It is more than likely that had the Republican movement been a genuine democratic political movement there would have been, as de Valera stoutly maintained there was, and as all hoped there would prove to be, a proper constitutional way of resolving its internal political differences. But the movement which had been outwardly democratic from 1917 to the General Election of 1918 had since been entirely taken over by violent undemocratic forces from within. Nothing in all the Treaty debate rang more hollow than the continued protestations on both sides that members’ only responsibility was to their constituents. Collins himself, of all people, actually proclaimed: ‘I would not be one of those to commit the Irish people to war without the Irish people committing themselves to war.’1 And Kevin O’Higgins chose this moment to ‘acknowledge as great a responsibility to the 6,000 people who voted against me in 1918 as to the 13,000 people who voted for me’.2
But, of course, it was the Volunteers, the ‘Army’, acting quite regardless of the people’s approval, who had brought about the situation in which there was a Treaty to be debated at all. And not illogically, many of them failed to see why they should be any more responsible to the people now than they had been in the past two and a half years. The IRA had never been very respectful of its nominal allegiance to Dail Eireann and had often been remarkably independent even of its own headquarters leadership. The IRA was now better armed than ever before; its ranks were swelled by new eager young warriors anxious to emulate their elders; its veterans were flushed with what felt like victory over the British, and enjoying the public adulation which easily came their way. The IRA was the effective force in the country whatever happened on the political level.
For many of the most idealistic IRA leaders – men like Liam Lynch and Ernie O’Malley – the Republic may indeed have been a symbol, but it was a symbol which was solemn and very real. ‘It is a living tangible thing,’ declared Liam Mellows, the 1916 Galway leader, during the Treaty debate. ‘Something for which men gave their lives, for which men were hanged, for which men are in gaol, for which the people suffered and for which men are still prepared to give their lives.’**3 Even if only a word it was one which many men had sanctified with all they held most dear and to de-sanctify it was to betray themselves.
Pro-Treaty IRA men were just as agonized by the denial of something inside themselves which support of the Treaty required, none more so than Collins himself. One detail in the complex situation, however, made things easier: the continuing apparatus of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood. Though in most ways superseded by the larger underground apparatus which Collins had developed in the IRA itself, the nucleus of the secret society still existed and Collins himself controlled it. He was able to throw it behind the Treaty with double advantage. First, it gave him a loyal organizational network within the IRA with which to rally material support to his side. Second, it enabled Republicans, even Collins himself, to feel that the establishment of the Free State was a temporary strategic requirement in continued pursuit of the still inviolate mystical Republic. With this factor in their favour Collins, Mulcahy and the Provisional Government were able to carry about half the IRA with them in support of the Treaty, arming them, giving them uniforms and, with a certain amount of ambiguity of Republican terminology, transferring them simultaneously into a Free State Army.
Roughly speaking, the IRA split down the middle, with units conforming to the pro- or anti-Treaty dispositions of their commanders. And since the IRA was officially taking over barracks from the evacuating British forces, pro- and anti-Treaty troops became distributed at random all over the country. Sometimes they occupied different premises in the same town, confronting one another in uneasy rivalry made all the more bizarre by the persisting comradeship of former times.
In March the anti-Treaty faction began to organize itself as a separate force. It repudiated its nominal allegiance to the Dail and in a press interview Rory O’Connor, who had been Director of Engineering in the old IRA and now headed the anti-Treaty section, left no doubt as to where the responsibility for future events was to lie. Asked if there were any government in Ireland to which he gave his allegiance, he responded, ‘No.’
‘Do we take it we are going to have a military dictatorship then?’ went on his questioner.
‘You can take it that way if you like.’4
The civil war which was soon to follow has often been popularly blamed on de Valera, but the responsibility was not his. His anti-Treaty attitude undoubtedly gave a coherence and a political point of focus to anti-Treaty opinion in the country. But anti-Treaty opinion inside the IRA, which was what was to bring about the civil war, organized and consolidated itself independently. It looked not to de Valera but to its own leaders.
