The responsibility of the leaders of the Republican movement was now awesome. They had to emerge from the blend of euphoric fantasy and day-to-day realism in which they had lived for the past five years and render account not only to the Irish people whom they had brought along with them but also, in their own view at any rate, to the past generations of Irish history. For the first time they faced the British Government as Redmond and Dillon had had to face them: round the negotiating table.
What were the realities with which they were confronted?
The truce had been a victory and a defeat for both sides. With it both sides acknowledged that they would prefer to fight no more. Inasmuch as the British Government were by far the stronger party and had always before been able to crush armed Irish rebellion, this represented a unique Irish victory. The government was treating its opponents as nominal equals. On the other hand they were not equals, and both sides knew it.
Far from having been able to drive the British out of Ireland, the IRA had been unable, as Mulcahy, the Chief of Staff, was soon to remind it, to drive them out of anything more than ‘a fairly good-sized police barracks’.1 If it came again to a mere test of strength – and contingency plans for the introduction of 250,000 British troops and even a blockade of Ireland were being discussed2 – the IRA could never physically win. Moreover, in the sort of war the IRA had been fighting, a truce was much more harmful to their future capabilities than it was to that of regular professional forces. Key men had to come out into the open; the highly-strung tension on which so much of the successful morale of underground warfare depends was relaxed; and a population overwhelmed by relief automatically became less ready to resume the burdens of a war in which they had always been the chief sufferers. To offset this physical imbalance a most important political factor operated in favour of the Irish. The Irish leaders were unquestionably now representative of the vast majority of the Irish people, and British public opinion would only have been prepared to see the government’s superior might made use of under certain circumstances.
This was really the strongest card in the Irish hand. Provided the terms they held out for did not seem outrageous to British public opinion, the government would have to forgo its physical advantage and submit to them.
There were two points around which all discussion of terms revolved. The first was the question of allegiance to the British Crown, carrying within it the very real issue of British security from some future enemy’s attack through Ireland. The second was the question of North-East Ulster. The Crown in itself had never in the past been an important issue one way or the other in the priorities of the vast majority of Irishmen, concerned as they were with their everyday grievances. Attempts by political theorists like Tone and his Fenian descendants to make republicanism a panacea for those grievances had been ineffectual. The two great mass movements which had effectively sought to deal with grievances on the level of national aspirations, those of O’Connell and Parnell, had had no difficulty in acknowledging loyalty to the Crown. Those national aspirations which survived the resolution of practical grievances, reinforced by the cultural movement at the beginning of the century, continued to be expressed as far as the great majority of the people were concerned in the Home Rule movement. And this continued to accept without question the constitutional role of the Crown. Indeed, it would have been extraordinary if it had not done so. One of the great traditions of nationalism to which all Irish nationalism looked back, that of the Protestant colonists of the eighteenth century, had been based on a nominally independent Crown, Lords and Commons of Ireland – the Crown being shared with England. And it was this model which Arthur Griffith, now to head the Irish delegation to London, had realistically accepted as the only feasible one for the twentieth century.
Griffith’s notion of the scale of autonomy required by Ireland had been far greater than that of the Home Rulers who formed the mass of Irish opinion, but on the question of the Crown itself there had been no dispute with them. Equally, the great majority of those who had voted for a Republic in 1918 had done so not as doctrinaire republicans but in the belief that to bid for a Republic was the most effective way of securing the largest measure of freedom the government could be forced to grant. Few of them then, or three years later, seriously believed that a British Government, whose prime concern for centuries had been the threat to Britain’s security presented by an independent Ireland, would allow Ireland to abandon all form of nominal allegiance to the Crown. From the point of view of British public opinion, all-important to the negotiations, abandonment of the Crown could not be seen as a reasonable demand.
On the other hand, the leaders of the Irish delegation to London were in a peculiar difficulty as a result of their own rise to the position of negotiators for the Irish people. For they represented not only the Irish people but at the same time a minority clique of republican dogmatists who had been the active spearhead of the most recent phase of the nationalist movement. The Republic for such people had become a Holy Grail, a sanctified symbol by which the suffering of the Irish people throughout history was to be redeemed – something inviolable and remote, and certainly not just a means to a political end. Anyone negotiating for Ireland at this moment was in the difficulty of simultaneously representing the Irish people and also representing this unrepresentative minority.
