ABSTRACT
This chapter explores concepts of the oneness of the island, and explains why relations between the two administrations remained almost non-existent. Ireland, as a piece of geography, had a more obvious distinct and separate identity from Britain than had the mixed inhabitants of the island from their fellow citizens in the rest of the United Kingdom. The treaty itself has very little to say about what the relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island might be if Northern Ireland did indeed exercise its right to opt out of the Free State. From a nationalist point of view, the Council might have been expected to be the symbolic embodiment of a united island, an institutional expression of that essential unity which was so important to the treaty negotiators. The fate of the Council of Ireland, potentially of practical value and of symbolic worth in preserving ‘the essential unity’ of the island, was an early victim of that phenomenon.
