Belfast boycott

Belfast boycott. Originally ordered by the Dáil cabinet in August 1920 as a boycott of Belfast‐based banks and insurance companies, this rapidly expanded into a wider campaign to exclude Northern Irish goods from the nationalist‐dominated south. In some border counties Protestant‐owned businesses were also proscribed. The lifting of the boycott was included in the Craig‐Collins pacts but it continued, enforced by anti‐treaty forces and tolerated by the new Irish Free State government, up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Although the immediate impetus came from recent attacks on Catholics in Belfast (to nationalists ‘the Belfast pogrom’), which had included mass expulsions from shipyards and engineering works, it was also hoped to demonstrate to Ulster Unionists the economic cost of partition. The actual result was to make partition more of a reality, by significantly weakening banking and commercial links across the newly established frontier between north and south.