On the question of North-East Ulster there should have been no such complicating factor. This was after all the issue which had brought the mass of Irish opinion into support of minority republicanism in the first place. Only on a point of emphasis was there a difference of attitude. Since it was the all-embracing symbol of the Republic which was vital to out-and-out republican activists, the detail of North-East Ulster tended to assume a secondary position, whereas it was in fact, and always had been, the most important issue.
The early stages of the negotiations were handled by de Valera who, as the subtlest political mind on the Irish side, was well aware of all delicate considerations. He had once declared that he himself was no doctrinaire republican. He could not, however, ignore the fact that influential people both in the IRA and in his own ministry were doctrinaire republicans – among the latter Austin Stack and Cathal Brugha. De Valera was found at his desk by Griffith one day during this period, working out on paper what seemed like some geometric problem of right angles and curves and positions marked A, B, C and D. He explained that he was trying to devise some means by which he could get out of ‘the strait-jacket’ of the Republic and bring Brugha along with him.3 To General Smuts in Dublin in July 1921 he had said – according to Smuts – ‘If the status of a Dominion is offered me, I will use all our machinery to get the Irish people to accept it.’4 And he had already admitted to Casement’s brother, Tom, ‘that a Republic was out of the question’.5
De Valera was in fact offered the status of a Dominion almost immediately but with fundamental reservations, most important of which was that the position of the six counties under the Parliament of Northern Ireland would remain as it was under the Government of Ireland Act. According to Lloyd George, de Valera replied with a demand for Dominion status inclusive of the North, with issues such as facilities for the British navy and air forces to be negotiated later between the two governments; alternatively, he demanded total independence for the rest of Ireland. On being told that these alternatives were unacceptable and meant the end of the truce, he turned very pale and demanded a respite for discussion in Dublin, which was granted. He asked Lloyd George not to publish the proposals and counter-proposals since this, he said, in a significant phrase, ‘would increase my difficulties’.6
The Dail, on de Valera’s recommendation, unanimously rejected the British proposals, but with the air thus cleared he re-established contact with Lloyd George and after much haggling over terminology eventually accepted an invitation to a conference on terms which were without any pre-conditions whatever. They did not imply the sovereign independent status for the Irish delegates which de Valera had doggedly tried to establish. On the other hand, they did not imply any Irish obligation to the British Empire either. The invitation, which followed further conciliatory intervention by George v, asked him to come ‘with a view to ascertaining how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire can best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’.7 The Conference began in London on 11 October.
On the Crown the Irish from the start adopted the ingenious compromise de Valera had worked out by geometry for Cathal Brugha’s benefit and which he now called External Association. The actual use of the word ‘external’ came to him one morning after his first meetings with Lloyd George when he was tying his bootlaces in his house in Dublin.8 The term meant the voluntary association of an independent sovereign state with the British Empire, the membership of such association creating a special link with the Crown which was to be the head of the association.
Ironically, this was one day to become the standard constitutional pattern by which the British Empire or Commonwealth was enabled to survive, permitting African and Indian nationalist states to become wholly independent sovereign states while still linked to Britain. In 1921, however, such a formula seemed totally unacceptable to any British Government as disruptive of the Empire, and though it was to be presented over and over again by the Irish delegates it was always to be flatly rejected. Persistence with it did, however, successfully lead by way of compromise to at least a remarkable obfuscation in terminology of that allegiance the British regarded as indispensable. In any case the obvious Irish tactics were to break with the British, if break they must, not on the Crown – unimportant as it was to the Irish people as a whole and important to the British – but on Ulster.
