Tomorrow, 6 December, is the 100th birthday of the state now called Ireland 🇮🇪. Is its neighbour, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 🇬🇧, also 100 years old tomorrow? For both, a century of unbroken democracy is something to celebrate.
It took 15 years for Ireland to adopt its current name, and 5 years for the UKofGB&NI. The Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927 disclaims tomorrow’s birthday: ‘the present Parliament shall be known as the Thirty-fourth Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, counting back to 1801. Horace Crawfurd MP said that this was ‘not only wrong, but ridiculous’ since Northern Ireland did not exist before 1922. It was, he said, the Third Parliament of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks (known as Jix) disagreed: ‘Certain portions of Ireland have, as it were, slipped out of the United Kingdom, and we now call it the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but it is still the United Kingdom, and this is still the Thirty-fourth Parliament of the United Kingdom.’
If Jix was right, the UK (ofGB&NI previously GB&I) will have to wait until 1 January for its 222nd birthday, and ‘certain parts of Ireland’ have tomorrow to look back at achievements and failures in the century since they slipped out.
