Following the Dáil’s acceptance of the Treaty, Collins sought to implement it as quickly as possible as a means of enlisting popular support. Convinced of the Treaty’s enormous possibilities, he believed he could win over sceptics by demonstrating that the agreement could be used as a stepping-stone to complete independence.
At every step, however, he was confronted by the determination of his opponents. De Valera had first stated that the Treaty was a matter for the cabinet, but when the cabinet approved, he said it was a matter for the Dáil, and now that the Dáil had approved it, he contended that it could only be ratified by the Irish people.
‘The resolution recommending the ratification of a certain treaty is not a legal action,’ he told the meeting of anti-Treaty deputies at the Mansion House on 8 January 1922. ‘That will not be completed until the Irish people have disestablished the Republic which they set up of their own free will.’
He had already indicated his intention of resigning as President, but he told the Mansion House gathering that he intended to run again on a platform of ‘no co-operation with pro-treaty leaders’ on matters relating to the implementation of the Treaty. At this meeting it was decided to set up Cumann na Poblachta (Republican Association), which amounted to a new party within Sinn Féin, but other than deciding on its name and defining its general aim as ‘defending the Republic’, little was done to organise it.
While some journalists may have taken de Valera’s threat to retire from politics seriously, J. L. Garvin of The Observer refused to believe it. In a widely circulated article, republished in the New York Times, he described the President as ‘a Robespierre who would send the dearest of his former friends to the guillotine for a formula and eat his dinner afterwards with self-righteousness’.
Collins responded to de Valera’s resignation next day by proposing that the President be replaced by a committee of public safety consisting of representatives from both sides until a general election could be held. But de Valera rejected this as unconstitutional. ‘This assembly must choose its executive according to its constitution,’ he insisted.
Kathleen Clarke surprised many at this point by proposing de Valera for re-election as ‘President of the Irish Republic’. But Collins was ready for the move.
‘We expected something like this,’ he said. ‘We would have been fools if we had not anticipated it.’ If de Valera was re-elected, he warned, ‘everybody will regard us a laughing stock’.
De Valera explained that he would ‘carry on as before and forget this Treaty’, if he was re-elected. ‘I do not believe that the Irish people, if they thoroughly understood it, would stand for it,’ he added.
It was not just his arrogance that critics found offensive, but also the smug, self-righteous way in which he sought re-election. It was as if he was saying that he wished to go back to private life but, because he was more intelligent than most Irish people and could see things that they could not understand, he would condescend to serve them. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘I am only putting myself at your disposal and at the disposal of the nation. I do not want office at all.’
‘I do not ask you to elect me,’ he said, re-emphasising the point moments later. ‘I am not seeking to get any power whatever in this nation. I am quite glad and anxious to get back to private life.’
If de Valera won, Collins said that he would quit. ‘I will go down to the people of South Cork and tell them that I did my best, that I could bring the thing no further, “and now you can elect a representative who will carry the Irish nation further”.’
‘There is only one man who can lead us properly and keep us all together,’ Brugha interjected. ‘If Eamon de Valera did not happen to be President who would have kept Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and myself together?’
‘That is true,’ replied Collins. ‘It is not today or yesterday it started.’
‘I only wish to God we could be brought together again under his leadership,’ Brugha continued. ‘I only wish it was possible.’
‘It is not, though,’ said Collins.
In a cold, reasoned response, Griffith depicted de Valera’s tactics as a ‘political manoeuvre to get round the Treaty’. It was an attempt to exploit the emotions of deputies. ‘There is no necessity for him to resign today,’ Griffith added. ‘His resignation and going up again for re-election is simply an attempt to wreck this Treaty.’
In accordance with the Treaty, a Provisional Government was to be set up in Dublin Castle to take over the administration of the country from the British regime, and de Valera was now suggesting that the pro-Treaty people form a Provisional Government while he would remain on as President of Dáil Éireann as a kind of reserve. ‘If the Provisional Government goes to Dublin Castle and takes on the functioning we will not interfere with them,’ he said. ‘Let them deal with their government as they please.’
As nobody else had been nominated for President, Stack argued that de Valera ‘has been re-elected unanimously’.
‘Well, I am voting against anyway,’ Collins declared.
Another deputy supported Stack’s argument, but de Valera objected. ‘I cannot, naturally, stand for that,’ he said.
Collins tried to nominate Griffith, but the Speaker ruled the Dáil would have to vote on de Valera’s nomination first. As the roll was called, de Valera refused to vote in an apparent effort to dramatise his contention that he did not want the office. This might easily have been a very costly gesture, because the vote was extremely close. He was only defeated by sixty votes to fifty-eight. If just one more deputy had voted in favour instead of against de Valera, his own vote would have given him victory by sixty votes to fifty-nine. His abstention, however, would have led to a tie and the Speaker, Eoin MacNeill, who was pro-Treaty, would probably have voted against the nomination.
The problems of implementing the Treaty in the face of obstructionist opposition became apparent when Collins proposed Griffith as ‘President of the Provisional Executive’, rather than as President of the Dáil or of the Irish Republic. Article 17 of the Treaty stipulated that ‘a meeting of members of Parliament elected for constituencies in Southern Ireland’ should meet to select a Provisional Government — all the members of which had to signify in writing their acceptance of the Treaty.
Collins wished the Dáil to authorise the establishment of the Provisional Government so that it would have continuity from the Irish people. He did not care if the British contended its authority was derived from Westminster. That made no practical difference. But de Valera was adamant that the Dáil could not transfer any of its authority, or do anything to implement the Treaty, without the prior approval of the Irish people. He was contending, in effect, that until the Treaty was ratified there would have to be two Irish governments — the Dáil executive, which would be recognised under Irish law, and the Provisional Government, which would take over the adminis-tration at Dublin Castle and would thus only be recognised under British law.
This whole argument now centred around the actual title of the chief executive and it was ironic that de Valera, of all people, should be so obstinate over the title, seeing that he had changed the title of his own office from Príomh-Aire to President back in 1919 without even consulting his colleagues. Indeed he waited for more than two years before requesting the Dáil to regularise the constitutional position with an oblique amendment in August 1921.
The wrangle over the title was unresolved until next day when de Valera was given his own way. ‘If I am elected,’ Griffith told the Dáil, ‘I will occupy whatever position President de Valera occupied.’
‘Hear, hear,’ exclaimed de Valera. He had won his point. ‘I feel that I can sit down in this assembly while such an election is going on.’
Minutes later, however, he changed his mind and announced that he was walking out of the Dáil ‘as a protest against the election as President of the Irish Republic of the Chairman of the Delegation who is bound by the Treaty’. Accompanied by his supporters, he then walked out of the chamber in what could only be described as a contemptuous insult towards what he insisted was the sovereign assembly of the nation. It was all the worse in the face of a most conciliatory attitude adopted by his opponents.
Collins was indignant. ‘Deserters all!’ he shouted at those leaving. ‘We will now call on the Irish people to rally to us. Deserters all!’
Countess Markievicz turned and shouted towards Collins and Griffith: ‘Oath breakers and cowards.’
‘Foreigners — Americans — English,’ snapped Collins.
‘Lloyd Georgeites,’ cried Markievicz. Mary MacSwiney also shouted something but her words were drowned out amid cries of ‘Up the Republic’ and the counter-taunts of those remaining in the chamber. The sorry spectacle was mercifully ended as the last of the protesters left the chamber.
Griffith was then elected without any further opposition. He proceeded to call a meeting of the Southern parliament, but in obvious deference to the de Valera group, he did not do so as President of the Dáil, but as chairman of the delegation which had negotiated the Treaty. In theory the Southern parliament was a much smaller body than the Dáil, seeing that everyone elected to Stormont was entitled to sit in the Dáil, but in practice this made little difference because, with just one exception, all the deputies who took their Dáil seats had been elected in the twenty-six counties. The one exception was Seán Milroy, a pro-Treaty deputy from County Fermanagh.
Members of the second Dáil had been elected under the machinery to set up the Southern parliament, which was supposed to set up the Provisional Government. It was therefore summoned but only pro-Treaty deputies and the unionists elected for Trinity College turned up at the Mansion House on Saturday, 14 January. A Speaker was elected and a motion to approve the Treaty was proposed by Piaras Béaslaí and promptly agreed without a division. A further motion was then approved ratifying the appointment of an eight-man Provisional Government under the chairmanship of Collins.
All of this had been agreed in advance by the Dáil cabinet. They were just going through the motions of duplicating everything to satisfy both de Valera and the British. It was really only a cosmetic exercise. Others might have highlighted the significance of the occasion with some kind of ceremonial address, but not Collins. ‘We did not come here to speak, but to work,’ he said.
Griffith said a few words about the difficulties on the road ahead and the assembly then adjourned, never to meet again. The whole thing was over in three-quarters of an hour.
Ever since the establishment of the Dáil there had been two administrations in Ireland — the Dáil and the Crown regime at Dublin Castle. In theory this arrangement was continuing, with Collins and the Provisional Government taking over at Dublin Castle. But, with the exception of Griffith and Mulcahy, members of the Dáil cabinet were appointed to the same portfolios in the Provisional Government with the result that the two administrations were effectively being combined under the dual leadership of Griffith and Collins. They had worked well together both while de Valera was in the United States and again during the Treaty negotiations. Hence the dual set-up, insisted on by de Valera, was never likely to be much more than a minor inconvenience.
De Valera declared next day that he would never take the Treaty oath. ‘We will continue every resistance against outside authority that has been imposed on the Irish people,’ he said. ‘We have a perfect right to resist by every means in our power.’
‘Even by war?’ a reporter asked.
‘By every means in our power,’ de Valera insisted.
In the coming weeks while de Valera railed against the Treaty — ‘It is not a stepping-stone, but a barrier in the way of complete independence,’ he argued in an interview with the International News Service on 15 January 1922 — Collins would try to implement it in order to convince the people of the benefits.
Collins sought to do this by taking over from the British in order to facilitate their earliest possible withdrawal. He met with Sir John Anderson, one of the under-secretaries of state, to make preliminary arrangements for the hand-over of power. It was not a particularly memorable meeting, except for one brief exchange. While Anderson and Collins were closeted together, Judge John Wylie, the man who had prosecuted the 1916 leaders, entered the room.
‘You met the Judge before, of course?’ Anderson asked.
‘That’s the damn silliest question I ever heard,’ the Big Fellow replied. ‘Would I be here if I’d met the Judge before?’
As part of the transitional process Collins and his team of ministers went to Dublin Castle on 16 January. Officially, they were there to receive their commissions from the Lord-Lieutenant, but this aspect was deliberately obscured. Inside the Castle they were met by the other under-secretary of state, Sir James MacMahon.
‘We’re glad to see you, Mr Collins,’ MacMahon said.
‘Like hell you are,’ the Big Fellow growled.
The heads of the various departments met their new bosses in the under-secretary’s room. The two groups sat across from each other, eyeing one another suspiciously. The civil servants were struck by the youth of the members of their new government. One of the civil servants noted that Collins was ‘cordiality itself, and there was none of the “top dog” attitude about him’. This, of course, was typical of him. The Big Fellow would show off by reserving his insolence for their bosses, people like MacMahon, or the army commander, General Sir Nevil Macready.
The resolution approving the Treaty was formally handed by Collins to the Lord-Lieutenant, who delivered a short address. Afterwards Collins bounded from the Castle into his taxi and returned to the Mansion House, where he issued a statement. He had just received his commission from the representative of the British King. In effect, he had at least temporarily abandoned the republican stance taken in 1919, but he made no mention of this. Instead he had the exquisite audacity to put his own particular spin on the proceedings: ‘Members of Rialtas Sealadach na hÉireann [Provisional Government of Ireland] received the surrender of Dublin Castle at 1.45 p.m. today,’ he announced. ‘It is now in the hands of the Irish nation.’ Thereafter, even historians would refer to what happened that day as ‘the surrender of Dublin Castle’.
The task confronting Collins and his colleagues was a formidable one. There they were, ‘eight young men in the City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole’, according to Kevin O’Higgins. ‘No police force was functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.’
Collins was personally taking on mammoth responsibilities. As well as being Minister for Finance in the Dáil, he assumed the duties of Finance Minister in the Provisional Government, which meant that he was in charge of fourteen different offices or departments, such as the treasury, internal revenue, board of works, and customs and excise. These would normally be taxing enough for any politician, but Collins also assumed the chairmanship of a committee to draw up the new constitution, and as Chairman of the Provisional Government, he had to oversee the transition of the overall structures of government, which necessitated frequent visits to London. In addition, he was still director of intelligence in the army, as well as president of the supreme council of the IRB. On top of all these he was required to play an arduous political role in defending his new regime against the constant sniping of his political opponents.
On 11 January several prominent officers had served notice on the Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy, demanding that he call an army convention, or they would do so themselves. The signatories included four members of the headquarters staff — Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Seán Russell, and Jim O’Donovan.
Many of the ordinary Volunteers felt that they should have a much greater say about future events. Anti-Treaty elements controlled most of the IRA units outside Dublin and they were anxious that the army should break away from the Dáil and revert to its previous independent status. In response to their demands, Mulcahy summoned a meeting of the headquarters staff and divisional commandants to discuss the situation on 18 January.
The anti-Treaty officers demanded that a full convention be convened on 5 February to select an executive that would take over supreme control of the army from the Minister for Defence. Ernie O’Malley explained that he would not recognise the authority of either the Minister for Defence or the new chief of staff, Eoin O’Duffy, who replaced Mulcahy after the latter became Minister for Defence. O’Malley’s remarks were a blatant repudiation of de Valera’s statement a few weeks earlier that the army owed full allegiance to the Dáil through the Minister for Defence.
De Valera personally protested against holding the convention, but O’Connor was not prepared to heed him. ‘It doesn’t matter to me what he said,’ O’Connor commented. ‘Some of us are no more prepared to stand for de Valera than for the Treaty.’
At the meeting on 18 January Collins appealed to the anti-Treaty officers to hold the line, for the time being, because the British could not be expected to hand over facilities to the IRA if the latter withdrew its allegiance to the Dáil. For the next six months Collins would play a double game. Publicly he would stand for the Treaty, while privately he tried to convince the anti-Treaty militants that he was as determined as ever to rid the country of the British, only now he was attempting to do so by peaceful means. ‘My idea is that if we can get our own army we can tell the British to go to hell,’ he told anti-Treaty officers.
In reality he was acting in much the same way he had conducted himself throughout the Black and Tan period. When in a tight situation he would go up to the enemy and talk with them as if he were a sympathiser. Playing this double game came quite naturally to him, but now he seemed to be playing it with everyone — at times possibly even with himself.
He wanted the anti-Treaty officers to trust him, but some of them no longer had any time for him. Jim O’Donovan, the director of chemicals, actually sparked an unseemly row. ‘You are a traitor,’ he snapped at Collins, ‘and you should have been court-martialled long since for treason.’