On Ulster the Irish were on much stronger ground. Few people in Britain or Ireland liked partition. The Unionists as well as the Nationalists in the South were opposed to it. If a British Government were prepared, as they were, to give a form of Dominion status to the vast majority of the Irish people, why, it might be asked, should that status not apply to the whole of their country, including those sections of that vast majority who lived among a relatively small anti-nationalist minority in the north-east? The nationalists had after all already committed themselves in a statement of de Valera’s to the principle of some autonomy within an Irish state for that minority. It was extremely unlikely that British public opinion would want to incur all the moral opprobrium and embarrassment of all-out war in Ireland for the sake of preventing that, particularly if further safeguards were to be given to Britain’s security by the grant of special facilities to the British Navy in Irish ports.
It is easy now to see that the Irish delegation should have stuck rigidly to this position in their negotiations, making further concessions on the Crown, and on other matters if necessary, but on no account abandoning the basic principle of national unity for the preservation of which the Irish people had first called upon their party. We know now that given the evolutionary development of the British Empire that was to take place within even the next ten years, the widening of an Irish Dominion’s internal powers and the eventual extension of its constitutional status would have presented no great difficulties and certainly would have involved no all-out war. But even without hindsight, to say this is to leave a number of vital contemporary factors out of account.
In the first place there was the simple personal factor. Lloyd George headed the British team, the ‘Welsh wizard’ by the lowest standards, and, by the highest, one of the most brilliant political manipulators of all time. Behind him were two men also of political stature in any age: Birkenhead and Winston Churchill. Only de Valera at the head of the Irish delegation might have been a match for Lloyd George, who had already paid him the compliment of saying that arguing with him was like trying to pick up mercury with a fork.** But for reasons which people have interpreted differently de Valera this time decided not to go to London. His enemies have said that it was because he knew there must be a compromise which would incur such odium among republicans in Ireland that he did not wish to be tainted by it. But this is wholly unjust.
It was indeed because de Valera knew there must be compromise that he remained in Ireland, but not in his own self-interest. By remaining in Ireland he was able to retain manoeuvre for two political situations at once. First, he was well positioned for the inevitable game of bluff needed to secure an acceptable compromise in London, with himself advantageously appearing an inflexible symbol of the Republic. Second, he was ready to deal with the delicate political situation that would arise at home with out-and-out republicans when the inevitable compromise on the Crown (embodied, he hoped, in some form of external association) went through. It was an example of the whole Republican movement’s weakness as representative of Ireland in this crisis that the more important political problem should have appeared to arise not across the negotiating table in London but in the reaction to what happened in London among dogmatic republican circles in Ireland. For this reason, above all, Ireland’s best player was, as Griffith put it, kept among the reserves.9 And self-imprisoned in the slight unreality of that Dublin situation de Valera inevitably applied to the negotiations in London something of its unreal perspective.
The other Irish negotiators, in addition to Griffith, were: Michael Collins, who had accepted the role most reluctantly, but whom the British, it could be assumed, would regard as representative of the hard-line IRA – and who conversely might be expected to lend a certain republican respectability to any necessary compromise in the minds of the IRA; Robert Barton, chosen partly for his economic interests, but also because as an ex-English public schoolboy and a land-owner he understood the background and mentality of men like Churchill and Birkenhead in the British delegation; E. J. Duggan, a solicitor who had acted as an intelligence front in Dublin for Collins in the past two and a half years, and George Gavan Duffy who had been a Sinn Fein representative in Paris. Erskine Childers, who had helped make such a brilliantly effective job of Sinn Fein’s propaganda, was the delegation’s secretary. The members of the delegation were defined in their credentials as ‘plenipotentiaries’, but they agreed to keep in touch with Dublin and also to submit the complete text of any draft treaty about to be signed with the British to Dublin and await a reply before signing.10
The full, complex, and detailed negotiations which led to the eventual signing of the so-called Anglo-Irish Treaty on the early morning of 6 December 1921 need not concern us. In the context of seven centuries of Irish history, or, more narrowly, in the context of a century and a half of different forms of Irish nationalism, what is important is what the negotiators brought back and why.
That as negotiators they were outclassed is undeniable. Their own private political difficulties in Dublin were certainly a handicap. But then the British delegation had an analogous handicap with many of their own party rank and file, of whom they were far in advance, in dealing with ‘murderers’ and assassins at all. The British, particularly Lloyd George, simply handled their own difficulties more subtly and skilfully.