On the night of 13 April O’Connor, supported by a new independent IRA executive including Liam Lynch, Ernie O’Malley, Sean Moylan and other battle-scarred combatants of the ‘Tan war’, occupied and set up military headquarters in the Four Courts, Dublin. Interviewed again by the press, O’Connor repeated that the IRA now had no political connections, merely adding that ‘If the army were ever to follow a political leader, Mr de Valera is the man.’ Independent gunmen had long been able to think that they were the only true guardians of Ireland’s destiny and, with their occupation otherwise gone, saw no reason now to relinquish their sacred charge. Collins himself was now at the mercy of the very system he had created.
Politically de Valera still hoped to effect a compromise that would prevent civil war. He had prophesied its dangers clearly enough in near-hysterical words at Thurles in March, when he said that those who wanted to complete the work of the past four years would have to wade through the blood of Irish soldiers and even of members of the Irish Government to do so. It seems he meant this as a warning, though it sounded like a threat. Psychologically, de Valera was in the same position on the anti-Treaty side as Collins was on the pro-Treaty side: both desperate to avoid a split but committed to making a split inevitable.
To Collins’s own anxieties over the anti-Treaty IRA were added complications over the situation in the North. There, the news of the Boundary Commission clause in the Treaty had been received badly by Protestants and had animated the worst sort of traditional tension between Protestants and Catholics. It immediately became clear that Lloyd George (by a trick similar to that with which he had reassured both Redmond and Carson with opposite interpretations of a single clause in 1916) had allowed both Collins and Craig to take totally contradictory impressions of what the Boundary Commission was meant to do. ‘I will never,’ said Craig in January 1922, ‘give in to any re-arrangement of the Boundary that leaves our Ulster area less than it is under the Government of Ireland Act’, emphasizing that Lloyd George had given him reassurances to this effect. Collins replied equally emphatically that there could be no dispute as to the fact that ‘very large areas’ in Tyrone, Fermanagh, Down, Derry and Armagh had been unquestionably understood as being involved in the agreement with the British delegation.5 It was on this understanding that he had been able to convince himself that the Treaty did not at least make impossible the essential national unity of Ireland.
Rioting on a serious scale now broke out in the North. Neither pro- nor anti-Treaty IRA there hesitated to support in arms the Catholic minority or cease to regard the North as national territory. The recently-created force of Ulster A and B specials did not hesitate to support the Protestants. In three weeks in February 138 casualties were reported from Belfast, of whom ninety-eight were Catholics. Thirty people were killed there in a single night. Catholic refugees streamed south of a border that began to look as if it were not going to be changed after all.
Collins’s own personal position was extremely ambivalent. Technically bound by the Treaty to regard the northern area as outside the Free State’s powers, he could not possibly bring himself to stand by and watch Irish nationalists subjected to violence because they were Irish nationalists. What, after all, had he been fighting for all these years? He therefore found himself in the ambiguous position of being on the verge of civil war with anti-Treaty IRA in the South, while virtually recognizing no differences in the IRA in the North and even supplying them with arms regardless of whether they were anti-Treaty or not. In a meeting with Craig in London he had done what he could by negotiation, calling off the Dail’s Ulster boycott in return for Craig’s promise to reinstate expelled Catholic shipyard workers in Belfast. But the disagreement over the Boundary Commission left him in an appalling state of frustration. ‘I am really and truly having an awful time,’ he wrote in January to the Irish girl in County Longford to whom he was engaged, ‘and am rapidly becoming quite desperate. Oh Lord, it is honestly frightful.’ And after Craig’s uncompromising statement on the Border, ‘This is the worst day I have had yet – far, far the worst. May God help us all.’6
Events in the North and the South interacted upon each other disastrously. A year before, at the time of the Northern Ireland election and at the height of the conflict between British forces and the IRA, there had been a preparedness by Northern leaders to consider some eventual cooperation with the South and some gesture towards the principle of a united Ireland.** It had been inspired more by pragmatic doubts about ‘Northern Ireland’s’ future viability than by consideration for the South’s susceptibilities, but it had been a positive attitude. Now there was only a cold and self-preserving shutting of the mind to everything but the ancient principle, rooted in fear, of ‘What we have, we hold’.