Collins jumped to his feet in indignation. Even many of the anti-Treaty people present were incensed. There were shouts of ‘Apologise’ and ‘Withdraw’.
‘I will not withdraw the word,’ O’Donovan insisted. ‘It is true.’
Although most of the anti-Treaty people present wished to set up their own independent headquarters, Liam Lynch would not hear of this, and he was supported by Frank Aiken. Eventually it was decided that a full convention of the IRA would be held in two months’ time. The meeting agreed that in the meantime the IRA headquarters would be run by a four-man committee with two members from each side of the Treaty divide. Mulcahy, who was to preside over the committee, did not like the arrangement, but he agreed to it in order to buy time. It never really amounted to much anyway, because Ernie O’Malley, one of the anti-Treaty duo, was so determined to break away from the Dáil that he never even attended a meeting.
Afterwards Collins was obviously troubled by the growing rift between himself and his former colleagues. ‘I am more sorry than you are that the President and Harry are on the other side from myself,’ he wrote to a friend of Boland. ‘I believe they have missed the tide, for, were it not for taking the bold course I am certain this country would have been split by contending factions, whether we liked it or not. If there be but good will on all sides I am convinced we may still bring the whole thing to final success. In any case, we are going forward, the English are evacuating this country, and surely no one will claim that we can possibly be worse off when that evacuation is complete.’
He was in fact playing the same double game on both the political and military fronts. On 30 January he established a committee under his own chairmanship to draw up a constitution. Although he presided over the committee for the first meeting in the Shelbourne Hotel, he handed over the actual drafting to a panel of experts under Darrell Figgis, who was appointed vice-chairman. Other members included James Douglas, Hugh Kennedy, James Murnahan, James MacNeill, Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, Kevin O’Shiel, and John O’Byrne.
‘You are not to be bound by legal formalities but to put up a constitution of a Free State and then bring it to the Provisional Government who will fight for the carrying of it through,’ Collins told them. ‘It is a question of status and we want definitely to define and produce a true democratic constitution. You are to bear in mind not the legalities of the past but the practicalities of the future.’
Collins maintained contact with members the committee, but essentially left the detailed drafting to them. He attended only one other meeting. In notes to Douglas, he indicated that he wanted a constitution that would be short, simple, and easy to alter as the final stages of complete freedom were achieved. He desired that it should contain only what was necessary to establish constitutional machinery to govern Ireland and suggested the committee omit everything already covered in the Treaty, such as the oath and the clauses dealing with the Governor-General. He also said that the authority of the constitution should rest solely upon authority derived from the Irish people, and that no phrase was to appear which vested executive powers in the King. In short, he was asking the committee to draw up a republican document that would be acceptable to the British.
Collins must have known that this was essentially an impossible task. Although he did not intend that the actual constitution should be ready before June, he asked them to have a rough draft prepared by the end of February. He apparently intended to use this draft constitution to placate the opponents of the Treaty and, then, once the people ratified the Treaty at the polls in April, the constitution would be completed. If he did not use this kind of deception, he warned the British, the Irish people would reject the Treaty.
‘If they did not have an election till after the Constitution was drafted,’ Collins told the British on 5 February, ‘the Treaty would be beaten in Ireland.’
That same evening he met General Sir Nevil Macready to discuss the withdrawal of British forces. He was trying to get the British to believe that he was only stringing along the more militant anti-Treaty elements until he could get the people to ratify the Treaty. At the same time he was giving the anti-Treaty people the impression that he was only stringing along the British until he could get them to withdraw their forces. Once the British had withdrawn, he indicated to his militant friends, it would be a lot easier to change the obnoxious aspects of the Treaty unilaterally. Of course, he could not announce this publicly, because it would scupper the withdrawal.
One of the areas of enormous potential in the Treaty concerned the partition question. Collins was convinced it contained the means of ending partition, because the Boundary Commission could, if implemented properly, render Northern Ireland an unviable entity; hence, he thought that this could be used as a lever to persuade the unionists to agree to a form of unity with safeguards for their own interests.
While he was in London to discuss the transfer of power to the Provisional Government, Collins met Craig on 21 January 1922. They talked about the possibility of closer relations between their respective governments.
‘Can we come to some agreement — some agreement which will allay the horror of the past, calm down the people, try to encourage the best elements throughout the whole of Ireland, and then leave the road open in some future time for the Ulster people whether they will come into your Free State or whether they will not?’ Craig began. ‘It is for you to decide your future policy.’
For three hours they discussed various issues affecting the future of the island. ‘We were able to put our joint names to a document,’ Craig explained. By so doing, he contended, the Free State effectively recognised Northern Ireland and established a precedent for talks between ‘Irishmen who wished well to their common country’.
They decided to try to settle the boundary issue by mutual agreement, instead of relying on the Boundary Commission, and Collins agreed to have the Belfast boycott ‘discontinued immediately’. In return, Craig promised ‘to facilitate in every possible way the return of Catholic workmen — without tests — to the shipyards as and when trade enables the firms concerned to absorb the present unemployed’.
They also discussed the Council of Ireland, which was supposed to be set up under the Government of Ireland Act to co-ordinate matters of common concern between the Dublin and Belfast governments. Craig suggested that it should be scrapped and replaced by joint meetings of the two cabinets, but Collins rejected this because he did not want to recognise the Northern government formally as there would be nothing to bargain with later. Collins proposed instead joint meetings of the two parliaments, but Craig argued that the time was not ripe for this. In the end they merely agreed to try ‘to devise a more suitable system than the Council of Ireland for dealing with problems affecting all Ireland’. They also agreed to meet again in Ireland to discuss the thorny question of prisoners.
On just about every issue Collins appeared to concede, but he was happy enough, as was Craig. Believing that it was necessary to either fight the North or make peace with it, Collins had decided to try the peaceful road first. It seemed as if the Big Fellow was making monumental concessions, but in reality his magnanimous gesture on the boycott was of little practical significance. As far as he was concerned the boycott had been ‘comparatively ineffective’, and he had concluded that it would be better to replace it with tariffs, if necessary. Hence he was careful to include a stipulation in their agreement that the whole thing was without prejudice to future consideration of tariffs by the Dublin government.
Yet it soon became apparent that one or both of them had been engaging in some wishful thinking about the other’s position.
‘With regard to the Boundary Commission I think I have satisfied him, and he has satisfied me, that it is far better that the two controlling interests should meet together and work out a boundary which will be agreeable to those who are living on that boundary rather than have an artificial line, which may leave behind it constant irritation and a great deal of trouble with which we have been afflicted in the past,’ Craig told a unionist gathering at the Ulster Hall on 27 January.
‘I can promise you here today that there will be agreement on the matter,’ the Northern Prime Minister added. ‘He and I will be faithful to the bargain we have entered into, and there will be no disturbance of those people who would desire to go from under our flag to the Free State.’
Craig’s use of terms like ‘our land’ and ‘common country’ certainly looked hopeful, as did his acceptance that there would be no hindrance of those wishing to give allegiance to the Free State. When Craig said that to him, Collins thought he was talking about people in the border areas staying put and simply transferring their allegiance to Dublin, but Craig actually envisioned those people transferring themselves physically to the twenty-six counties.
‘I will never give in to any rearrangement of the boundary that leaves our Ulster area less than it is under the Government of Ireland Act,’ Craig told the cheering unionist throng at the Ulster Hall.
Collins was giving up the right to arbitration in relation to the boundary dispute and agreeing to suspend the boycott, in return for Craig’s promise that the Roman Catholics dismissed from the Belfast shipyards would eventually be rehired. Because of an economic slowdown at the time, they could not be re-employed for some time. Thus, Collins really got nothing but platitudes. It looked like a poor bargain, and the confusion led to suspicion of bad faith on both sides.
The confusion was understandable enough. Craig had been led by the British to believe that the Boundary Commission was designed merely to redraw the border so that pockets of Protestants in Counties Monaghan and Donegal could be included in the North, in return for similar-size pockets of Roman Catholics so that the overall area of Northern Ireland would remain the same. Collins, on the other hand, was convinced that all the nationalist areas adjacent to the border would be transferred.
When Collins met Craig for a second time on 2 February, their talks broke down over the extent of territorial revision that might be expected from the Boundary Commission. Collins contended that ‘large territories’ would be involved ‘and not merely a boundary line’, as Craig was given to understand privately by several British ministers.
Most people in the Dáil accepted Collins’s interpretation, which explains why there had been so little opposition to the partition clauses of the Treaty. Why did people so readily accept this interpretation?
For one thing, Lloyd George had indicated during the Treaty debate in the House of Commons that counties like Fermanagh and Tyrone could only remain within Northern Ireland by force, and he made it clear that he was opposed to such force. And Collins indicated privately that he had received some kind of informal assurance from the British during the negotiations.
During the Treaty debate in the Dáil, for instance, Collins used to meet regularly with IRB colleagues like Seán Ó Muirthile, Joe McGrath, and P. S. O’Hegarty. One evening O’Hegarty mentioned he was surprised at how the anti-Treaty people were essentially ignoring the partition issue.
‘It’s an astonishing thing to me,’ he said, ‘that in the attack on the Treaty practically nothing is said about partition, which is the one real blot on it.’
‘Oh, but that is provided for,’ Ó Muirthile replied. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘How is it provided for?’ O’Hegarty asked. ‘Ulster will opt out.’
‘Before they signed,’ Ó Muirthile explained, ‘Griffith and Collins got a personal undertaking from Smith [Birkenhead] and Churchill that if Ulster opted out they would get only four counties and that they would make a four-county government impossible.’
O’Hegarty looked over at Collins, who grinned. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
Tim Healy told a relatively similar story. In the final week of the Treaty negotiations he informed William O’Brien that he dined with Lloyd George and Churchill. Healy told them that Northern Ireland’s right to secede was ‘likely to be intolerable to Irish national sentiment’. But, according to Healy, Churchill remarked that there was no need to worry on that point, because the government was ready to appoint a Boundary Commission that would ‘ensure the transfer to the Free State of the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh, South Armagh, and (if I remember rightly) South Down, together with the towns of Londonderry, Enniskillen and Newry, and the inevitable result being that Sir James Craig, with the three counties left to him, would be compelled (“compelled” or “forced” was quite certainly the word used) to follow the example’.
‘That,’ said Healy, ‘is a statement of supreme importance. Do you mind repeating it, so as to enable me to transmit it to those men. I cannot imagine anything better calculated to silence their objections.’
Healy took down Churchill’s words in shorthand. ‘Am I to understand,’ he asked, ‘that that assurance is endorsed by the Prime Minister?’
‘It certainly is,’ Lloyd George replied.
Healy read his shorthand notes to O’Brien, who later said that this was the crucial point in the negotiations. But the records of the actual discussions do not back that up. The sticking points in the negotiations concerned the Crown and the association questions. O’Brien’s story of Healy’s impact on Griffith and Collins was only third hand.
As a Northern Protestant and a member of both Griffith’s cabinet and the Provisional Government, Ernest Blythe had a deep personal interest in the Ulster situation, but he dismissed the suggestion that any such assurance had ever been given, because he believed that Griffith and Collins would undoubtedly have mentioned it in cabinet.
‘I was present at a good many cabinet meetings with both in the early months of 1922, and I never heard either of them say anything of the kind,’ Blythe explained. ‘Of course both believed in making our maximum claim and both hoped for the best, and people may have confused what they said we should claim with what they believed we might get.’
Blythe was present when Kevin O’Higgins actually asked Lloyd George what the twenty-six counties was likely to get from the Boundary Commission.
‘Who am I to say what a judicial commission will decide?’ the Prime Minister replied.
In his own account of his private meeting with Lloyd George hours before the Treaty was signed, Collins indicated that the Prime Minister had referred to predictions made by Collins himself. ‘He remarked that I myself pointed out on a previous occasion that the North would be forced economically to come in,’ Collins reported.
Lloyd George had not disagreed with the assessment, but that is something vastly different from guaranteeing that the territory would actually be transferred. If the British were prepared to give such an assurance, Collins should have secured documentary evidence of the promise.
Seán Mac Eoin later stated that Collins actually got a commitment from Birkenhead in writing ‘that if the Six Counties opted out of the all-Ireland parliament, the British Government agreed that instead of one representative on the Boundary Commission they would accept Collins’s nomination of their man and this gave the Free State two members instead of one. This would rectify the situation in Ireland’s favour.’
‘Collins gave me that letter to read,’ Mac Eoin continued. But he added that this letter vanished after Collins was killed. It seems strange that nobody else ever mentioned seeing that document.
Blythe dismissed the story. ‘If you knew Seán Mac Eoin even fairly well,’ Blythe wrote, ‘you would know that he inclines to give play to his imagination and his sense of the dramatic when he is talking about other people and wants to make his story sound a little sensational. I venture to say that no one knowing him even fairly well would attach any importance to testimony from him which, on a matter not directly concerning himself, was intrinsically unlikely. Birkenhead may, like all men, have been foolish in some respects, but he certainly was not enough of a blithering idiot to write a letter of the kind suggested. Whatever he may have done during negotiations by way of innuendo or private hint to suggest vaguely the possibility of substantial transfers to the Free State we can be sure that he did not speak as suggested by Mac Eoin.’
Birkenhead was actually one of the ministers who was privately assuring the unionists that large areas would not be involved in the Boundary Commission transfer. ‘The real truth is,’ he wrote to Arthur J. Balfour, ‘that Collins, very likely pressed by his own people and anxious to appraise at their highest value the benefits which he had brought to them in a moment of excitement, committed himself unguardedly to this doctrine, and that it had no foundation whatever except in his overheated imagination.’
‘At no time was there any question of being misled by Mr Lloyd George,’ Collins declared on 3 February 1922. ‘I never went on any opinion of his on the subject. It was a matter for the inhabitants of the areas involved and for them only.’
The stories about a secret assurance were therefore probably fanciful, but they were the kind of stories that people wished to believe. There can be no doubt that Lloyd George deliberately allowed Collins to expect the transfer of large areas, and he even encouraged this with his remarks during the Treaty debate in the House of Commons.
By mid-February Griffith feared that London ‘were backing off’ on the Ulster question. ‘If the British Government stands firmly on this situation,’ he wrote to Collins, ‘we’ll [be] saved. Otherwise disaster.’
Collins complained to Churchill of provocation in Northern Ireland, after five members of the IRA were charged with possession of arms in early January 1922. They had fired shots at a funeral over the grave of a comrade. At the time they were supposed to have until 28 February to surrender their arms. Collins was particularly annoyed that special police constables had been drafted into nationalist areas like Newry, where they were ‘hunting down and tracking every person suspected of having nationalist sympathies and in general doing their best to make trouble’. He argued that the provocation was ‘apparently part of a determined plan to exasperate nationalist feeling beyond endurance, and thereby stir up strife and chaos between neighbours’. But then, as we will see later, Collins himself was already stirring up things in the North behind the scenes.