The chief mistake the Irish delegation made was to allow the two all-important issues of the Crown and Ulster to become confused. They did not sufficiently single out Ulster as the issue on which to challenge the British to renew the war. This was largely because, though the unity of Ireland was more important than the issue of allegiance, to the people of Ireland in general, the issue of allegiance was of equal importance to the minority of republican dogmatists whom the delegates also represented. In the event they fought both issues either simultaneously or alternatively and lost over both. In terms solely of the tactics which the situation seemed to demand it is amazing to find that as late as ten days after the conference had begun the Irish were writing to de Valera through Childers for instructions as to which issue to give most weight to: Ulster or the Crown. When Griffith indicated that his natural inclinations were to offer concessions on the Crown, de Valera wrote back that there could be ‘no question of our asking the Irish people to enter an arrangement which could make them subject to the Crown, or demand from them allegiance to the British King. If war is the alternative we can only face it …. ’11
It was to be de Valera’s weakness throughout that, staying in Dublin where even External Association presented a problem, he should have been able to feel that he had made all the compromise necessary by (a) being prepared to give up the actual word ‘Republic’, and (b) by conceding a recognition of the Crown as head of the Commonwealth with which Ireland was to be associated. After Griffith had expostulated at de Valera’s interference with the delegation’s power of manoeuvre over the Crown, de Valera became less inclined to make further suggestions, and the dangers of future misunderstanding were enhanced by distance. The possibility that might have been open had the delegation felt wholly free to offer concessions on the Crown was revealed to Griffith by Lloyd George, who said that provided he had Irish reassurances on the Crown he would ‘smite the Die-Hards and would fight on the Ulster matter to secure “essential unity” ’.12 And a few days later Griffith told de Valera that if Ulster proved unreasonable the British Government were prepared to resign rather than go back to war against the South.13
There were two difficulties. The first was that Griffith and Collins had only limited freedom of manoeuvre on the Crown. The second was that in the stage in the negotiations after Sir James Craig had shown himself uncomfortably intransigent towards any change in the 1920 status quo, Lloyd George had introduced a subtle device to try to get himself off both the Belfast and the Dublin hooks simultaneously. The device was a Boundary Commission which, along the lines of his original proposal for the Government of Ireland Bill,** would sit and adjust the borders in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants. If this were to mean what it said, it could only mean that large areas of Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh, together with other areas of County Derry, South County Down and South County Armagh would be transferred to a Dublin government in return for small reverse border indentations in the Counties of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan. On the grounds that any border adjustment of this sort would probably make the Northern Government politically and economically unviable, Griffith had privately agreed to accept it as a temporary solution of the Ulster difficulty when Lloyd George said that what he wanted was reassurances with which to calm his own right wing. When in the last hours of the negotiations, after it had seemed that they would break down altogether over the question of the oath, and the Irish delegates, on referring themselves to Dublin, had been sent back again with instructions to break on Ulster, Lloyd George suddenly produced Griffith’s agreement to the Boundary Commission, the delegates found they did not have Ulster to break on, only the Boundary Commission.14 And to break on that would in the circumstances have come even more unreasonably from Griffith – who had agreed to it privately – than from Craig. It was a superb piece of political manoeuvre on the part of Lloyd George.
The very title of the agreement which the delegates brought back from London – ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty Between Great Britain and Ireland’ – announced a new era in Irish history, a change as fundamental in its way as that brought about by the arrival of the Norman barons seven centuries before. The use of the word ‘Treaty’ conferred a status Ireland had never before been granted.
‘Who are our Ambassadors? What treaties do we enter into?’ Sir Lawrence Parsons had exclaimed, deploring the hollowness of the Irish ‘Nation’ of Grattan’s Parliament, 130 years before. Now she had a Treaty with the country that had disputed her nationality so long. By this document Ireland was given the constitution and status of Canada and the other Dominions ‘in the community of nations known as the British Empire’. (As Collins was to point out, this automatically made the other Dominions guarantors of Ireland’s status.) She was to be styled the Irish Free State – a literal translation of the Irish word Saorstat which Dail Eireann had been using as the Irish for Republic over the past two and a half years.