The change had started as a negotiating position at the time of the opening of the Treaty talks in London. Craig had correctly understood that it was in his tactical interest to take the firmest possible stand on ‘the rock of Ulster’ as planted in the new Government of Ireland Act. To a large extent his tactics had succeeded and he now only had the Boundary Commission to fight, with Northern Ireland Protestant opinion solidly behind him, expressed in the new Parliament which had had nearly a year’s viable existence. With its assistance he had created his own para-military force of some 25,000 A and B Specials, many of them fanatical Orangemen from Carson’s old Ulster Volunteer Force, and had introduced a Special Powers Bill giving him power to inflict flogging and the death penalty for unauthorized possession of arms. A feeling that the Six-County State of Northern Ireland was sacrosanct, and somehow part of the natural order of things, took root among Northern Protestants, though the British Government had been prepared to make it negotiable only a few months previously and were still nominally committed to adjust its form. Similarly, a sense of helplessness and desperation began to overwhelm northern nationalists, who, as the prospects of a genuine Boundary Commission receded, saw their only support in the IRA. In March, sixty people were killed in Belfast, and Craig appointed Sir Henry Wilson, arch-enemy of Irish nationalism, as his adviser to help provide law and order.
Rory O’Connor’s anti-treaty republican headquarters in the Four Courts, openly tolerated by Collins, further increased the Northern Protestants’ sense of threat and their determination to defend their new establishment. As anti-Catholic riots continued, sometimes supported in ugly fashion by uniformed forces who were supposed to be preserving law and order, it seemed to Irish nationalists both inside and outside the IRA that in the North something like the Tan war was still in progress. By the middle of June, 264 people had been killed altogether in the six counties of Northern Ireland since the signing of the Treaty – 93 of them Protestants and 171 Catholics. Thousands of refugees streamed south to Dublin and a thousand even across the water to Glasgow.7
This Northern situation made it even more imperative for Collins to try to avoid the danger of civil war in the South and was a contributory factor to a curious political event which now took place there. A general election was due to give democratic status to the Provisional Government and its new Constitution based on the Treaty. Collins and de Valera, in their mutual anxiety to avoid civil war, worked out an electoral Pact by which the old Sinn Fein party was to stand for election as one party on a single panel. Candidates were to be distributed on the panel between the two sides in the proportion of 64 pro-Treaty to 57 anti-Treaty, being the proportion in which the vote had been distributed on the Treaty in the Dail. Candidates of other parties, or independents, were of course free to stand as they chose, but the panel would nevertheless undoubtedly result in a far greater number of anti-Treaty candidates being returned than was representative of the true state of opinion on the Treaty in the country. Furthermore, by the terms of the Pact, it was provided that after the election there should be a Coalition Government composed of five pro-Treaty Ministers and four anti-Treaty Ministers.
In some respects the Collins–de Valera Pact actually increased Collins’s difficulties. For news of it was heard with alarm in London and at the same time drove Craig in the North into an intransigent frenzy. He seized it as an opportunity to denounce privately to the British Government the whole idea of the Boundary Commission, feeling not without some justification that if Collins and de Valera could agree politically, then the Treaty was being undermined. Publicly, Craig declared that if the clause on the Boundary Commission were now enforced it would lead to civil war.8 On the Government side the evacuation of British forces from Southern Ireland was suspended. Churchill declared that should a new Coalition Government such as might emerge from a Pact election set up a Republic in defiance of the Treaty it would produce a situation comparable to that which gave rise to the American civil war: ‘We should no more recognize it than the Northern States of America recognized secession.’9
Collins’s motives in agreeing to the Pact with de Valera – which strained his own relations with Griffith to the limit – were mixed. He was desperate to avoid civil war, partly for straightforward emotional reasons, partly because he wished to retain an effective unity with which to confront the situation in the North. In this sense he undoubtedly wanted, against all the odds, to try to reconcile two irreconcilable positions. On the other hand, he had always been the most practical realist of them all. And there was an element of strict realism in the de Valera Pact. The explanation which he gave to the British Government, namely that it was the only way of allowing Ireland to have an election at all, had good sense in it and may well have been his principal motivation. The split in the IRA and the dissociation of the anti-Treaty elements had led to conditions of increasing anarchy in the South over which the government had no control. It was not just that fusillades between pro- and anti-Treaty IRA forces, sudden and furious as hailstorms, though usually as harmless, swept the streets of towns like Sligo and kilkenny. Far more serious was the breakdown of law and order on an everyday detailed level over much of the area in which any local Brigade Commander was an anti-Treatyite.