On the domestic front de Valera increased the political temperature on 12 February with the first of a series of political rallies around the country. He was introduced to the crowd from a platform under the Parnell monument in O’Connell Street by Count Plunkett as ‘President de Valera — head of the Irish Republic’. He was welcomed by the huge crowd, but it was made up of ‘what railway people call “novelty traffic”’, according to Tim Healy. ‘There was a great curiosity and no enthusiasm.’
De Valera told the crowd that the Irish people would not accept the Treaty because it was signed under duress. ‘We, Irish Republicans, feel no more bound by that agreement signed in that fashion than the nationalists of the generations that have passed felt themselves bound by the equally infamous Act of Union,’ he said. ‘The independence and unity of Ireland have been hopelessly compromised unless you prevent it.’
Gradually de Valera would begin to harp on the drawbacks of the partition issue, which he had showed a willingness to accept during a private session of the Dáil before the Treaty negotiations. ‘As far as I was concerned,’ he said, ‘I would rather have taken the old Council of Ireland Bill for the whole of Ireland than the fullest measure of Home Rule for twenty-six counties. I have made my position as regards partition clear in the Ard Fheis speech of 26 October. It was clear to the Chairman of the Delegation when he went to London, because in the draft Treaty there was a proposal with regard to the six counties.’
In fact there was no clause in Draft Treaty A when the delegation went to London, and his public stance on the issue was merely a negotiating posture. The following Sunday, 19 February, de Valera held a similar rally in Cork at which he raised the political temperature further.
‘If the Treaty was signed under duress the men who went to London broke faith with the Irish people,’ he declared. ‘If it was signed without duress they were traitors to the cause.’
It was particularly volatile stuff. He said the country was ‘in greater danger’ than at any time in the last seven hundred and fifty years, because ‘for the first time in that period a suggestion was being made to give Britain democratic title in Ireland’. He therefore challenged the Provisional Government to fulfil its promise to provide a constitution that would give the Irish people complete freedom.
‘Let them make the boast good,’ de Valera said, ‘frame it, and then come before the people and they would know what they were voting on.’
Over three thousand delegates gathered at the Mansion House a couple of days later for the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, which was dominated by the personalities of de Valera and Collins. ‘As long as I have been working in the Sinn Féin movement,’ de Valera said in his opening presidential address, ‘I have never had a partisan idea in my mind and I hope I will die without being a partisan in that sense.’
During the Treaty negotiations he had been insisting on the unqualified allegiance of the IRA to the government, but now that he was in opposition, he called for two separate armies. ‘I have sufficient faith in the Irish people to believe that they can divide without turning on one another,’ he said.
Most of the anti-Treaty animosity at the Ard Fheis was directed at Collins. At one point de Valera looked straight at him. ‘There are people who talk of Ireland being a mother country but who are content to make here the illegitimate daughter of Britain.’
The main issue before the conference was a resolution proposed by de Valera stipulating that ‘the Organisation shall put forward and shall support at the coming Parliamentary elections only such candidates as publicly subscribe to it, and pledge themselves not to take an oath of fidelity to, or owe allegiance to, the British King’.
Collins argued repeatedly for the chance to demonstrate the benefits of the Treaty. ‘If there is any false dealings with us by England,’ he declared, ‘they will find I am not a Redmond or a Dillon to deal with.’ His supporters relished this kind of bravado.
‘Some people say that England cannot now make war on this country,’ he added. ‘I know that England can go to war, and will go to war, and is at this moment watching for an opportunity to go to war with us.’
‘It is for the Irish people to say whether they will have the Treaty or not,’ Brugha interjected. ‘Put it to the Irish electors and let them decide, whether Mr Collins decided to resign or not. Let the British put someone else in Mr Collins’s place.’
There were loud shouts of ‘Withdraw!’
‘The people of South Cork put me there, not the British,’ Collins replied amid the uproar.
Confusion reigned for some moments before de Valera announced that Brugha would withdraw his statement in substance. ‘I had no intention and I have no intention of offending Mr Collins,’ Brugha said. ‘Mr Collins has been put in that position as a result of the Treaty in London.’
‘By whom?’ some people shouted.
‘By the majority of Dáil Éireann,’ Brugha conceded, and the gathering applauded. ‘Is that sufficient now?’
There were cries of ‘Yes’ from around the hall.
The day’s proceedings dragged on for some nine hours. Although Michael Hopkinson has argued that there was very probably a pro-Treaty majority at the Ard Fheis, because of the make-up of the standing committee elected in January, the organisation outside Dublin was largely in the hands of militants. Collins actually admitted that the anti-Treaty faction probably had a majority, and he was therefore facing defeat. Towards the end of the day’s deliberations, he suggested that they should adjourn for three months to allow passions to cool and give people a chance to see how things were developing in Northern Ireland. Afterwards he and Griffith got together with de Valera and Stack and hammered out a formal agreement.
It stipulated that the elections would be postponed for three months ‘in order to avoid a division of the Sinn Féin Organisation’. Several other reasons were also given, such as allowing the Treaty signatories to draft a constitution that would be published before the election, so that the people would be better able to decide between the Republic and the Free State before voting. During the three-month delay all departments were to be allowed to function as before the signing of the Treaty.
‘These articles,’ de Valera told the Ard Fheis next day, ‘have been signed by President Griffith and myself, Michael Collins and Austin Stack. Four of us have signed these articles of agreement, and we have agreed that we present them to you without speeches.’ Naturally, they received the overwhelming approval of the convention.
The first weekend following the árd fheis de Valera was again campaigning against the Treaty, this time in Limerick and Ennis. In the circumstances, the pro-Treaty side could not afford to allow him to do all the running. They felt compelled to respond on behalf of the Treaty.
Collins and Griffith therefore addressed a massive rally near Trinity College Dublin the following Sunday, 5 March. Although it was a blustery day with showers, a huge crowd gathered between the college and the old parliament building, now housing the Bank of Ireland. Students gathered on the roof of the college and there was hardly room for people to move by 3 p.m. when the proceedings were to begin.
There were several minutes of cheering when Collins mounted the platform under the portico of the bank opposite Thomas Moore’s statue. He took off his hat and coat and walked to the front of the platform and stood there with his hands on the wooden rail until the cheering died down. He then began in a deep, clear voice, and his words were broken only by applause, except for a group of women hecklers.
The speech was a fine blend of emotional appeal and logical argument. He had hoped to have the new constitution ready so that the real benefits of the Free State would be apparent for all to see, before taking the case for the Treaty to the public, but because of de Valera’s regular rallies against the Treaty throughout the country, it had become necessary to speak out now.
After meeting with Lloyd George the previous July, de Valera recognised that ‘the Republican ideal’ was ‘physically impossible’ for the time being and therefore surrendered that ideal, according to Collins. ‘We were sent to make a Treaty with England,’ he said. ‘Everyone knew then, and it is idle and dishonest to deny now, that in the event of a settlement some postponement of the realisation of our full national sentiment would have to be agreed to.’ But now de Valera and his supporters were saying that they were again standing for the Republic.
‘What has happened since to account for the burial of the Republican ideal and its subsequent resurrection?’ Collins asked.
‘Jealousy,’ someone shouted from the crowd.
‘I will tell you what has happened since. The Treaty has been brought back,’ he continued. ‘We could not beat the British out by force, so the Republican ideal was surrendered. But when we have beaten them out by the Treaty, the Republican ideal, which was surrendered in July, is restored.’
He accused de Valera and other critics of exploiting the situation. ‘They are stealing our clothes,’ Collins said. ‘We have beaten out the British by means of the Treaty. While damning the Treaty, and us with it, they are taking advantage of the evacuation.’
Figurative speech was often used by de Valera as an effective oratorical device. In Limerick the previous week, for instance, he had said that the Irish people were like a party that had set out to cross a desert, but on coming to an oasis, some of them argued that they should lie down and stay there, and be satisfied and not go on. ‘Yes,’ Collins now countered, ‘we have come by means of the Treaty to a green oasis, the last in the long weary desert over which the Irish nation has been travelling. Oases are the resting place of the desert, and unless the traveller finds them and replenishes himself he never reaches his destination. Ireland has been brought to the last one, beyond which there is but a little and easy stretch to go. The nation has earned the right to rest for a little, while we renew our strength, and restore somewhat our earlier vigour. But there are some amongst us who, while they take full advantage of the oasis — only a fool or a madman would fail to do that — complain of those who have led them to it. They find fault with it. They do nothing to help. They are poisoning the wells, wanting now to hurry on, seeing the road ahead short and straight, wanting the glory for themselves of leading the Irish nation over it, while unwilling to fill and shoulder the pack.’
‘We are getting the British armed forces out of Ireland,’ he added. ‘Because of that evacuation our opponents are strong enough and brave enough now to say: “They are traitors who got you this. We are men of principle. We stand for the Republic” — that Republic which was physically impossible until the traitors had betrayed you.’
‘Have we betrayed you?’
‘No,’ the crowd roared.
Collins justified his support of the Treaty with detailed arguments on the freedom to achieve freedom, but this time he went further than ever before in relation to the Northern aspect of the agreement. ‘We must remember,’ he said, ‘that there is a strong minority in our country up in the North-East that does not yet share our national views, but has to be reckoned with. In view of these things I claim that we brought back the fullest measure of freedom obtainable — the solid substance of independence.’
‘The arrangement in regard to North-East Ulster is not ideal,’ he said. ‘But then the position in North-East Ulster is not ideal. If the Free State is established, however, union is certain.’ Rejecting the Treaty, on the other hand, would ‘perpetuate partition’.
‘Destroy the Free State now and you destroy more even than the hope, the certainty of union,’ he continued. ‘You destroy our hope of national freedom, all realisation in our generation of the democratic right of the people of Ireland to rule themselves without interference from any outside power.’ Britain believed that it could not concede the Republic at that time without breaking up the Commonwealth. ‘But she will acquiesce in the ultimate separation of the units, we amongst them, by evolution, which will not expose her and not endanger her. We must have a little patience. Have we not gained great things for our country?’
‘We claim that the solid substance of freedom has been won, and the full power of the nation to mould its own life, quite as full for that purpose as if we had already our freedom in the Republican form,’ Collins declared.
‘The solid substance of freedom’ about which Collins was speaking was Britain’s formal agreement according the Irish Free State the same de facto status as the dominions. ‘Our position cannot be challenged by England,’ he argued, because it would be challenging the status of Canada, South Africa, and the other dominions, and ‘such a challenge would disrupt her Empire at once’.
‘War, though necessary and noble, for necessary and noble ends, has terrible effects incidental to it, not only material ruin, but moral effects when prolonged unrighteously; a tendency to lose balance and judgment, to forget or misinterpret the real objective of the national struggle, to grow to believe that strife, even fratricidal strife, is noble in itself. Such things must cease as soon as our freedom is secured, or the nation will perish.’
On the next seven weekends Collins travelled from Dublin to political rallies in Cork, Skibbereen, Waterford, Castlebar, Wexford, Naas, and Tralee. The first of his rallies outside Dublin was fittingly in Cork city, the following weekend.
Accompanied by Fionán Lynch, Seán Mac Eoin, Seán Milroy and J. J. Walsh, he was greeted on Saturday afternoon by a large crowd at Glanmire Station and was taken through the city in triumph, behind a number of bands, much to the annoyance of some armed anti-Treaty men. They tried to disrupt the proceedings by firing shots in the air as he was being driven through Patrick’s Street.
‘The people came out of their own free will to express their feelings, and they came without canvassing and without organisation,’ Collins said afterwards. ‘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.’
Afterwards armed men attacked one of the bands and threw some instruments into the River Lee off North Gate Bridge. One enraged band member jumped into the cold water to recover the drum as it floated downriver.
During the night anti-Treaty militants dismantled the two platforms and threw the wooden planks into the river. Next morning the place around Turner’s Hotel, where Collins was staying, was littered with slogans in red paint calling on people to stand by the Republic. There were also a number of white flags strategically placed in prominent positions, and some of the planks from the platforms could still be seen floating in the Lee. After Sunday mass Collins and his colleagues tried to visit the graves of Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney, but their way was barred by some twenty armed men who threatened to shoot any of them who entered the Republican Plot.
Elsewhere, special excursion trains from Fermoy, Newmarket, and Youghal were held up by armed anti-Treaty militants, who kidnapped the 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 fifty thousand 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 and continued to the top and sat on the crossbar. The laughter of the crowd promptly turned to cheering as Collins and his colleagues made their way to the main platform. It was a most impressive sight.
‘Old people who have seen Parnell, O’Brien and Redmond meetings all say that they never see anything like yesterday’s display,’ Collins gloated next day. He delivered a rousing speech that was typical of the Big Fellow, sprinkled with bravado, and indignant swipes at de Valera, who had had the effrontery to suggest in Cork, three weeks earlier, that Collins was, in effect, 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.
The anti-Treaty organ, Poblacht na hÉireann, concluded that there was a deliberate insinuation of cowardice against de Valera when Collins referred back to some of de Valera’s remarks during the Treaty debate in the Dáil. ‘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.’
The IRA had worn down the British, but it did not defeat them militarily. Hence in negotiating the Treaty, the Irish side was not able to dictate terms. He left no doubt 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. Prior to the truce, for instance, it was not safe for any man to walk the streets with his hands in his pockets. ‘I put up my hand,’ he said raising his hands with a laugh, ‘as often as anybody, but not if I had anything in my pocket.’ While the crowd loved this kind of bravado, it was not his rhetoric that was best remembered but the irresponsibility of about a dozen anti-Treaty agitators who skirted around the periphery of the gathering, firing shots into the air and shouting, ‘Up the Republic’.
Collins remarked on the wonderful composure of the crowd. ‘If there had been a stampede,’ he said, ‘women and little children would have been trampled under.’
That evening when he went over to the home of his sister, Mary Collins Powell, he was accosted by a gunman.
‘I have you now,’ the gunman said, but Mac Eoin disarmed him.
‘Will I shoot him?’ Mac Eoin asked.
‘No,’ replied Collins. ‘Let the bastard go.’
Although de Valera was initially happy with the Ard Fheis agreement postponing the election until after the publication of the constitution, he soon changed his mind and began adopting delaying tactics. He demanded that the electoral register be updated, which would necessitate an even longer delay than the three months agreed at the Ard Fheis. He contended that the existing register ‘contains tens of thousands of names that should not be on it, and omits several tens of thousands that should be on it — the latter mainly those 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’.
Griffith, showing signs of exasperation, 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 in order to avoid certain defeat. Griffith pointed out that while President as recently as the previous November de Valera had been instrumental in having the register updated. ‘In face of this fact you now come forward to assert that the register is invalid,’ Griffith wrote in an open letter. ‘The public can draw its own conclusion.’ If a new register were ‘begun now 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.’
De Valera’s own conduct in recent months and especially in the following days and weeks certainly raised serious doubts about his commitment to democracy. On 15 March, for instance, he issued a manifesto announcing the formation of a new organisation, Cumann na Poblachta, which he said 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 warned 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 to-day you will have to fight to-morrow, and I say when you are in a good fighting position, then fight on.’