The ‘representative of the Crown in Ireland’ – a last-minute improvement secured by Collins over the word ‘Governor-General’ – was to be appointed and to act in accordance with the practice of the Canadian Governor-General. The oath to be taken by Members of the Parliament was set down in Clause 4 of the Treaty, and since it was to dominate the future of internal Irish politics for the next six years, is worth studying in full. In many ways it was a masterpiece of ingenuity, a compromise as brilliantly calculated to satisfy equally two diametrically opposed interpretations as any compromise of words could be.
‘I …,’ the oath began, ‘do solemnly swear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State as by law established …’ (Not, it may be noted, allegiance to the king.) It went on: ‘… and that I will be faithful to H.M. King George v, his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations.’15 There was on a purely literal interpretation no oath to the king. The fact that ‘allegiance’ was subtracted from faithfulness where the king was concerned may even be said to have made this point emphatically. The faithfulness sworn was in respect of ‘common citizenship’ with Great Britain, and of Ireland’s membership of the Commonwealth. The very use of the word ‘Commonwealth’ rather than the then current usage ‘Empire’ was in itself a mark of deference to Irish Republican susceptibilities. The phrase ‘common citizenship’ could be interpreted in two ways. In one interpretation it could be made to mean that Irish Free State citizens were still automatically subjects of H.M. King George v as English citizens were, and as Irishmen hitherto always had been. In another interpretation it could be made to seem that common citizenship specifically excluded subjection and was something voluntarily entered into by Irishmen with this Treaty. The whole past history of the close intermingling of the people of the two islands in their everyday lives made this a not undignified decision.
Amazing as it may now seem, Ireland was largely to destroy herself, to know again two rival reigns of terror – by government (though an Irish one this time) and by civilian guerrillas – to read again of executions by the roadside and in barracks yards, to see many more of her fine buildings consumed in flames and the highest hopes of those who had believed in Irish freedom for so long turned to ashes – all on the issue of whether or not the Treaty which contained this oath was a betrayal of all she had been struggling for.
On the question of Ulster, so much more fundamental to the concept of Irish nationalism, there were two major items. First, though the Treaty and the constitutional status similar to Canada’s were conferred on Ireland as a whole, the powers of the Government of Northern Ireland established the year before were to remain unaffected until one month after the ratification of the Treaty by Act of Parliament. If within that month the Government of Northern Ireland so asked, then Northern Ireland was to continue to be excluded from the powers of the Free State. Second, if that happened – and everyone knew that it would – then a Commission was to sit to ‘determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic considerations, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland’.
Except for such adjustments as this Boundary Commission might give rise to, this was basically no improvement on the ‘temporary’ partition of the six counties to which Redmond had reluctantly agreed. Purely theoretically it might be said that since the six counties now had autonomy from Westminster, a sort of constitutional lip-service was thereby paid to the Irish nationalist principle. But in practice, given the known two-thirds anti-nationalist majority in the North, autonomy put paid to the national hopes of those who lived there more finally than subservience to Westminster had ever done. The Boundary Commission alone seemed to give some chance of a reprieve. For if the border were thus re-aligned then large tracts of Tyrone and Fermanagh at least and some parts of Derry, Armagh and Down would presumably be allotted to the Free State, and the question would inevitably arise as to whether ‘Northern Ireland’ could reasonably continue as a viable political and economic unit if so truncated. This was the hope to which Collins in particular clung, enabling him to convince himself that in the end the Treaty would not be found to have destroyed the All-Ireland principle. Just before the Treaty was signed Collins had an interview with Lloyd George in which the British Prime Minister allowed Collins to think that he too interpreted the significance of the Boundary Commission in this sense – i.e. in the sense that it would transfer large areas to the nationalist South.16
The constitutional status of Canada permitted Ireland to raise her own military and naval defence forces, but other clauses in the Treaty gave the British forces certain rights and facilities in four Irish ports. Some recognition, however, of the special strategic relationship between Britain and Ireland had always been made by Sinn Feiners and these rights could hardly be said to constitute a violation of Irish nationality in the circumstances.** Unquestionably the Treaty did not give Ireland the Republic many people had been fighting for. But hopes of getting that had been tacitly abandoned by entering into negotiations at all. Soon after they had begun in fact Collins had admitted in a private letter that Dominion status, though nowhere near a finalized solution, was ‘the first step’. More than this could not be expected.17 And de Valera himself had earlier made the same compromise. What the Treaty unquestionably did do was to end Ireland’s old relationship with England for ever. And that for the vast majority of Irishmen and women after all they had gone through in the past two and a half years, after all their forefathers had gone through in seven centuries, was not a bad start. Ireland at last could now look to herself for salvation.
