The first political rally that Collins attended outside Dublin was fittingly in Cork city, the second weekend in March 1922. The crowd ‘exceeded in dimensions any similar demonstration held in the south of Ireland in recent years,’ Hamar Greenwood reported.. 1.. Collins travelled to Cork by train, along with Fionán Lynch, Seán MacEoin, Seán Milroy and J. J. Walsh, on the eve of the planned address. A large enthusiastic crowd greeted them at Glanmire railroad station on that Saturday afternoon, and they were taken through the city in triumph, behind a number of bands.
Not everyone was so happy to see them. Some armed republicans had stopped one band on the way to meet Collins, seized their instruments at gunpoint and threw them into the River Lee. One enraged band member jumped into the cold water to recover a drum as it floated down river. Republican protesters later tried to disrupt proceedings by firing shots in the air as Collins was being driven through Patrick’s Street.. 2..
‘The people came out of their own free will to express their feelings, and they came without canvassing and without organisation,’ Collins said afterwards. ‘Of course, I knew that Cork was for us. I knew that I was as good an interpreter of the desires of the people of Cork as anyone, and I am glad my interpretation was confirmed.’. 3..
. During the night the republicans dismantled the two platforms which had been prepared for the speeches due to be made on Sunday and threw the wooden planks into the river. The place around Turner’s Hotel, where Collins was staying, was littered next morning with republican slogans, along with a number of white flags, strategically placed in prominent positions to intimate that the Treaty supporters were essentially surrendering. Some of the planks from the platforms could also be seen floating in the river.
After Sunday Mass, Collins and his colleagues tried to visit the graves of Tomás MacCurtain, who had been murdered by crown forces in March 1920, and his successor as lord mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike the following October. A group of about twenty armed men blocked Collins and colleagues and threatened to shoot any of them who entered the republican plot. Outside Cork, special excursion trains from Fermoy, Newmarket and Youghal were held up by armed republicans, who kidnapped the engine drivers and firemen, leaving the passengers stranded. Had those trains made it to Cork, however, there would hardly have been room for the extra people because, as it was, a crowd of about 50,000 people turned up that afternoon for the rally on Grand Parade. Every vantage point was taken.
As the crowd waited for the rally to begin, one young man began climbing the fountain to take down a white flag from its pinnacle. As he was about to remove the flag a shot rang out and, to the horror of spectators, the young man fell into the empty basin, but he was not injured. Shortly afterwards another young man shinned up a tram pole, topped by another flag. As he neared . the top another shot was fired but, much to the amusement of the crowd, he ignored the flag, continued to the top and sat on the cross bar. The laughter of the crowd promptly turned to cheering as Collins and his colleagues made their way to the main platform. It was an impressive sight. ‘Old people who have seen Parnell, O’Brien and Redmond meetings all say that they never saw anything like yesterday’s display,’ Collins gloated the next day.. 4..
He delivered a rousing speech, sprinkled with bravado and with indignant swipes at de Valera, who had had the effrontery to suggest in Cork, three weeks earlier, that Collins was either a coward or a traitor. That was some charge from the man who had not only spent most of the terror in the United States, but had also refused to go to London to negotiate the Treaty. ‘While the captain was away from the ship – that time in America – there was a hurricane blowing,’ Collins said. ‘The helm had been left by the captain in the hands of those very same incompetent amateurs who afterwards, in the calm water, had the ship on the rocks, and while he was away, somehow or other, we steered safely through those troubled waters, the roughest through which the ship of the Irish nation had to be navigated in all her troubled history.’ Poblacht na h-Éireann, the anti-Treaty journal edited by Erskine Childers, contended that Collins was accusing de Valera of cowardice.. 5..
Collins explained in his speech that the IRA had not defeated the British militarily. Hence the Irish side was not able to dictate terms in negotiating the Treaty. He left no doubt, however, that they would have stood out for better terms if they had been strong enough to secure them. What they got was the freedom to develop. . ‘The only policy of our opponents has become, it seems, by hidden manoeuvre, to stir up trouble,’ he told the gathering. They were fomenting strife and delaying the withdrawal of the British. In the process they were damaging the chances of unity and causing disunion. ‘That disunion in itself encourages the cowardly element in Belfast to an orgy of bloodshed and ruffianism,’ Collins said. ‘For factionalist ends they are jeopardising the unity of Ireland.’. 6..
The meeting was best remembered for the irresponsibility of republican agitators who skirted the periphery of the gathering, firing shots into the air and shouting, ‘Up the Republic’. ‘There were probably not more than a dozen men doing the shooting,’ Collins noted.. 7.. He commented on the wonderful composure of the crowd. ‘If there had been a stampede,’ he said, ‘women and little children would have been trampled under foot.’. 8.. Remarkably, the only incident reported requiring hospitalisation was a youth who was shot in the wrist.. 9..