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.’ With the British departing, who was de Valera proposing to fight against?
De Valera answered that question himself in both Carrick-on-Suir and Thurles next day, St Patrick’s Day. Speaking in Thurles he told a crowd which included a contingent of armed IRA 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’.
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, would have to, as I said yesterday, march over the dead bodies of their own brothers. They will have to wade through Irish blood.’
‘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. ‘Their 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 the Treaty were ratified, it would not be ratified with your free will, but under the threat of war.’
By this time his remarks had set off a fire-storm of criticism in both the Irish and international press. His speech was widely interpreted as threatening civil war, or even attempting to incite one. ‘Mr de Valera has shocked the whole country,’ The Times of London declared.
De Valera indignantly refuted that he was trying to incite civil war. He contended that he was merely assessing the situation realistically and refuting the argument that the Treaty contained the freedom to achieve freedom. He accused his critics 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.’
There were around seven thousand people in Tralee on Sunday, 19 March, when de Valera took a swipe at the press, by complaining that newspaper owners had ‘an influence altogether disproportionate to their personal worth’. When making up their minds, he said, people should not allow themselves to be hypnotised by newspapers, but should conclude that something was more likely to be false if they read it in the newspaper.
Although de Valera was widely blamed for inciting the IRA, he was, in fact, rapidly losing his sway over the organisation. Under the influence of Collins and the IRB, most of the headquarters staff were pro-Treaty, while divisional commanders and the rank and file of the Volunteers were strongly anti-Treaty, especially in those areas that had been most active in the struggle against the British. The more militant, like Rory O’Connor, the director of engineering, had little time for de Valera any more. He had already declared that he was no more prepared to stand for de Valera than for the Treaty. He wanted an IRA convention called to elect a new leadership, but the headquarters staff — realising their own position 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 again suggested that the IRA should split on Treaty lines.
Many people mistakenly thought de Valera was the actual instigator when O’Connor — claiming to represent 80 per cent of the IRA — announced at a press conference on 22 March 1922 that an army convention would be held in four days’ time, in defiance of the Dáil cabinet and headquarters staff. He added that the IRA, which had freely submitted to the authority of the Dáil, would be withdrawing its allegiance, because the Dáil had exceeded its authority by approving the Treaty.
‘There are times when revolution is justified,’ O’Connor 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.’
The convention was being called to set up a new executive to issue orders to the IRA throughout the country. ‘In effect,’ he 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.
As the convention was being held, Collins went to Waterford for a political rally. Trenched roads, cut wires, a burned platform, and the stealing of band instruments were features surrounding his visit. Supporters of Collins felt that the aggressive and obstructionist tactics of their opponents were in fact indicative of the Treaty’s inherent popularity.
The first sign of trouble was when the train carrying Collins, Ernest Blythe, Joe McGrath, and Seán Milroy was delayed for over an hour at Ballyhain Station, because the communication wires with Mullinavat had been cut. This necessitated a porter walking eight miles. When the party finally got to Waterford, the band to welcome them was unable to play because their instruments had been commandeered by armed men earlier in the day. Several tar barrels that were burning as a welcome were thrown in the river, and the platform that had been erected for them was sprinkled with petrol and set on fire.
Collins spoke, instead, from an upstairs window of the Town Hall. There were frequent interruptions from hecklers, but he parried those effectively, much to the delight of the crowd. ‘I have had occasion to give plain talk to some of those slackers during the past few years; to those who were civilians in war, and who are warriors in peace and I perceive that some of you know nothing about freedom,’ he said.
From a house on the other side of the mall, a banner with ‘Long Live the Republic’ was unfurled.
‘I am not ashamed to see that flag flying,’ Collins said. ‘I can afford to look at it, and that is more than some of you can do.’
The crowd loved it. He was responding to good effect, but the inter-ruptions continued.
‘If you with the black hat down there were as brave this time twelve months as you are now, perhaps we need not be here today.’
In his address Collins was particularly critical of de Valera’s recent speeches. ‘While it was perfectly justifiable for any body of Irishmen, no matter how small, to rise up and make a stand against their country’s enemy,’ he argued, ‘it is not justifiable for a minority to oppose the wishes of the majority of their own countrymen, except by constitutional means.’
‘He states it was to future generations he was referring when he spoke of “civil war” and “wading through Irish blood” in order to get Irish freedom,’ Collins continued. ‘No one can speak for the next generation and no one can tie the hands of the next generation.’ The Treaty was merely the freedom to achieve the desired freedom and any talk of future generations having to wage civil war to undo the Treaty was not just nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.
‘Whatever Mr de Valera’s meaning, the effect of his language is mischievous and, while I do not want needlessly to labour the point, I do want to make it clear to him that a leader must not be unmindful of the implications of his words,’ Collins said. ‘This is more than usually emphatic at this moment, when we are speaking to people just emerging from a great national struggle with their outlook and their emotions not in a normal state.’
‘If Mr de Valera really wishes to convince the public that he did not mean to indulge in violent threats and in the language of incitement, and wants to wipe out the impression caused by his speeches, he must take instant action,’ Collins continued. ‘His explanation, as published, will not do. He must press home the foregoing truths to all his supporters, and he must publicly disassociate himself from the utterances of the former Ministers of Defence and Home Affairs, and from such mutinous views as those expressed by Commandant Roderick O’Connor.’
‘Freedom under the Free State is definite and practical,’ he added. ‘It is there waiting for you to grasp it, if you will. If you prefer Mr de Valera’s policy, which he tells you is now a Republic, can he give it to you? That is the question which the Irish people must put to themselves and answer.’
They were now being intimidated and threatened with civil war, if they decided to accept the Free State. ‘Nobody knows better than Mr de Valera that the Treaty gives freedom to achieve freedom,’ Collins insisted. ‘The whole of his present position is founded upon that fact. He is already using the freedom won to shout for a Republic.’
It was indeed a measure of the new freedom that over two hundred delegates were free that day to attend the convention called by Rory O’Connor. They met throughout the day and into the night in the Oak Room of the Mansion House. The small gathering outside was indicative of their meagre popular support, but they went ahead anyway and formed a new executive with Liam Lynch as chief of staff. Henceforth there were two armies, both claiming to be the IRA, at least for the time being.
The pro-Treaty elements retained their headquarters at Beggar’s Bush Barracks, while the others — branded as Irregulars by their opponents and the press — set up their headquarters in a building that they seized from the Orange Order in Parnell Square. Each claimed to be the regular or official IRA, but for the sake of convenience, and in order to avoid confusion, the pro-Treaty element will be referred to as the Free State army or Free Staters, and the anti-Treaty faction, the IRA or Republicans.
On 30 March Rory O’Connor and his men raided the offices of the Freeman’s Journal and wrecked the equipment, and then boldly issued a statement justifying their actions. ‘I was, with my associates, responsible for the suppression of the Freeman,’ O’Connor announced. ‘A free press is admirable, but “freedom of the press”, according to the view of the Freeman, is the right to refuse publication of articles with which its proprietors do not agree, and the right to undermine the army and seduce it from its allegiance to the Republic.’
Although de Valera later said that he ‘heartily disagreed’ with O’Connor’s repudiation of the Dáil, he nevertheless publicly defended O’Connor’s patently undemocratic behaviour in a series of press interviews in the coming weeks.
The British were naturally alarmed about the IRA split and the way things were developing. As Colonial Secretary Churchill was now charged with dealing with Irish relations. He concluded that the Provisional Government ‘were obviously afraid of a break with their extremists and have not shown themselves on any single important occasion capable of standing up to them’.
‘The Irish have a genius for conspiracy rather than government,’ Churchill wrote. ‘The government is feeble, apologetic, expostulatory; the conspirators active, audacious and utterly shameless.’
Collins had a very difficult meeting in Castlebar that weekend. He would have needed all the experience of the previous public meetings to prepare him for what happened in Mayo. Motor cars and trains were held up to prevent Treaty supporters from getting to the meeting.
A train from Ballina had to be cancelled, but its prospective passengers were luckier than the three hundred people who set out from Sligo at about 11.30 that morning. At Swinford they were informed that the rails had been lifted down the line, about two miles from Kiltimagh. It was three o’clock before they were able to continue their journey. Then they were held up by fourteen armed Republicans, who forced the gangers to lift the rails again at the spot where they had just been replaced. The passengers therefore held a rally of their own on the spot. Ben Ryan, one of the speakers, told them that the tracks had been lifted by men who were lifting the ‘rails of their beds’ while Michael Collins was fighting the Black and Tans. The train had to reverse to Swinford before returning to Sligo, which it reached about nine o’clock.
Meanwhile the Castlebar meeting was a particularly stormy affair with persistent interruptions, some quite dramatic. As Collins was speaking from a makeshift platform on the back of a lorry, a motor car drew up beside him and a solicitor named Campbell from Swinford produced a list of typewritten questions to which he demanded answers. Collins invited him to hand over the questions and there was a brief private exchange between the two of them.
‘He won’t give them to me,’ Collins shouted to the crowd and then tried to take up his address where he had been interrupted. But Campbell shouted him down, demanding that he answer the questions. When a local priest called for order, Campbell suggested the priest should not interfere and proceeded to declare that Collins was a faithful subject of King George.
‘Your conduct is worthy of your record,’ Collins responded angrily. ‘You took good care to be in jail when there was danger.’
Suddenly there was further commotion as some men tried to drive the lorry away with the platform. Alex McCabe, one of the pro-Treaty deputies on the platform, drew his revolver and threatened the would-be hijackers, and there were some moments of electrifying tension. Numerous revolvers were produced. Portions of the crowd took flight, and an anti-Treaty officer in uniform announced they were going to arrest McCabe. An angry scene ensued, as another priest pleaded with the uniformed officer and his men.
Charles Byrne, a tall, young Dubliner, dashed through the highly strung crowd, pursued by officers in uniform. He raced down a side street, and several shots were fired. Many women screamed, and some even fainted. One woman was wounded by a bullet, but the crowd around the lorry held their ground. In the brief lull that followed Collins proceeded with his address, only to be interrupted again.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of the man who shot the woman?’ a uniformed officer shouted.
‘Everyone here knows I am not responsible for that,’ the Big Fellow replied, and the crowd cheered.
Another anti-Treaty officer then announced that the meeting was being ‘proclaimed in the interests of peace’. Somebody started up the lorry, and Collins promptly jumped off as the vehicle was driven away, much to the consternation of the platform guests, who included a number of women and priests. Thus the meeting ended in disarray.
Collins went to a hotel with some colleagues. The officer who had proclaimed the meeting came by to explain that he had done so strictly in the interests of peace. He added that none of the Collins party would be allowed to leave the hotel until they had surrendered their guns, but this order was rescinded by Michael Kilroy, the divisional commandant.
Although de Valera was widely blamed for the disruptive tactics of the anti-Treaty people, because he had initially stoked the radical Republican passions, he was no longer able to control them, if, indeed, those people would ever have obeyed him. He was pretending to lead while he was, in fact, being dragged along by his supposed followers. He made approving statements to conceal his differences with them and he soon found himself compelled to serve his own initial folly. He was like a man floundering in quicksand, sinking deeper every time he tried to move. He was trying to assume a position of real leadership with his statements approving of the actions of the anti-Treaty militants, but each time he found himself outmanoeuvred as his erstwhile supporters moved on inexorably towards civil war.
‘If Dáil Éireann attempted to set up a Provisional Government as the Government of this country, then, I tell you that that Government will not be obeyed, and further that that Government will not function,’ de Valera declared in Dún Laoghaire on 6 April 1922. ‘If the Irish people were allowed a free choice,’ he told another gathering the following weekend, ‘they would choose by an overwhelming majority exactly what these armed forces desire.’ As far as he was concerned, it was wrong to talk about free elections with the British threat of war hanging over the electorate.
‘The threat of war from this government is intimidation operating on the side of Mr Griffith and Mr Collins as sure and as definite as if these gentlemen were using it themselves, and far more effective, because indirect and well kept in the background,’ he declared. ‘Is our army to be blamed if it strives to save the people from being influenced by, and from the consequences of, giving way to this intimidation?’
Collins, on the other hand, condemned de Valera’s emotive language. ‘It is the language of a despot posing as a greater lover of liberty than other men — of a despot who shouted the name of liberty louder while he trampled the forms of liberty underfoot,’ Collins told a rally in Wexford on 9 April. ‘If we proceed to fly at each other’s throats, the British will come back again to restore their Government, and they will have justified themselves in the eyes of the world. They will have made good their claim that we were unable and unfit to govern ourselves. Would not Mr de Valera, then, pause and consider where his language, if translated into action, was hurrying the nation? He had much power for good or evil. Could he not cease his incitements — for incitement they were, whatever his personal intentions? Could he not strive to create a good atmosphere, instead of a bad one?’
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr Edward Byrne, invited leaders of both sides to a peace conference in Dublin on Wednesday, 12 April. Griffith and Collins were on one side and de Valera and Brugha on the other. The attendance also included the archbishop and the respective lord mayors of Dublin and Limerick, Laurence O’Neill and Stephen O’Mara. All that resulted from this meeting, however, was an agreement to meet again the following week. At least the archbishop had got the two sides talking to one another around a table, but with Easter coming up, he had to ask for a week’s recess. De Valera agreed, but the real power on the Republican side had already slipped from the hands of the politicians.
In the early hours of Good Friday, 14 April, the anti-Treaty IRA, under Rory O’Connor, occupied the Four Courts and a number of other buildings in Dublin. Between three and four hundred men were estimated to be involved in the operation. There were all kinds of rumours of a coup d’état, but O’Connor said that they just occupied the buildings, because they did not have enough room elsewhere. He added, however, that scrapping the Treaty was the only way of avoiding civil war.
The similarity with the start of the Easter Rebellion, six years earlier, was unmistakable. Although de Valera was again assumed to be behind the takeover of the Four Courts, he had nothing to do with it. In fact, he had not even been informed, much less consulted in advance. Nevertheless he did nothing to disabuse the public misconception.
A Labour Party deputation that called on him later the same day found him particularly unreceptive to their pleas for peace. ‘We spent two hours pleading with him, with a view to averting the impending calamity of civil war,’ one member of the deputation later recalled.
‘The majority have no right to do wrong,’ de Valera told them. ‘He repeated that at least a dozen times in the course of the interview,’ according to one of those present. He refused to accept he had a ‘duty to observe the decision of the majority until it was reversed’.
Some years later de Valera tried to justify the stand he took at this time. ‘What appeared to be an obvious wrong was being justified by the idea that it was backed by the majority vote of the people,’ he explained. ‘I said that that did not justify wrong. That never justified wrong. If you got a unanimous vote of the people telling you to go and shoot your neighbour, you would be quite in the wrong in carrying out that majority will. You would not be right. Therefore the majority rule does not give to anybody the right to do anything wrong, and I stand by the statement.’