Of the five Irish signatories to the Treaty – Griffith, Collins, Duggan, Barton and Duffy – none had liked its compromises, but the first three had thought its advantages far outweighed its disadvantages. The essence of their position was that it gave, in Collins’s phrase, the freedom to achieve freedom.
In London Collins, essentially a realist for all the extreme republican position from which he had started as a young man, had successfully adjusted fantasy to reality. Practical by temperament, he was able to maintain the adjustment on return to Ireland. The reality after all was greater than the majority of Irish nationalists only a few years before would have dreamt possible. On the other hand, Collins knew quite well the sort of mood he had to answer to among his former comrades. In the night hours in which the Treaty had been signed in London Churchill had noticed that Collins at one point looked as if he were going to shoot someone, ‘preferably himself’. On his arrival by boat in Dublin on 8 December his first words to his intelligence agent Tom Cullen, who was first across the gangway, were: ‘Tom, what are our fellows saying?’ ‘What is good enough for you is good enough for them,’ came the reply.18
With Barton and Duffy the emphasis in their attitude to the Treaty was different. They had been appalled by its compromises, but thought them better than the alternative which was a breakdown, bringing, if not the ‘terrible war’ which Lloyd George threatened, at least a sterile and dangerous deadlock in which the Irish would have lost all advantage. (Collins, in whose political interest it was to play up the threat of war, in fact rather played it down.) Erskine Childers, the Secretary to the delegation, affected perhaps by the remorselessness of his own propaganda in the later phases of the military struggle, was by now an ascetically severe and dogmatic Republican, and had long been casting a baleful eye on the way things were going in London. Just before the end of the negotiations Collins had described Childers’s advice and inspiration as being ‘like farmland under water – dead. With a purpose, I think – with a definite purpose. Soon he will howl his triumph for what it is worth.’19
The remark is a good example of how Collins, realistic about the negotiations, was equally realistic about the potential political crisis over his shoulder in Dublin – in fact he had already once described Dublin as ‘our over-riding difficulty’.20
Childers, uninhibited by any need to face the personal alternatives of signature or commitment to war, did much to reinforce the grievous doubts which de Valera himself felt when he first read the Treaty’s details as outlined in the evening papers of 6 December. For the plenipotentiaries, though they had returned to Dublin to discuss with de Valera Britain’s final offer on 3 December, when it was regarded by all as unacceptable, had signed, without further reference back, a Treaty that was only marginally improved.
The technicalities which have been endlessly argued over in Ireland ever since as to whether the plenipotentiaries really had full powers or whether they should have again referred back to Dublin before signing (which according to their original instructions they should have done) or whether the instructions were contradictory to their plenipotentiary status, are not in themselves nearly so important as they have sometimes been made to seem. They are important inasmuch as de Valera personally felt them to be important. He was in any case tensely prepared for the political situation he knew he would have to face over the inevitable compromise. Rightly or wrongly, he saw himself in Dublin as the central figure in control of the most delicate part of the political situation. And if that seems a parochial and dogmatic view in the context of the great drama being played out in terms of the lives of ordinary Irish people in London, it must be said that a dogmatic narrowness of view amounting at times to a sense of total unreality had long been one of the weaknesses of the Fenian and Republican movements. When, through what he regarded as a disregard of the technical arrangements he had made, he found himself by-passed in his control, an understandable personal resentment was added to what in any case was his own disappointment with the actual terms.