‘Before Collins’ visit, Cork republicans had had the luxury of blaming the passage of the Treaty on political enemies who had not supported them during the War of Independence: the commercial elite, the newspapers, Redmondites, ex-soldiers and the Catholic church,’ John Borgonovo concludes in his book, The Battle for Cork. ‘Yet the city’s rapturous reception for Michael Collins clearly demonstrated the mass of public opinion was opposed to renewed hostilities with Britain.’. 10..
That evening Collins went to the home of his sister, Mary Collins Powell. On the way a gunman accosted him. ‘I have you now,’ the gunman said, but MacEoin disarmed the man.
‘Will I shoot him?’ MacEoin asked.
‘No,’ the Big Fellow replied. ‘Let the bastard go.’. 11..
. Over the next six weekends Collins held political rallies in Skibbereen, Waterford, Castlebar, Wexford, Naas and Tralee.
Although de Valera professed to be happy with the Ard-Fheis agreement postponing the election until after the publication of the constitution, he soon changed his mind and began adopting further delaying tactics. He demanded that the electoral register be updated, but Griffith contended that this would take over five months, which would necessitate an even longer delay than the three months agreed at the Ard-Fheis. In reply, de Valera argued that the existing register excluded tens of thousands ‘of young men who have just attained their majority, who were the nation’s most active defenders in the recent fight, and whose voice should certainly not be silenced in an election like the pending one, in which the fate of their country and the ideals for which they fought are to be determined’.. 12..
Showing signs of exasperation, Griffith refused a further delay. He was convinced the request had nothing to do with the democratic rights of the unfranchised, but was merely a ploy to stall the elections to avoid certain defeat. As recently as November, de Valera had been instrumental in having the register updated, but now he was asserting that ‘the register is invalid’, Griffith wrote in an open letter. ‘The public can draw its own conclusion.’ If they waited for a new register ‘an election would be impossible for the next six months,’ Griffith argued. ‘This would suit the game of those who desire to muzzle the Irish electorate, but I cannot be a party to any muzzling order.’
‘You propose muzzling them,’ de Valera replied. ‘I simply demand a proper register on the existing franchise, so that all who are entitled to vote may be permitted to vote. You would deprive . the young men of their right because you believe that their votes would be cast against the London Agreement.’. 13..
De Valera’s own conduct in recent months and especially in the following days and weeks certainly raised serious questions about his commitment to democracy. On 15 March 1922, for instance, he issued a manifesto announcing the formation of a new organisation, Cumann na Poblachta, which he had initially announced at the Mansion House meeting the day after the Dáil accepted the Treaty. He said the name should be translated as ‘the Republican Party Organisation’. Composed of anti-Treaty deputies, it was not supposed to supersede Sinn Féin, but there was no doubt that this party within the party added to the growing split within the movement as he set out on what would be the most controversial tour of his whole career.
‘They tell you, you will be prosperous,’ he told a gathering in Dungarvan next day. ‘Wait till you see the burden they will try to place upon you. You will want to fight for your rights whether you like it or not, if you don’t fight today you will have to fight tomorrow, and I say when you are in a good fighting position, then fight on.’. 14..
While de Valera was calling on people to fight on, Collins was in his native west Cork proclaiming that ‘Dublin Castle has been surrendered into my hands for the Irish nation’. He told the cheering crowd in Skibbereen that ‘the British game is up. Dublin Castle has fallen, and with it will have gone all bureaucratic regulations and tyrannies that the people of Ireland suffered from’.. 15.. With the British departing, Collins asked, who was de Valera proposing to fight against?
De Valera answered that question in both Carrick-on-Suir and . Thurles on St Patrick’s Day. Speaking in Thurles he told a crowd which included many armed IRA volunteers that if the Treaty was ratified, they would have ‘to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government, and through, perhaps, the blood of some members of the government in order to get Irish freedom’.. 16..
Next day in Killarney he suggested that he was not just talking about the current generation of volunteers but also future generations. ‘These men, in order to achieve freedom, will have, I said yesterday, to march over the dead bodies of their own brothers. They will have to wade through Irish blood.’. 17..
‘It is not peculiar in our time to have Volunteers and men who are willing to give up their lives for the freedom of their country,’ he explained. ‘These aspirations will continue, and the next generation will strive to do it, and the road will be barred by their own fellow-countrymen, and feeling that they have a right to complete freedom, they will not allow that to stand in the way. Therefore, they will oppose even the troops of an Irish government set up in accordance with that, because it will be felt that, even if that Treaty were ratified, it would not be ratified with your free will, but under the threat of war.’. 18..