In a purely abstract sense he was undoubtedly correct, but he was not talking in the abstract on that Good Friday. Taking his remarks in their proper context, he was contending that the anti-Treaty IRA had a right to ignore the wishes of the majority of the Irish people. Moreover, he issued an inflammatory proclamation that weekend which ended with an emotional appeal to the youth of the country. ‘Young men and young women of Ireland,’ he concluded, ‘the goal is at last in sight. Steady; all together; forward. Ireland is yours for the taking. Take it.’ It is hard to see how such a statement could have been interpreted as other than an appeal for young people to support the anti-Treaty IRA which had just seized the Dublin buildings.
At a rally in the Theatre Royal, Dublin, on Easter Sunday de Valera said that they had been hearing wails about disunion. Although none of them wanted disunion, he warned that a certain section of the Irish people, followers of those who had died for Ireland, would go marching on. It did not matter whether they would be few or many; they were that section of the Irish nation which had been the point of Ireland’s spear in the past. If people wanted to unify the nation they could do so only by uniting behind that section.
Collins spoke in Naas that day. Some of those who preceded him on the platform had raised questions about de Valera’s decision not to go to London for the Treaty negotiations. ‘I am not going to argue as to why de Valera stayed behind,’ Collins told the crowd, ‘but I know the reason, because I spent five hours with him. I can say if he had gone over you would not have got what we got in the Treaty.’ The crowd cheered loudly.
‘We might as well tear off the veil of sanctity of Mr de Valera,’ Collins added.
‘It is time,’ someone in the crowd shouted.
‘I am going to do it from this time forward, and I am going to tell the people where we all stand,’ Collins said. ‘The position is rapidly developing into a state of civil war. The condition of the country is unstable. Life is insecure. Liberty is imperilled. This state of things must be brought to an end. It is a question now between ordered Government and anarchy. The people want ordered Government. They must, and will, have it.’
When Collins talked about life being insecure he could hardly have envisioned what would happen on his return to Dublin that night. He was dropped off outside Vaughan’s Hotel. As he got out of his taxi, he paused to talk with Seán Ó Muirthile and Gearóid O’Sullivan on the footpath outside the hotel. Just then a group of Republicans rushed out of No. 44 and began shooting. It was initially reported that they tried to kill Collins, but this was obviously not the case.
The affair was related to a number of incidents that had occurred in the area earlier in the evening. Some pro-Treaty soldiers who cruised the area in a car had exchanged shots with those in No. 44. During the later incident Collins never thought they were firing at him, but he still chased one of the men into a doorway and took a pistol off him.
The garrison in the Four Courts later issued a formal statement emphasising ‘definitely and emphatically that an attack on Mr Michael Collins was not in any way intended or contemplated. He happened to be in the vicinity during the incidents at Parnell Square, and thus got implicated in the matter.’
When Archbishop Byrne’s peace conference reconvened at the Mansion House on the following Thursday, the atmosphere was poisoned by the personality differences. At one point Brugha accused Griffith and Collins of being British agents. The archbishop demanded that the accusation be withdrawn. Brugha agreed but proceeded to explain that he considered those who did the work of the British government to be British agents.
‘I suppose we are two of the ministers whose blood is to be waded through?’ Collins snapped.
‘Yes,’ replied Brugha quite calmly. ‘You are two.’
For months vile accusations had been hurled at Griffith and Collins, while de Valera stood by indifferently, depicting himself as having consistently tried to maintain the Republican position. He never denied his willingness to compromise with the British, but now he contended that there was never any possibility that this compromise would have been inconsistent with the Republican ideal.
‘Was that your attitude?’ Griffith asked. ‘If so a penny postcard would have been sufficient to inform the British government without going to the trouble of sending us over.’
De Valera tried to explain himself, but Griffith interrupted. ‘Did you not ask me to get you out of the strait-jacket of the Republic?’
‘Oh, now gentlemen, this won’t do any good,’ the archbishop interjected.
‘I would like to explain,’ de Valera said, ‘because there is a background of truth to the statement.’ He said he was thinking of the strait-jacket of the isolated Republic when he asked Griffith to go over.
There was so much bitterness now between Griffith and Collins on one side and de Valera and Brugha on the other that the two sides had to withdraw to separate rooms while the others vainly tried to mediate. The discussions were then suspended until the following week, and the various leaders headed off for rallies around the country that weekend.
Collins headed for Kerry where the two IRA brigades had gone strongly anti-Treaty. There was a split in north Kerry within the No. 1 Brigade going back to before the truce as a result of problems between the brigadier, Paddy J. Cahill, and the IRB man, Humphrey Murphy, but the latter went anti-Treaty anyway despite his IRB connections. Murphy and Brigadier John Joe Rice of the No. 2 Brigade both proscribed the pro-Treaty rallies planned for Collins in Killarney on Saturday and Tralee the following day.
Collins arrived by train in Killarney together with Seán Mac Eoin, Kevin O’Higgins, and Fionán Lynch, as well as a twelve-man army guard under Joe Dolan. They were met at the railway station by an anti-Treaty officer who told them that the meeting would not be allowed. Posters had already been put up around the town banning the gathering and the platform built for the occasion was burned down. The heavily armed contingent of anti-Treaty people had a Thompson sub-machine gun, but their threats were withdrawn following the intervention of a Franciscan priest. The meeting was then held in front of the Franciscan Church, where the sloping ground formed a natural platform
‘“Maintain the Republic,” Mr de Valera and his followers exhort us,’ Collins exclaimed. ‘What Republic? Do they mean the Republic we have had during the last few years with the British here — a Republic functioning incompletely, with British laws, British taxation, British stamps affixed to our cheques and agreements, paying our revenue to the British? Is that the Republic we are to maintain? A Republic during which the enemy was here hunting, imprisoning, torturing, shooting and hanging our people.’
Next day Collins and company went on to Tralee, where they met as much opposition. Special trains had been put on for the Sunday meeting, but only the Dingle train reached Tralee. Others from Killarney, Kenmare, and Newcastle West were stopped because rail lines had been taken up. Virtually every road leading to the town was also heavily obstructed. Collins and his colleagues were at morning mass when the dean of Kerry denounced the efforts to prevent the meeting.
The military escort under Dolan had been strengthened with the addition of a further twenty-four men under Commandant Dinny Galvin of Knocknagoshel. He had been told to disarm the opposition and he not only seized some of their weapons but also arrested a number of IRA men.
Humphrey Murphy protested about this to Mac Eoin, who was clearly unwilling to allow their old IRB ties to influence his attitude. He knocked Murphy down a stairs and then jumped on him and began pummelling him. Collins broke them up and pushed Mac Eoin into a closet to cool down. He then compelled him to apologise to Murphy and a kind of truce was arranged. The men arrested by Galvin were released and the gunmen from each side withdrew to different sides of the town and agreed not to disrupt the meeting.
The Kerry Leader newspaper had come out that Friday with a series of questions that Robert Barton had posed for Collins to answer in Tralee. They were the kind of questions that would be asked again and again over the next fifty years. Barton asked whether Collins and Duggan had flatly refused to present the counter-proposals following their return to London on the Sunday before the Treaty was signed. They certainly had refused, but Collins responded with a disingenuous distortion in which he sought to brush aside the question by appealing to the emotions of the crowd.
‘No,’ Collins lied. ‘We did not definitely refuse. We put it like this, and there are members of the Dáil cabinet who will bear me out on this.’ Brugha had complained at the cabinet meeting about the exclusion of Barton from the talks and Collins said that he just adopted the attitude that Barton could try for himself.
‘Go ahead and see what you can do,’ Collins told him at the time, according to himself. ‘That is the reason that I did not go, and my staying away got better proposals than we would get otherwise, because they thought that I was going to take the field against them again.’ The crowd cheered loudly. This was a time when emotion had more influence than reason.
De Valera had been in Tuam and Galway over the weekend. Speaking in Galway on the Sunday, he again denounced the stepping-stone idea. If the Irish people wished to be free in future, he said, they ‘could not put aside the physical force weapon’. But in Dublin next day he took a very different line as he stressed that he was a moderate. ‘I am not an extreme man,’ he told a meeting near Boland’s Mills. ‘I have always regarded moderation in everything as the highest human virtue.’
Few people realised then that de Valera was now impotent when it came to influencing hard-line Republicans. ‘If de Valera were on your side,’ Mary MacSwiney wrote to Richard Mulcahy, ‘we should still fight on. We do not stand for men but for principles, and we could not more accept your Treaty than we could turn our backs on the Catholic Faith.’
She was in for a rude awakening a couple of days later when the Catholic hierarchy issued a blistering condemnation of the ‘immoral usurpation and confiscation of the people’s rights’ by those in the Four Courts ‘who think themselves entitled to force their views upon the nation’. According to the bishops, ‘the one road to peace and ultimately to a united Ireland, is to leave it to the decision of the nation in a general election, as ordered by the existing Government, and the sooner the election is held the better for Ireland’.
The O’Connor faction was determined to prevent elections, however, and de Valera was grasping at straws. He publicly supported their opposition to the elections by contending not only that the electoral register was out of date, but also that the British were really making a mockery of the democratic process by using their threat of war to bolster support for the Treaty. He charged that Winston Churchill was deliberately exploiting ‘the fear of renewed warfare’ as a means of getting the Irish electorate to ‘go to the polls and support the Treaty’. Hence, he argued, the Republicans were justified in preventing such an election.
His objections to the electoral register were largely spurious, and this would become particularly apparent when he refused to consider several suggestions put forward by Griffith and Collins. They even offered to arrange a referendum in which all adults could participate — whether their names were on the register or not. The people would meet at the same time in designated localities throughout the country and would vote by passing through barriers where they would be counted, but de Valera refused to consider such ‘Stone Age machinery’.
He simply did not want any election at the time, and he publicly justified his refusal to co-operate on the grounds that there were ‘rights which a minority may justly uphold, even by arms, against a majority’. He wanted the vote postponed for a further six months. ‘Time would be secured for the present passions to subside,’ he argued, ‘for personalities to disappear, and the fundamental differences between the two sides to be appreciated —time during which Ireland’s reputation could be vindicated, the work of national reconstruction begun, and normal conditions restored.’
‘We all believe in democracy,’ he told John Steele of the Chicago Daily Tribune, ‘but we do not forget its well-known weaknesses. As a safeguard against their consequences the most democratic countries have devised checks and brakes against sudden changes of opinion and hasty, ill-considered decisions.’ In America a treaty needed the approval of a two-thirds majority of the United States Senate for ratification. As the Irish system had ‘not yet had an opportunity of devising constitutional checks and brakes’, he intimated it was legitimate for the anti-Treaty IRA to do so. ‘The Army sees in itself the only brake at the present time, and is using its strength as such,’ he said.
For one who had championed the right to self-determination for years, de Valera had drifted into an untenable position in his efforts to obscure his own differences with Republican militants like O’Connor.
‘We took strong actions against the Freeman’s Journal, and we have never tried to conceal what we have done since the Army was reconstituted,’ O’Connor declared publicly. ‘Everything that has been done has been done openly and above board, and that is more than can be said of those who want to bring Ireland into the British Empire.’
This was obviously a reference to Collins who, for some months, had been playing a very devious role not with only the Republicans, but also the British and even his own colleagues, especially when it came to matters relating to Northern Ireland. While the partition question had not figured in the Treaty dispute, it began to develop as an issue during 1922 as the Northern situation deteriorated. The January agreement with Craig proved futile. Part of the agreement covered the release of prisoners. On 14 January ten Monaghan ‘footballers’ going to a football match in Derry were arrested in Tyrone. In fact, they were really planning to spring three men under sentence of death for killing a warder during an earlier escape attempt from Derry Jail.
When the men had still not been released by 26 January Collins wrote to Craig complaining that he had been led to believe that the men would be promptly released. Craig’s reply was moderate and conciliatory in tone.
‘If the prisoners will at once apply for bail, I will direct the Attorney General not to oppose,’ Craig replied. But Collins did not want anyone recognising a Northern Ireland court. From the introduction of partition he was determined ‘to keep striving in every way’ to end it. ‘The north-east must not be allowed to settle down in the feeling that it is a thing apart from the Irish nation,’ he wrote to de Valera in January 1921. Although Craig welcomed the signing of the pact as an indication of recognition, Collins still insisted on his side that the new policy ‘must be coupled with a strict campaign of “non recognition”’.
Collins was secretly encouraging Northern nationalists to refuse to cooperate with the unionist authorities. Nationalist-controlled councils were urged not to recognise the Stormont government, and the Provisional Government promised to fund their activities, as well as some three hundred Catholic schools that refused to co-operate with the North’s Department of Education. In addition, in the coming weeks Collins agreed to fund a seventy-two man Republican Guard in Belfast, and he and his chief of staff, Eoin O’Duffy, arranged to supply the IRA in Northern Ireland with weapons that were handed over by the British forces to the Provisional Government. One of the men who actually delivered the guns in Northern Ireland was Seán Haughey, the father of the future Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey.
O’Duffy notified Collins of his plan to spring the three men in Derry Jail by kidnapping ‘one hundred prominent Orangemen in Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone’. The kidnappings were initially postponed because of the Collins–Craig agreement, but on 7 February, when the three condemned men in Derry had still not been reprieved, bands of the IRA crossed the border and kidnapped forty-two unionists and held them as hostages. The aim was obviously to take more, and there were reports that up to seventy hostages had been taken, but the Northern police captured eleven of the IRA men from Leitrim and Longford. The great irony was that the death sentences of the three men had already been commuted to prison terms that day.
Andy Cope assured London that the Provisional Government ‘are doing their best’ in difficult circumstances. ‘Collins has had great difficulty in holding in certain sections of the IRA who were out for hostages,’ Cope wrote.
Collins acted as if the whole thing was natural and predictable. ‘Naturally the people whose feelings were outraged by the impending executions would take some action of this kind,’ he declared. ‘The blame lies with the people who delayed until the last moment in giving a decision as to the fate of the men in Derry Jail.’
He was acting in a dishonest, underhanded manner, as he lied shamelessly to the British and even his own colleagues, including President Griffith, who was in London for talks with the British at the time. ‘The diehards here are representing what appears to me to be the taking of hostages against the execution of political prisoners in Derry as an invasion of Ulster,’ Griffith warned as he asked Collins to issue an immediate repudiation and an assurance that ‘every possible step will be taken to have these hostages released and to prevent the malign influence at work in England against the Treaty from scoring a success’.
‘Throughout yesterday I was extremely anxious as to what might happen in view of pending executions of the three men in Derry prison,’ Collins wrote to Lloyd George. ‘I made special efforts to prevent acts of violence on the part of my people and as soon as I heard of reprieve last night I took steps to have information conveyed without delay to leading men on border in order to allay anxiety and to ensure against any untoward incident.’