But that his own idea of what the minimum acceptable terms should have been were not in themselves so different from what were accepted could be immediately seen from the so-called ‘Document No. 2’ which he produced as an alternative in the great debate in the Dail that was inaugurated on 14 December 1921. For Document No. 2 did not mention the word ‘Republic’, though it spoke of the ‘Sovereign Irish Nation’, and inasmuch as it associated Ireland ‘for purposes of common concern’ with the British Commonwealth it recognized ‘for the purposes of the Association … His Britannic Majesty as head of the Association’. The fact that such a formula had been consistently turned down by the British negotiators from the very first hardly seemed to figure in his considerations. But in many ways the most remarkable feature of Document No. 2 was that on the most important question of all, that of Ulster, it actually accepted the provisions of the Treaty.21
The emotion with which de Valera and his supporters in the Dail now opposed Griffith and Collins and their supporters in debate was something which far out-reached the significance of the literal points on which they differed. Given the comradeship in difficult and dangerous times they had shared so long, and the courageous unanimity – unique in the history of Irish revolt – with which they had appeared to face the British Government, given the major national victory achieved by the removal of British rule from twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, and the challenge that remained of vindicating the nationalist principle over the other six, it seems amazing that the movement should now have split as it did, so suddenly and ferociously. Part of the explanation of the intensely emotional character of this split must lie in the simple release of tension that automatically followed a period so long fraught with suppressed fears and anxieties on both the purely human and political levels. Individual personal rivalries and jealousies, too, that had long had to be restrained or concealed, could now leap out into the open.** Closer to the heart of the matter was the removal of the need for what had often been unnatural unanimity. There had always been moderates and extremists in the movement though the difference had been fairly efficiently concealed. More important: there had always been realists and fantasists and this difference was now often revealed clearly for the first time as some of the toughest of the extremists in the past – Commandants of the IRA like MacEoin, of Ballinalee, and Mulcahy the Chief of Staff – followed Collins, the toughest of them all, in support of the Treaty. The women had perhaps the best reason to cling to fantasy: Mrs Pearse, mother of Padraic and Willie, Mrs Clarke, widow of Tom, Miss Mary MacSwiney, sister of Terence, and Mrs O’Callaghan, widow of the murdered Mayor of Limerick, all were passionate opponents of the Treaty. It was a struggle between those who were prepared to come down to earth from the loftiest flights of Irish nationalism and those who were not. And this, of course, was where the Irish people who had never been up there but had allowed their fate to be taken over by republican fantasists almost without realizing it, now suffered from being represented by an esoteric clique, which had to resolve its own contradictions in public.
The Dail in the end approved the Treaty by 64 votes to 57, a result which led to a number of near-theological political adjustments. De Valera resigned as President or Prime Minister and went into opposition to Griffith who took his place. The Treaty stipulated that a Provisional Government chosen by the Parliament of Southern Ireland was to implement its terms and produce the Constitution of the Irish Free State. But the mystical Republic continued in being for a time both in the minds of the supporters as well as of opponents of the Treaty. The Army, the pro-Treaty Mulcahy asserted in the last words of the entire twelve-day debate, remained the Army of the Republic.
The members of Dail Eireann were also nominally members of the so-called Southern Parliament, except for one man who represented only an Ulster constituency and therefore was only a member of the Dail. A momentary ghostly overlap of Parliaments thus became possible as the four Southern Unionists who alone had attended the Southern Parliament’s one previous meeting joined pro-Treaty Dail members to elect a Provisional government. An even more curious ghostly overlap of governments thus came into being. This Provisional government had for form’s sake to have a different leader from that of the fading Republic. Thus Collins, who retained his post as Minister of Finance in Griffith’s government, became Chairman of the Provisional government with Griffith as his closest collaborator. Other ministers of Griffith’s still Republican government became simultaneously ministers of Collins’s Provisional Free State government: men like William Cosgrave, Kevin O’Higgins and Richard Mulcahy. Constitutionally the Irish Republic was disappearing like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
But, of course, there were hard realities, and the chief of them was the Army.