements (and which, post-Brexit, persists in this regard under the auspices of the Northern Ireland Protocol). There was, moreover, no established basis for cross-border dealings. After the intense period of negotiations to rescue the GNR(I) through joint ownership, the two governments sought to stand off from each other and engage only through the GNRB. Lemass would not develop any meaningful relationship with Lord Glentoran, who succeeded McCleery as Northern Ireland’s Minister for Commerce.Footnote ⁸² For much of the period of joint ownership the archives illustrate that direct communications between the two governments were vanishingly rare, and ministers were left to divine their counterparts’ intention through polite requests for copies of public speeches and reports. This was in no way comparable to the development of North–South cooperation under Strand 2 of the 1998 Agreement. The post-1998 arrangements should have provided an institutional foundation for a reconsideration of railway policy.Footnote ⁸³ Railways, however, were not high on either the Irish government’s or the Northern Ireland executive’s list of priorities. It took many decades to return to the development of a cross-border rail policy in cooperative terms, and even today the ambitions of an all-island transport strategy faced delays caused by the stop–start nature of devolution in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁴

Conclusion

In Oh Mr Porter! – that classic Englishman-out-of-place comedy – the titular character finds himself waving off trains from Buggleskelly station to ‘Ballyhooley, Ballyhelly and all the other Bally places’, which turned out to uncomfortably reflect the level of interest shown by the UK Treasury’s civil servants in Northern Ireland’s transport infrastructure in the 1950s. The continued existence of the Fintona horse tramFootnote ⁸⁵ into the mid-1950s was not treated by Treasury officials as a marker of persistent underdevelopment which needed to be addressed, but as illustrative of a rail transport system in Northern Ireland that was beyond reform and could be ‘replaced quite adequately by road transport’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The inadequacies of the devolution funding settlement had, by this juncture, generated multiple extraordinary funding requests from the Northern Ireland government and increasingly ‘fraught’ relations between Belfast and London.Footnote ⁸⁷ When it came to the GNRB, the UK Treasury had had its fill of these efforts, adopting a narrow and costs-focused response. Key actors in this decision making would return to haunt Northern Ireland as it slid into conflict; Sir Edmund Compton would again demonstrate his loyalty to the UK government’s position in producing an uncritical report into abusive interrogation practices in 1971.Footnote ⁸⁸

Amid the recriminations, in 1958 Seán Lemass publicly deplored the termination of the Railway Agreement as ‘a backward step in the development of co-operation on matters of common interest affecting both parts into which our country is divided’, but he laid the blame firmly upon the ‘change of outlook regarding transport matters which has taken place in Belfast’.Footnote ⁸⁹ There is, nonetheless, something missing from accounts which suggest that the story of the agreement was one in which ‘[t]he transport policies of Northern Ireland and the Republic were quite different, and the GNRB was caught in the middle’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Unionist government was, in this instance, playing a forced game. Its prioritisation, alongside Dublin, of the shareholders of an essentially bankrupt concern meant that from the outset of joint ownership they were focused on finding savings and not on the needs of the railway. They were, moreover, hemmed in by inadequate funding arrangements and a UK Treasury which did not see itself as being under any obligation to facilitate cross-border cooperation. As a result of this intervention, the best avenue for building substantive cross-border policy cooperation prior to the Northern Ireland conflict was summarily dissolved.