Not only had he not tried to stop the kidnappings, but he had also sent two men, Joe Dolan and Charlie Byrne, to England to kill the two hangmen. ‘Mick Collins told us to get them at all cost,’ Dolan later recalled, ‘but if we were captured we could not expect any help from him, as we could not identify ourselves as part of the newly formed National Army.’ Fortunately for the two hangmen, they had already left for Ireland, but Dolan only learned that when he called to one of their homes and actually talked to the man’s wife.
If the British were deceived about his role in the kidnapping, they were not deceived for very long. ‘If your people are going to pop into Ulster and take off hostages every time the Northern Government enforces the law in a way you dislike there will be reprisals,’ Churchill warned Griffith in London on 9 February. ‘We will have a fortified frontier and we will have to put there Imperial troops because they would be more impartial than Northern Ireland troops.’
The British asked Collins for an assurance that he would take ‘immediate steps to ensure release of prisoners and to provide against any repetition of these grave outrages’. They even credited the Provisional Government the following week with securing the release of twenty-six of the hostages. The British clearly realised that Collins was involved, but they had always been anxious to avoid a break on the Ulster issue. Hence they turned a blind eye to his behaviour.
The Provisional Government was deliberately trying to destabilise conditions in the North. Richard Mulcahy, the Minister for Defence, noted that ‘the general aim underlying all operations in Carsonia is to disorganise the economic structure of the territory and to make the hostile inhabitants realise that aiding and abetting the activities of the Enemy does not pay’.
On 10 February the IRA tried to arrest a group of eighteen Northern policemen who were travelling from Belfast to Enniskillen by train. For part of the journey the route went through County Monaghan and the train even had a stop in Clones. Commander Matt Fitzpatrick of the IRA approached the train with his revolver drawn and called on the police to surrender. But they shot him in the head and he died instantly. This led to an extended gunfight in which a sergeant and three constables were killed and the others taken into custody by the IRA.
The incident prompted a horrific retaliation in Belfast, where thirty-nine people were murdered in the next three days. In Milewater Street a bomb was thrown among teenagers playing in the street, killing five of them. ‘In my opinion,’ Churchill wrote to Collins, ‘it is the worst thing that has happened in Ireland in the last three years.’ Craig had already denounced it as a ‘dastardly outrage’, but Collins complained that the Belfast regime could prevent such outrages if they would ‘adopt a sufficiently stern attitude’.
De Valera had no involvement whatever in the kidnapping or the Clones incident, but the press mistakenly thought he was behind them. Some British advisers allowed themselves to be deluded by the press reports and their own wishful thinking that Collins was acting in a strictly honourable way. ‘As has been stated in the papers these were engineered by de Valera and his party who got hold of local sections of the IRA,’ Tom Jones noted. ‘It is hoped that Collins is re-establishing his authority.’
Of course, the sectarian outrages were on both sides. In a three-week period during February, 138 people were killed — 96 Catholics and 42 Protestants. The principal murdering group on the unionist side was the Ulster Protestant Association, a 150-strong group based in a public house in east Belfast. There was also a police element involved, especially the notorious Inspector John W. Nixon. Those elements were as unfit for service as the worst elements of the Black and Tans had been in the South before the truce.
On the night of 24 March five policemen raided the home of a Catholic publican, Owen McMahon. He was lined up with his six sons and a barman who was lodging with the family and they were shot one by one. Only his youngest son, John, aged eleven, survived the massacre by hiding under a sofa. There murders were believed to have been a reprisal for the shooting of two policemen in the area the previous day.
Although Collins had not calculated to provoke such outrages, he persisted with his efforts at destabilising the situation and then blaming Craig’s regime for what was happening. To a degree his tactics seemed to be working when Churchill chided Craig that the outrages in Belfast ‘were worse than anything which has occurred in the south’.
The initial agreement between Craig and Collins had been warmly welcomed in the North with cross-community support, but it had foundered when Craig failed to keep his side of the agreement to ensure that Catholics expelled from the docks would be re-employed. ‘Not one single expelled Nationalist or Catholic worker has been reinstated in his employment,’ Collins wrote to Craig on 23 March 1922.
Craig did not deny this. He just pleaded an inability to keep his side of the agreement. ‘No Government could compel workmen of one class or another in any industry to work with any other unless with the general approval of the workmen themselves,’ Craig declared the following week. He said he had persuaded the workers to agree if employment reached its old level that they would ‘allow Catholics back to the yards’.
Craig contended that the January agreement was really undermined by Collins’s attitude on the Boundary Commission. In particular, Collins had kept him ‘entirely in the dark’ about believing ‘that large territories were involved in the Commission and not merely boundary lines’, Craig explained in a statement on 28 March. Ever since the signing of the Treaty, Collins had made no secret of his expectation that the Boundary Commission would transfer large areas, but it was a measure of how little the partition issue had actually figured in the Treaty dispute in the South that Craig could claim to have been unaware of this.
With the situation in Belfast becoming steadily more dangerous, representatives from the three governments met in London on 29 March. It was the first meeting of its kind ever. By the following day, the three sides had negotiated another agreement, which was signed this time by Collins, Duggan, O’Higgins, and Griffith on behalf of the Dublin government; by Craig, Lord Londonderry, and E. M. Archdale for the Stormont regime; and by Churchill, Worthington-Evans, and Sir Hamar Greenwood for the British government.
‘Peace is to-day declared,’ the agreement began. It outlined a reorganisation of the police in Northern Ireland. In mixed areas the police were to be made up of an equal number of Catholic and Protestant policemen, and the specials (the various police reserves) not required were to be withdrawn and were to surrender their weapons. The uniformed police were also to be disarmed, and all searches were to be conducted ‘by police forces composed half of Catholics and half of Protestants’, with the military being used as an armed back-up. A joint committee, comprising an equal number of Catholics and Protestants, was to be set up to hear complaints. All IRA activity was ‘to cease in the Six Counties’, and it was agreed that political prisoners would be released.
Unlike the euphoric cross-community acceptance that initially welcomed the first agreement, the second one was never really accepted. The agreement was published on 31 March, but next day, after an RIC constable was shot dead, a party of policemen from Brown Square Barracks in Belfast went on a violent rampage in Arnon Street. They killed one man in each of the first two houses that they raided, used a sledgehammer to murder the occupant of a third house, and shot and fatally wounded that man’s seven-year-old son.
De Valera declared in Dundalk that the Belfast murders already made the latest agreement with Craig a mere ‘scrap of paper’. That would soon become apparent to all.
Craig was a particularly hard-headed and obstinate character. It used to be said that he was once kicked in the head by a horse, and that the poor horse had to be put down with a broken leg. Despite several requests from Collins to have the proposed bipartisan committee investigate the Arnon Street killings, along with the murders of two policemen, Craig refused to act. It would be ‘injudicious’ to go back on any of those killings ‘in view of the pleasing fact that peace has reigned for over twenty-four hours’, he wrote on 4 April.
‘It is imperatively necessary to have inquiry into all cases, including the two constables,’ Collins replied. ‘We believe continuation of peace and restoration of confidence depend on the inquiry. The conditions of the Agreement must apply rigidly from date of signing; otherwise they are valueless.’
‘I differ profoundly,’ Craig responded. ‘A few days were required to establish the peaceful conditions now prevailing. I cannot consent to rake up past cases.’
Collins was not even demanding an inquiry into the McMahon case; he was just insisting that the outrages that had occurred since the latest agreement be investigated. Those were not even a week old, yet Craig was dismissing them as ‘past cases’.
The faults were not all on one side. In the following days Collins pleaded that he was unable to get Republicans to evacuate the Orange Lodge in Parnell Square, and he claimed ‘a certain lawless section in the country has illegally reimposed the Belfast Boycott and undertaken the destruction of goods consigned from Belfast’. Many of the culprits, he contended, were driven out of Belfast themselves. In order words, he was suggesting that the unionists were really to blame for his inability to uphold his end of the latest agreement.
O’Duffy had announced the release of the remainder of the police specials arrested in Clones, but the Stormont regime procrastinated with the release of its prisoners. Craig argued that he had pointed out in London that the release would not apply ‘to those convicted of grave civil offences’. Collins had supplied the names of 170 prisoners, but Craig contended they included ‘a very large proportion of criminals convicted of murder and other serious crimes’. The Northern Minister for Home Affairs, Dawson Bates, was only prepared to recommend ‘the release of persons convicted of technical offences of a so-called political character’.
Bates was a virile bigot who was determined to have no co-operation with Catholics. One of his contemporaries later recalled that Bates had ‘such prejudice against Catholics that he made it clear to his Permanent Secretary that he did not want his most juvenile clerk or typist, if a Papist, assigned to his ministry’. The March agreement may never have had much chance of success, but it had absolutely none when Craig was not prepared to stand up to Bates and his ilk. As a result, dealing with Craig required an enormous amount of patience, and Collins, unfortunately, had very little patience and soon became exasperated.
The Provisional Government decided on 21 April that Collins should warn Churchill ‘that unless immediate action were taken by Sir James Craig to show his good faith, the Provisional Government would be obliged to regard the agreement as broken’.
‘General impression amongst our people in Belfast is that the Northern Government has no intention of abiding by the Agreement,’ Collins wrote to Churchill on 25 April. ‘You will I am sure agree that unless something is done at once to remove that impression no arrangement that I could make with Sir James Craig would be of any value.’
In the four weeks after the pact with Craig was signed, thirty-five people — twenty-four Catholics and eleven Protestants — were murdered in the North. Collins accused Craig of ‘keeping attention off the daily practice of atrocities and murders’. But behind the scene Collins was still stirring things up himself with deliberate attacks on the stately homes and businesses of prominent unionists. ‘For a good many months we did as much as we could to get property destroyed,’ he acknowledged privately. ‘I know they think a great deal more of property than of human life.’
Instructing his ministers to keep an eye on the Northern situation, Collins circularised each of them on 5 May to prepare schemes ‘for non-co-operation in every possible way with the Northern Parliament’ as well as ‘a scheme towards making it impossible for them to carry on’.
Churchill had been uneasy about developments in the South for some time. On the day after the March agreement was signed, he was expressing reservations about arming the Provisional Government in Dublin. ‘There can be no question of handing over further arms until we are assured that persons to whom they are entrusted will use them with fidelity to the Irish Provisional Government and will not allow them simply to pass into Republican hands,’ he ordered on 31 March. But he was embarrassed a few days later when the ship Upnor was hijacked off the Cork coast by Republicans who captured its cargo of 381 rifles, 727 revolvers, 33 Lewis guns, and 29,000 rounds of ammunition.
‘It is generally believed here that there was collusion between those responsible on your side and the raiders,’ Collins complained to Churchill. ‘We do not charge collusion from high responsible authorities but we are convinced there has been collusion from subordinates. It is absurd to believe that a vessel containing such quantities of arms and ammunition be left open to seizure in an area where it is notorious our opponents are well armed.’
In fact, Collins was still colluding in supplying the IRA with weapons for use in the North. Believing that Rory O’Connor’s plan was ‘to involve British troops by hook or by crook in hostilities with the IRA’, Churchill was worried that events in Belfast were pushing Collins to the point that he was in league ‘with avowed Republicans’. Collins and his former IRA colleagues were indeed trying to patch up their differences.
For weeks the tension between the two sides in the South had been growing and it had led to shootings in several areas around the country. Eight men had been killed and forty-nine wounded in clashes between the IRA factions. At the rally in Naas on Easter Sunday, Collins had said that the situation was rapidly developing into a state of civil war. Harry Boland, for his part wrote that ‘Civil war is certain unless Collins and Company see the error of their ways and come to terms with their late colleagues.’
On 2 May Collins, accompanied by Mulcahy, O’Duffy, and Gearóid O’Sullivan, met with anti-Treaty officers — Dan Breen, Tom Hales, Humphrey Murphy, Seán O’Hegarty, Florrie O’Donoghue, and Seán Moylan. All accepted that the majority of the Irish people were in favour of acceptance of the Treaty, so they called for the two Sinn Féin factions to conclude an election pact from which a unified coalition government would emerge that would command the unified support of the IRA. This was promptly denounced by Rory O’Connor as ‘a political dodge intended to split the Republican ranks’.
Nevertheless the officers from the two sides agreed to a truce two days later, and there were further talks, which included Liam Lynch, Rory O’Connor, and Liam Mellows on the anti-Treaty side. A ten-strong Dáil committee, with five from each side, was set up ‘to explore every possibility of arriving at an agreement’, much to the annoyance of Churchill, who ridiculed the idea of an agreed election.
‘The Irish leaders move in a narrow world,’ Churchill told the British cabinet on 16 May 1922. ‘They had been men of violence and conspiracy and had hardly emerged from that atmosphere. They had been discussing an agreed election between the two factions by which was meant that so many seats would be assigned to de Valera and so many to the Free State.’
‘It would not be an election in any sense of the word, but simply a farce,’ Churchill wrote to Collins. ‘It would be an outrage upon democratic principles and would be universally so denounced.’
‘What troubled Collins was the split in the Army,’ Seán Ó Muirthile wrote. ‘There were men in the Army that he would go almost any distance to satisfy. He would rather, as he said to me more than once, have one of the type of Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy, Tom Hales, Rory O’Connor, or Tom Barry on his side than a dozen like de Valera.’
The thought of going to war against those old comrades was abhorrent to Collins, but he warned that the peace committee set up by the Dáil was a desperate effort to patch up an agreement. Collins outlined his views in an interview with John Steele of the Chicago Daily Tribune.
The interview took place in the Big Fellow’s new office in the College of Science on Merrion Street. ‘It is probably one of the most handsome and convenient Government buildings in the world,’ Steele wrote. ‘If it had been built specially for the purpose it could not have been better.’ He actually suggested that it would ‘probably become the permanent home of the Irish Government’. He was right, though it was nearly seventy years later that Charles J. Haughey moved into the building as head of government in 1991.
The room that Collins occupied was modest and plainly furnished. He had a table and an American roll-top desk. There was a host of secretaries, typists, and other staff in an adjoining room.
Collins told Steele that he had just returned from the country where he had spent the weekend reading an account of the American Revolution and the early years of the United States by John Marshall, the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court. He proceeded to quote an extract from Marshall’s work:
To be more exposed in the eyes of the world, and more contemptible than we already are, is hardly possible. No morn ever dawned more favourably than ours did, and no day was ever more clouded than the present. . . . We are fast verging to anarchy. Good God, who besides a Tory could have foreseen, or a Briton predicted, the disorders which have arisen in these states?
It was an apt quotation. ‘It might pass for a history of the present days in Ireland,’ Collins said. ‘There are the same divisions, the same disorder, the same rebellious elements. America won through. So shall we.’
He confidently predicted that the pro-Treaty side would win the upcoming election. If de Valera and his followers continued their campaign of anarchy after losing the election, Collins said that he was prepared to take them on, but he added that there would not be civil war. It would simply be a police measure. His jaw stuck out, as he told Steele that the current peace initiative would be the last.