Yet in January of that year he had denounced the idea of civil strife. ‘I hope that nobody will talk of fratricidal strife,’ he had told the Dáil. ‘This is all nonsense. We have got a nation that knows how to conduct itself. As far as I can on this side it will be our policy always.’. 19.. Now in March he was clearly abandoning that policy and talking openly of civil war. It was grossly irresponsible, as his words were widely interpreted as threatening civil war, or even attempting to incite one, and he set off a firestorm of . criticism both in the Irish and international press. ‘Mr de Valera has shocked the whole country,’ The Times of London reported.. 20..
De Valera contended that he was merely assessing the situation realistically and rebutting the argument that the Treaty contained the freedom to achieve freedom. He accused the press of using his words to do the very thing of which they were accusing him. ‘You cannot be unaware,’ he wrote to the editor of the Irish Independent, ‘that your representing me as inciting the civil war has on your readers precisely the same effects as if the inciting words were really mine.’. 21.. He blamed the press. There were around 7,000 people in Tralee on Sunday 19 March, when de Valera complained that newspaper owners had ‘an influence altogether disproportionate to their personal worth’.. 22.. He warned the people not to allow themselves to be hypnotised by newspapers when making up their minds. Instead, he said, they should realise that anything they read in a newspaper was likely to be false.
Although de Valera was widely blamed for inciting the IRA, he was rapidly losing his influence over the organisation. Collins and the Irish Republican Brotherhood were in control of most of the headquarters staff, which was largely pro-Treaty. Even among the anti-Treaty members of the headquarters staff, de Valera had little influence. Rory O’Connor, the director of engineering, declared that he was ‘no more prepared to stand for de Valera than for the Treaty’.. 23.. The divisional commanders and the rank and file were strongly anti-Treaty, especially in those areas that had been most active in the struggle against the British. O’Connor therefore wanted an IRA convention called to elect a new leadership, but the headquarters staff – realising that their control was tenuous at best – procrastinated. De Valera tried to make the best of his . own weak position by siding with those asking for a convention. He suggested that the IRA should split on Treaty lines. Some mistakenly thought de Valera was therefore the instigator when O’Connor announced at a press conference on 22 March that an army convention would be held on 26 March, in defiance of the Dáil cabinet and headquarters staff.
O’Connor openly distanced himself from de Valera at the press conference announcing his plans. ‘President de Valera asked that the army should obey the GHQ, but the army for which I speak cannot,’ O’Connor said, ‘because the minister for defence has broken his agreement.’. 24.. The IRA had voluntarily submitted to the authority of the Dáil, but O’Connor – who claimed to represent eighty per cent of the organisation – announced that it would be withdrawing this allegiance, because the Dáil had exceeded its authority in approving the Treaty. ‘There are times when revolution is justified,’ he said. ‘The armies in many countries have overturned governments from time to time. There is no government in Ireland now to give the IRA a lead, hence we want to straighten out the impossible position which exists.’. 25..
The convention was called to set up a new executive to issue orders to the IRA throughout the country, despite the decision by the Dáil cabinet that the convention should not be held. ‘In effect,’ O’Connor said, ‘the holding of the convention means that we repudiate the Dáil.’
‘Do we take it that we are going to have a military dictatorship then?’ a reporter asked.
‘You can take it that way, if you like,’ O’Connor replied.. 26..
On the eve of the convention some eighty volunteers associated with the Four Courts garrison seized the Wholesale Fish Market . in Halston Street. They held it overnight and then withdrew the following day. The same night some forty or fifty of O’Connor’s followers seized the Orange Hall and Fowler Memorial Hall at 10 Parnell Square. There was a social function going on in the Orange Hall at the time when men in civilian clothes and carrying pistols ordered everybody out. The raiders announced they were seizing the building in the name of Catholic workers expelled from the Belfast shipyards. All apparently had southern accents, but they indicated that they expected some of the expelled workers to arrive that night. In the following days fifteen families, totalling eighty-three individuals, from Belfast were put up in the building, and seventy single men from Belfast were provided with three meals a day there.
The convention called by O’Connor was convened in the Oak Room of the Mansion House, with some 233 delegates representing forty-nine brigades. The meeting, which began at 10 a.m., lasted throughout the day and did not break up until after 10 p.m. Only a small group gathered outside, which was a reflection of the meagre public support. Liam Lynch was elected chief of staff of the faction of the army that had broken away from the authority of Mulcahy and O’Duffy. Henceforth there were two armies, both claiming to be the IRA, at least for the time being.
Pro-Treaty elements retained their headquarters at Beggars Bush Barracks, while the others – the self-styled Executive Forces – set up their headquarters in the building seized from the Orange Order in Parnell Square the previous night. Each claimed to be the official or regular IRA, but the pro-Treaty element was frequently referred to as the Free State army or Free Staters, and the anti-Treaty faction, as the Executive IRA or Republicans.