‘If this peace effort fails, then there will be no other,’ he emphasised. ‘Every avenue of co-operation will have been explored and we shall have to take action to restore order in the country. It is not an easy problem; for a revolutionary Government, in the nature of things, must take some account of motives. There is a lot of plain looting, robbery, and violence going on. That is common criminality, and must be punished. Also, there is a certain amount of commandeering from what, after all, is a patriotic, if misguided motive. That, too, must be stopped; but it requires a different method.’
For one thing, gun control was necessary. ‘There are too many guns in the country — uncontrolled guns,’ he explained. ‘A gun is a dangerous thing for a young man to have. Some day he may use it in a quarrel over a girl, or over a shilling, or over a word. That is one of the problems the revolutionary Government has got to solve, and is determined to solve; but it cannot be done in a day or two.’
De Valera had been saying that the people had no right to do wrong, but Collins challenged this. ‘Any people has a right to go wrong if it wishes, and no one has the right to deny it that right, or to deny it the right to exercise it,’ Collins emphasised. ‘No man, and no army, has got the God-given right to say what a people may or may not do. Not even the Kaiser or the Tsar in the days of their greatest glory made such an extravagant claim.’
Even where there were checks on the powers of government, like the presence of a second chamber, there was no right to override the wishes of the people. No modern state existed on the army alone, Collins insisted. The strength of each government depended on the extent to which its executive and legislative branches were ‘supported by a strong army, thus enabling it to carry out a virile policy’.
De Valera appeared to be more conciliatory after the publication of the Collins interview. He proffered an olive branch in the Dáil on 17 May. Having consistently refused to recognise the Provisional Government, he now declared that the Provisional Government ‘could use any machinery’ set up under the Treaty, provided they did not depart from fundamental principles. In short, he was ready to co-operate with the Provisional Government in matters which he thought would advance the cause of Irish freedom.
Collins, who had pleaded with him to adopt such an attitude months earlier, agreed to explore again the possibility of an agreement with him. When they met on 18 May, Collins offered a pre-election pact provided the pro-Treaty side was assured of a six to four majority and the minority gave an assurance that it would not try to wreck the Treaty. He was not ‘looking for scalps or for anything that designated surrender’, he said, but he needed an assurance that the people’s will would not be frustrated. De Valera argued, on the other hand, that ‘the disappearance of the party spirit would bring ample security’.
De Valera had still not abandoned Document No. 2, but Collins had little time for it. A fortnight earlier Seán T. O’Kelly had complained that Collins was completely indifferent to de Valera’s alternative and even hostile to it ‘as a thing of no advance on the Treaty’. In reply, Collins stated that he had ‘no objection’ to O’Kelly’s conclusion. ‘I certainly would not ask any Irishman to risk his own life or take the life of a brother Irishman for the difference — the difference which was described by Mr de Valera himself as “only a shadow”.’
Yet de Valera was still insisting that the new constitution should be consistent with Document No. 2. Hence he refused to guarantee that the minority would not wreck the Treaty when he met Collins again next day. Collins eventually relented anyway, and they concluded an election pact on 20 May. In accordance with it, the two wings of Sinn Féin would put forward a united panel of candidates in ratio with their existing strength in the Dáil and, in the likely event that the party was successful, they would form a kind of coalition government in which there would be a President elected as usual and a Minister for Defence selected by the army as well as five other pro-Treaty ministers and four anti-Treaty ministers. In short, the Treaty would not be an election issue at all.
None of the principals seemed happy with the pact. Some saw it as a victory for de Valera, but he did not share that view. It ‘is no victory’, he wrote. He saw it as a possible ‘slippery slope’, because he did not believe Collins would insist on a republican constitution. De Valera, who had always seen himself as primarily a propagandist, was in a weak position in which he really felt powerless and overwhelmed. Only the previous week he was complaining that ‘the propaganda against us is overwhelming. We haven’t a single daily newspaper on our side, and but one or two weeklies. The morale of the people seems to be almost completely broken, but that was only to be expected when the leaders gave way.’
Griffith was disturbed that Collins had conceded too much, because the agreement had the effect of denying the people the right to express their views on the Treaty. ‘If we were not prepared to fight and preserve the democratic rights of the ordinary people and the fruit of national victory,’ Griffith complained, ‘we should be looked upon as the greatest set of poltroons who had ever had the fate of Ireland in their hands.’
While some people saw the agreement as evidence of the Big Fellow’s reluctance to break the strong bond that was believed to have existed between himself and de Valera, friends of Collins thought he had little time for any of the politicians. ‘He had no great regret regarding the loss of de Valera’s friendship, nor no great fear of the opposition he alone could offer,’ Ó Muirthile noted. ‘He did not worry too much either about parting company with others of his political colleagues.’ This apparently included even Arthur Griffith.
Griffith was particularly cool towards the election pact. When he was asked if he would accept it, he was clearly reluctant. He spent some minutes reflecting, pulling nervously at his tie and wiping his glasses. The other ministers waited in silence for his answer for what seemed like a long time, and when he did assent he no longer addressed Collins as ‘Mick’, but as ‘Mr Collins’.
Despite his own reservations about the pact, Griffith proposed it for ratification in the Dáil, and in the circumstances it was easily approved. There was a new air of party unity in Dublin, but there are grounds for suspecting that all this was intended to cover up a monumental blunder by Collins. He had secretly agreed to support a concerted campaign of action in the North. This explains why even Brugha seemed to be holding out the hand of co-operation to the Big Fellow on 17 May. ‘I suggest to Michael Collins that he and I should retire from public life and go to the north of Ireland on a defence crusade in favour of our people there.’
The campaign in the North, which was set to begin next day, was to involve arson and destruction of commercial property in Belfast as well as RIC barracks, stately homes, and railways in different parts of the province. Collins was supposed to provide support from the South, but reneged at the last moment. He had probably agreed to the whole thing as a means of promoting IRA unity in the South, and having backed out he grasped at the chance of concluding the election pact with de Valera.
Fourteen people were murdered in Belfast over the weekend. Six more were killed on Monday, 22 May, including the first political assassination. William J. Twaddell, a unionist member of the Stormont parliament, was shot dead in the street by the IRA. Later that day the Northern government implemented the Special Powers Act, which authorised the Minister for Home Affairs to adopt draconian measures, like arrest without warrant and internment without trial. It also permitted prisoners to be flogged and even executed, coroners’ inquests to be dispensed with, organisations to be banned, and meetings to be prohibited by ministerial order. That night the police began a sweep of Northern Ireland, backed up by the military. They arrested over three hundred and fifty suspected Republicans and interned them without trial. No loyalists were interned, even though they had been responsible for most of the murders. This, of course, further alienated the nationalist community.
The Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, which adjourned back in February, was reconvened on 23 May to approve the election pact. Collins indicated that he was endorsing the pact even if it endangered the Treaty.
‘We have made an agreement which will bring stable conditions to the country, and if these stable conditions are not more valuable than any other agreement,’ he said, ‘well, then, we must face what these stable conditions will enable us to face.’ He accused the unionists in the north-east of organising a last desperate stand for ascendancy, but in reality it was more like a desperate attempt for nationalist unity on his part. It did not matter whether those present supported the Treaty, or any alternative, so long as they spoke with one national voice, he argued. Since all of them were against partition, he said, they should form a united front on the issue.
Although de Valera was hoping that there would be no contests in the election, Collins emphasised that the pact specifically allowed for all other groups to put forward their own candidates. In order to keep the spirit of party unity, de Valera asked that there be no further speeches on the pact. His reluctance to speak was probably a reflection of his own uneasiness about the pact, which was then ratified by a show of hands, with only four or five voting against ratification.
In an ensuing discussion Collins denounced Republican threats against the press, because the newspapers were not publishing everything they were being given. Authentic cases were published, he said, and journalists had been helpful in the matter, so there was no justification for the threats against the newsmen. He was obviously playing to the press gallery as he raised the spectre of the attack in which Rory O’Connor and his gang had wrecked the machinery of the Freeman’s Journal some weeks earlier.
‘If you are for that kind of freedom,’ Collins said, ‘I have no use for it.’
Collins was engaged in a devious game in which he was telling various people what they wished to hear. ‘Unity at home was more important than any Treaty with the foreigner,’ he told some anti-Treaty people. ‘If unity could only be got at the expense of the Treaty — the Treaty would have to go.’ Yet he was genuinely trying to reconcile the irreconcilable in seeking to draft a republican constitution that would be compatible with the Treaty.
Mary MacSwiney questioned his sincerity about seeking such a constitution. ‘If he is sincere in that, why is he risking civil war on the acceptance of the Treaty?’ she asked. ‘Collins is undoubtedly a clever man, and I am sorry to say an unscrupulous one but do you think for an instant that he can beat L. George in the game of duplicity?’
The British were particularly upset at the news of the election pact in Dublin on top of the upsurge in violence in the North. Churchill described the pact to the cabinet as a disastrous agreement that would prevent the Irish people expressing an opinion on the Treaty and leave the Provisional Government ‘in its present weak and helpless position’. Publicly, however, he adopted a more reserved attitude. ‘We have not yet been able to form any final conclusion in regard to it,’ he said. ‘We have, therefore, invited the Irish signatories to the Treaty to come to London to discuss the matter with the British Government.’ In effect, the invitation was more like a summons.
Collins told Churchill that the pact with de Valera was necessary as an election would otherwise be impossible. It was, he claimed, the only means of securing a vote on the Treaty. ‘The idea was to try and get a non-party Government so as to secure tranquillity in Ireland and at a later date stage a proper election on the main issue,’ he explained.
‘The two parties agree to simply monopolise power,’ Churchill told his colleagues. ‘The one inducement offered to the public to accept the agreement is the hope of escaping from anarchy.’
Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who had recently retired as chief of the imperial general staff and had been elected to Westminster for North Down, was scathing in his attitude towards the pact. ‘The story of the surrender of the Government to Mr de Valera was one of the most pitiful, miserable, and cowardly stories in history,’ Wilson declared. ‘Now Mr de Valera had Mr Collins in his pocket, and it was another proof that, quite apart from the misery of the thing, the Government had miscalculated every single element that went to make the Irish situation.’
Wilson had been invited to advise the Stormont government on security matters in Northern Ireland. He warned that English public opinion would be manipulated by British propaganda into accepting a republic in the twenty-six counties, just as it had got accustomed to murders.
‘There is no doubt that at the conferences which are now to take place there is a very grave danger that the British Cabinet will come to the view that the pact between Mr Collins and Mr de Valera does not violate the Treaty,’ Wilson argued. ‘Should that happen, it will be not only a direct menace to Ulster, but, by establishing an independent Republic within the Empire, it will be the beginning of Imperial disruption.’
When the Irish delegation headed by Griffith and Collins went over to London to discuss the draft constitution during the second week of June, they found the British deeply uneasy over the terms of the election pact. Hugh Kennedy, the principal constitutional adviser to the Irish side, warned that provision in the election pact for a coalition with the anti-Treaty element would be a violation of the Treaty. ‘You cannot have a coalition Provisional Government consisting of pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty members,’ Kennedy explained. ‘Every member of the Provisional Government must accept the Treaty in writing.’
While in London, Collins put up a stout defence of his actions. When Austen Chamberlain pressed him to disavow the IRA’s campaign, he replied that he would not ‘hold the hands of the northern government when Catholics were being murdered’. He was ‘in a most pugnacious mood’, according to Tom Jones, who noted that the Big Fellow ‘talked on at a great rate in a picturesque way about going back to fight with his comrades’. He accused the British of being ‘bent on war’, because they were doing nothing about the situation in Belfast. Jones noted that Collins went ‘on and on at great length about the Ulster situation’.
Collins had ‘become obsessed’ with Northern Ireland, according to Lloyd George, who found himself in the unenviable position of trying to placate the volatile personalities of both the Big Fellow and Churchill. He felt there was ‘a strain of lunacy’ in Churchill, and he said that Collins was ‘just a wild animal — a mustang’. When someone suggested that negotiating with Collins was like trying to write on water, Lloyd George interjected, ‘shallow and agitated water’.
Eamonn Duggan tried privately to impress on the British that they should realise that Collins had been under enormous pressure. ‘We ought to remember the life Collins had led during the last three years,’ Jones noted. ‘He was very highly strung, and overwrought, and sometimes left their own meetings in a rage with his colleagues.’
He had enormous ministerial duties as Chairman of the Provisional Government and Minister for Finance. He was faced with a serious deficit as revenue was expected to fall £10 million short of the £30 million that the government expected to spend, yet that was only a minor problem in comparison with the difficulties of his other functions. He was chief propagandist for the Provisional Government as he travelled to speaking rallies around the country, often under the most trying conditions. He was also the person mainly responsible for conducting the thorny, day-to-day negotiations with the British at an intergovernmental level and with both the Republican and unionist minorities in Ireland, as well as being ultimately responsible for the drafting of the new constitution, not to mention being up to his neck in a conspiracy to destabilise Northern Ireland. Any one of those functions was a full-time job, especially when it frequently involved trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. In the process he left himself open to the charge of dealing in bad faith with everyone — the Republicans, the unionists, the British, and even his own colleagues. The Big Fellow had taken on too much for any one man.
There was no doubt that the British had solid grounds for objecting to the election pact, because its full implementation would almost inevitably violate the provision stipulating that all members of the Provisional Government had to signify their acceptance of the Treaty in writing.
‘Does it matter if de Valera is in charge of education?’ Kevin O’Higgins asked the British. ‘Are we bound to take steps which would wreck the Treaty?’
De Valera realised that the aim would be to appoint him to some innocuous post like Education, which he intended to refuse. He was hoping to be elected Minister for Defence instead.
Without the pact, Collins contended, the anti-Treaty IRA would disrupt the balloting by intimidating people and burning ballot boxes, with the result that there would be no coherent expression of the public will. While the number of visionary and fanatical Republicans was comparatively small, a larger criminal element would support them in order to generate a disorder that they could exploit for their own personal gain. The election pact afforded the opportunity of isolating the criminal elements so that they could be tackled first and a climate could then be created for a proper, free election. As things stood the Provisional Government would not be able to protect all the RIC, especially in isolated areas.
Far fewer people had been killed in the whole of the twenty-six counties since the Treaty was signed than in Belfast alone. Ten Protestant people had been murdered in Cork during late April, but the condemnation of this had been universal throughout the South. When Sir Henry Robinson, a Protestant civil servant, asked Collins for protection he was told that the Provisional Government was in no position to protect anybody; he and his family ‘had much better clear out, and come back later when things had settled down a bit’.
The Provisional Government had even less chance of protecting all the people who would wish to vote in the general election. It was only by concluding the pact within Sinn Féin that it would be possible to hold an election. As already mentioned, Collins had insisted, as part of the deal, that other parties and individuals should be free to contest the election. Some of them were likely to defeat anti-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates, he predicted, with the result that there would be an even greater pro-Treaty majority. Not only would this be tantamount to endorsing the agreement but it would also undermine the existing argument that the Dáil had been elected on a platform to uphold the Irish Republic and did not therefore have the authority to implement the Treaty.
Churchill later explained the situation to the House of Commons. If the pact led to an improvement in the conditions of social order throughout the twenty-six counties and a cessation of all attacks upon Ulster as well as upon former servants of the Crown and Protestants in the South, then those advantages could ‘be set off against the disadvantages of increased delay in ascertaining the free will of the Irish people in respect of the Treaty’.
‘If we are wrong,’ Churchill continued, ‘if we are deceived, the essential strength of the Imperial position will in no wise be diminished, while the honour and the reputation of Ireland will be fatally aspersed. By doing nothing we may yet succeed. But if we fail in spite of all our efforts and forbearance, then by these efforts and that very forbearance we shall have placed ourselves upon the strongest ground, and in the strongest position, and with the largest moral resources both throughout the Empire and throughout the world, to encounter whatever events may be coming towards us.’
While Collins was in London there was trouble on the Donegal–Fermanagh border around the villages of Pettigo and Belleek. The former was in Donegal and the latter over the border in Fermanagh. A force of IRA men fired on policemen in Belleek. Collins assured Churchill that the anti-Treaty IRA was responsible. ‘You told us that these forces were not your forces,’ Churchill reminded him a few days later, ‘you disclaimed any responsibility for them. I announced this in Parliament in your presence the same afternoon.’
Churchill forcefully defended the integrity of Griffith and Collins in that speech. ‘I do not believe, as has been repeatedly suggested, that they are working hand in glove with their Republican opponents with the intent by an act of treachery to betray British confidence and Ireland’s good name,’ he told the House of Commons. ‘I am sure they are not doing that.’ After listening to Churchill’s speech from the strangers’ gallery of the House of Commons, Collins endorsed what had been said, but before taking his leave he seemed rather morose.
‘I shall not last long,’ he told Churchill. ‘My life is forfeit, but I shall do my best. After I am gone it will be easier for others. You will find they will be able to do more than I can do.’ Collins then left for Dublin. ‘I never saw him again,’ Churchill added. But he did send him a stern message shortly afterwards when he learned that Collins had lied about the troops in Belleek and Pettigo.
‘It is with surprise that I received the Communiqué issued from GHQ Beggar’s Bush that there were “no other Irish troops”, other than “our troops”, i.e. Free State Troops, “in the district now or then” and I shall be glad if you will explain the discrepancy,’ Churchill wrote. Collins had essentially been caught lying, and Churchill was determined to force the issue, even though Lloyd George wished at all costs to avoid ‘fighting in the swamps of Lough Erne’. Churchill insisted on having his way and even threatened to resign, if necessary.
The British army sent in heavily armed troops to clear the IRA out of Belleek. After a few shells were fired, the IRA fled and the British pushed on to Pettigo, much to the annoyance of Collins, who protested strongly about the incursion into the twenty-six counties. Despite his grave misgivings about the venture, Lloyd George was able to celebrate that night ‘a famous victory’ in what was called ‘the great bloodless Battle of Belleek’. In fact, seven IRA men had been killed.
The Northern offensive had been a disaster for Collins. Indeed, he had already abandoned it, seeing that the Provisional Government had decided on 3 June ‘that a policy of peaceful obstruction should be adopted towards the Belfast Government’. In other words, the offensive was being called off in favour of a more passive approach.
With the round-up and internment of IRA activists, reports from Belfast were extremely gloomy. ‘The Military Organisation is almost destroyed,’ one report warned. ‘Under present circumstances,’ another noted, ‘it would be impossible to keep our Military Organisation alive and intact, as the morale of the men is going down day by day and the spirit of the people is practically dead.’
Meanwhile the delegation in London was abandoning the Big Fellow’s hope of persuading the British to accept a constitution compatible with Document No. 2. The draft constitution excluded the Treaty oath and incorporated a clause stipulating that ‘the legislative, executive, and judicial authority of Ireland shall be derived solely from the Irish people’. There was also a clause stipulating that only the Free State parliament could declare war on behalf of the country. If the British parliament ratified such a constitution for the Irish Free State, this would be tantamount to acknowledging the right to neutrality — that prized right which de Valera had contended would make ‘a clean sweep’ of the whole defence question during the Treaty negotiations.
The British disliked the manner in which the role of the King was played down in the draft constitution. Although the functions of the Crown were not defined in Canada, or even in Britain, Lloyd George noted that it was of ‘a greater potential force’ than other aspects of the everyday government of a dominion. This was what de Valera had been contending, but the British had to play the issue down as they had previously argued that the King was only of symbolic significance.
Tom Jones had feared that ‘Collins might appoint a charwoman’ to the post of Governor-General. ‘I see no great objection if she’s a good one,’ Jones added, ‘but others may take a different view of what is fitting.’
The British insisted on the inclusion of the Treaty oath in the constitution, because its omission could be seen as a violation of the agreement. Griffith had no intention of defending the republican symbols of the draft constitution to the point of breaking with the British. The Treaty oath was therefore incorporated into the constitution and the Treaty itself was scheduled to the document, with the stipulation that the Treaty would take precedence.
The text of the constitution was only released on the eve of the election, which had eventually been set for 16 June. As a result the Irish people did not have a chance to see it until it was published in the daily newspapers on election day. While this fulfilled the strict letter of the Ard Fheis agreement that the constitution would be published before the election, it effectively denied critics the chance of explaining the document before polling. By then, however, Collins had ridden roughshod over the spirit of the election pact.
Speaking in Cork on the eve of the election, he virtually asked voters to support others, rather than vote for anti-Treaty candidates on the Sinn Féin panel. ‘I am not hampered now by being on a platform where there are coalitionists, and I can make a straight appeal to you, to the citizens of Cork, to vote for the candidates you think best of, whom the electors of Cork think will carry on best in the future the work that they want carried on,’ he said. ‘You understand fully what you have to do, and I will depend on you to do it.’
In Clonakilty later that night, he told the gathering that they had a duty to vote for the people that they thought would carry out their policy. There was no doubt this was a violation of the spirit of the election pact. Of course, it should be pointed out that the anti-Treaty faction had already violated the pact by engaging in some blatant intimidation to prevent pro-Treaty independents and candidates of other parties contesting the election.
That same day The Irish Times published a letter in which Dr Browne, the bishop of Cloyne, announced that he was subscribing to the election fund of two independent pro-Treaty deputies in his east Cork diocese. This, of course, was tantamount to asking his flock to vote for those people.
Even though Sinn Féin had deliberately avoided making the Treaty an election issue, there was no doubt about the outcome. The election count took over a week, but from very early on it was clear the electorate were in favour of the Treaty. Of the sixty-five pro-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates, fifty-eight were elected, while only thirty-six of the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin people were successful. Even that exaggerated the anti-Treaty support, because seventeen of them were returned without opposition. Where the seats were contested, forty-one of forty-nine pro-Treaty candidates were successful, while only nineteen of forty-one anti-Treaty candidates were elected.
The popular vote painted an even bleaker picture for the anti-Treaty side, which received less than 22 per cent of the first preference votes cast. No anti-Treaty candidate headed the poll in any constituency, and Sligo–Mayo East was the only constituency in the whole country where a majority of voters supported anti-Treaty candidates. Had the Labour Party, which was pro-Treaty, run more candidates it might have surpassed the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin vote, seeing that the total vote of Labour’s eighteen candidates was only 1,353 votes short of the combined total of the forty-one anti-Treaty candidates who faced opposition. Labour candidates actually won seventeen of the eighteen seats that they contested. There was absolutely no doubt that the Irish electorate favoured acceptance of the Treaty, at least as a short-term measure.
In Dublin the Republicans fared dismally, winning only one of the eighteen seats in the city and county. In the city they lost four of their five seats, only Seán T. O’Kelly being re-elected; and they failed to win any seat in the remainder of County Dublin, where Patrick Pearse’s mother lost out, even though she was the only anti-Treaty Republican seeking election in the six-seat constituency. The poll there was headed by Darrell Figgis, who ran as a pro-Treaty independent. Thomas Johnson, the Labour leader, came in second.
‘Labour and Treaty sweep the country,’ Harry Boland noted in his diary. Yet he and his colleagues had no intention of accepting the popular verdict. Two days after the election, the anti-Treaty IRA held another convention at which it was proposed to give the British government seventy-two hours, notice of their intention to terminate the truce. Although twelve of the sixteen-man executive supported the motion, it was vigorously opposed by the chief of staff, Liam Lynch, and also by Cathal Brugha. When the matter was put to a vote, the proposal was narrowly defeated by 118 to 103 votes.
Rory O’Connor and other hard-liners refused to accept the decision. They returned to the Four Courts, where they locked out those who had voted against their motion. The twelve dissident members of the executive repudiated Lynch and elected a new chief of staff of their own, Joe McKelvey.
De Valera played no part in the machinations of those in the Four Courts. He concentrated instead on political matters, denouncing the decision of the people. ‘These results seem, indeed, a triumph for the Imperial methods of pacification,’ he contended in a statement issued on 21 June. As far as he was concerned, the Irish people were intimidated into voting as the British desired by the threat of war. ‘But their hearts and their aspirations are unchanged,’ he added. ‘Ireland unfree will never be at rest, or genuinely reconciled with England.’
De Valera still confidently expected to be a member of the new cabinet in line with the election pact and he was determined to oppose the ratification of the new constitution. ‘It will exclude from public service and disenfranchise every honest Republican,’ he contended. ‘Dáil Éireann will not dishonour itself by passing it.’
The Roman Catholic hierarchy denounced conditions in the country and called upon the people to insist that the government prevent Ireland being rushed headlong into the abyss. Next day, 22 June, the political climate was further poisoned with the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson in London by two members of the IRA, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, who were captured after a short chase. The murder sparked a chain of events that were to have tragic consequences for the nation.
‘Documents have been found upon the murderers of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson which clearly connect the assassins with the Irish Republican Army, and which further reveal the existence of a definite conspiracy against the peace and order of this country,’ Lloyd George complained. ‘The ambiguous position of the Irish Republican Army can no longer be ignored by the British Government. Still less can Mr Rory O’Connor be permitted to remain with his followers and his arsenal in open rebellion in the heart of Dublin in possession of the Courts of Justice, organising and sending out from this centre enterprises of murder not only in the area of your Government but also in the six Northern Counties and in Great Britain.’
The British assumed the Four Courts element was behind the murder. Before the truce Dunne and O’Sullivan had reported to Rory O’Connor, who was in charge of IRA activities in England for a time. But some of those closest to Collins later stated that it was the Big Fellow himself who ordered the hit on Wilson, without telling his government colleagues. Of course, there is no more definite proof of this than there is of him ordering the Squad to kill the various detectives in 1919. History must rely on the word of people like Liam Tobin, Frank Thornton, Joe Dolan, and Joe Sweeney.
Collins actually met Joe Sweeney within hours of the killing.
‘How do we stand about the shooting of Wilson?’ Sweeney asked.
‘It was two of our men did it,’ Collins replied, looking very pleased with himself.
When Liam Tobin told Richard Mulcahy that Collins was behind the killing, Mulcahy was so annoyed that he threatened to resign. It was a reckless act that threatened to destroy everything. Collins had allowed his weakness for intrigue and his own turbulent nationalism to get the better of his judgment.
De Valera had no involvement whatever in the murder. ‘I do not know who they were who shot Sir Henry Wilson, or why they shot him,’ he told the press. ‘I do not approve but I must not pretend to misunderstand.’ Later he would contend that the killing of Wilson more than any other single happening was responsible for the breakdown of the uneasy peace, because, he claimed, it was Churchill’s virtual ultimatum which prompted the Provisional Government to attack the Four Courts.
‘Now [that] you are supported by the declared will of the Irish people in favour of the Treaty,’ Churchill warned Collins, the British government felt that ‘they have a right to expect that the necessary action will be taken by your Government without delay’. The British offered to furnish artillery for an attack on the Four Courts.
‘Hitherto we have been dealing with a weak Government, and have been anxious to do nothing to compromise a clear expression of Irish opinion; but now that the Provisional Government is greatly strengthened, it is its duty to give effect to the Treaty in the letter and the spirit without delay,’ Churchill told the House of Commons on 26 June. He went on to accuse those in the Four Courts of encouraging ‘murderous outrages’ not only in Ireland but ‘also probably in Great Britain’, which was an obvious reference to the murder of Wilson.
‘The time has come when it is not unfairly premature, or impatient for us to make this strengthened Irish Government and new Irish Parliament a request in express terms, that this sort of thing must come to an end,’ he continued to the cheers of the House. ‘If it does not come to an end — if through weakness, want of courage, or some other even less creditable reason, it is not brought to an end, and a speedy end — then it is my duty to say, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, that we shall regard the Treaty as having been formally violated, that we shall take no steps to carry out or legalise its further stages, and that we shall resume full liberty of action in any direction that may seem proper.’
‘Let Churchill come over and do his own dirty work,’ was the Big Fellow’s initial reaction.
It was Ireland’s great misfortune at this time that the man at the helm of Irish affairs in Britain was someone as volatile and tempestuous as Churchill, who prided himself as a man of action, but whose judgment on Irish matters was suspect, to say the least. The British commander in Ireland, General Sir Nevil Macready, was actually ordered to attack the Four Courts, but he astutely delayed, while those in the building forced the pace of events themselves.
On 27 June they raided the premises of a Dublin car dealer and seized sixteen cars in which they planned to convoy a small force to Northern Ireland, where they planned to restart hostilities with the British. Forces of the Provisional Government managed to arrest some of the raiders, and those in the Four Courts retaliated by seizing J. J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell, the deputy chief of staff of the Provisional Government’s army.
At this point Collins had had enough. ‘The Irregular Forces in the Four Courts continued in their mutinous attitude,’ he observed in some notes drawn up during the Civil War. ‘They openly defied the newly expressed will of the people. On the pretext of enforcing a boycott of British goods, they raided and looted a Dublin garage, and when the leaders of the raid were arrested by the National Forces, they retaliated by the seizure of one of the principal officers of the National Army.’
The Provisional Government had two courses open to it, Collins contended: ‘either to betray its trust and surrender to the mutineers, or to fulfil its duty and carry out the work entrusted to it by the people’.
An ultimatum was sent to those in the Four Courts to withdraw by the early hours of 28 June. At the same time the Provisional Government issued a statement to the press. ‘Outrages such as these must cease at once and cease for ever.’ Business life had been suffering and this resulted in unemployment and distress. ‘The Government is determined that the country shall no longer be held up from the pursuit of its normal life and the re-establishment of its free national institutions’.
When the time-limit on the ultimatum expired, the forces of the Provisional Government bombarded the building. In view of Churchill’s comments in the House of Commons hours earlier, Republicans concluded that the attack was launched at the bidding of the British, who provided the heavy artillery. Just as the attack on Fort Sumner marked the opening of the American Civil War, the attack on the Four Courts would henceforth be considered the start of the Irish Civil War.