Some of the lawlessness was honestly undertaken. Sean Moylan, for instance, commended once for his chivalry in action after an IRA ambush of British forces,** actually boasted proudly in the Dail that he had robbed nineteen Post Offices in one day in the neighbourhood of Kantark in March 1922. He told how he had ‘collected’ dog taxes with relish from pro-Treaty citizens and others, to clothe and provide food, tobacco and – ‘We are not all Pussey footers’ – a drink or two for his men. He would do it again, he said, because in doing such things he was ‘standing up for and defending the Republic’.10 It can be imagined what opportunities such a state of affairs provided also for those who were just standing up for themselves. In the three weeks from 29 March to 19 April, 323 Post Offices were robbed in the South of Ireland; and forty consignments of goods were seized from the Dublin and South-Eastern Railway between 23 March and 22 April, though in only thirty of the cases was the seizure even stated to be ‘by order IRA’. When a big pro-Treaty meeting was held at Wexford on 9 April special trains were stopped by armed men and the crews forcibly prevented from running them; telephone and signal wires were cut and sleepers and rails removed.11 Murders of former RIC men, ex-servicemen, or other individuals against whom old scores of one sort or another needed to be settled occurred weekly, sometimes daily. There were constant forced levies of money from people too frightened to resist or to inquire too closely the exact nature of the cause to which they were contributing. All these activities to which it had been so easy to give a patriotic gloss in the days of the ‘War of Independence’ were resumed now in the anti-Treaty cause with even less punctiliousness than before. Not for nothing were the anti-Treaty forces becoming known as ‘irregulars’.
It was difficult to think of an election taking place successfully in such an atmosphere. Ordinary public opinion in the country was overwhelmingly for the Treaty, but at the mercy of anti-Treaty men with revolvers who often had long training in the arts of intimidation. Prior to the Pact, de Valera himself, though he expressed disapproval of interference with political freedom of speech, used a number of constitutional excuses to try to have the election postponed, principally complaining that the electoral register which had not been revised since October 1918 was unfair. By the Pact Collins secured de Valera’s and the political republicans’ active participation in the election. For quite apart from any genuine hopes Republicans might have of a bold change of face on the part of Collins, it was obviously in their interest to take advantage of an election presented to them in such advantageous terms.
That a certain Machiavellian realism at least overlapped Collins’s more emotional conflict of loyalties was shown by his electioneering behaviour. For although early in the campaign he addressed a number of meetings on behalf of the panel as a whole, speaking on the same platform as de Valera, yet on the eve of the poll itself, when the Pact had done its work and secured at least a coherent election, he made a speech in Cork which undermined the Pact’s whole intention. A large number of independents and candidates of other parties had in fact presented themselves on nomination day to oppose the panel, and all were pro-Treaty. Now in this speech in Cork Collins advised his audience to vote not necessarily for the Sinn Fein panel but for the candidate they thought best. ‘The country must have the representatives it wants,’ he continued. ‘You understand fully what you have to do and I call on you to do it.’12
Voting took place on 16 June and the results were declared on 24 June. A surprisingly high number of pro-Treaty candidates outside the panel had been elected: thirty altogether – without the four Unionists from Trinity College. Ninety-four out of the total of 128 members of the new Dail were for the Treaty. Collins made no move towards implementing the Coalition clause of the Pact, though de Valera waited for an invitation. Collins now had unmistakable democratic sanction for the Treaty.
Such clear expression of the people’s will had been accomplished in the nick of time. For on 22 June there came a piece of news which transformed the entire post-Treaty situation.
Sir Henry Wilson, on returning by taxi to his house on the corner of Eaton Place and Belgrave Place on the afternoon of 22 June, having just unveiled a memorial at St Pancras to the employees of the Great Eastern Railway Company who had lost their lives in the war, was attacked on his doorstep by two men with revolvers. He made a spirited attempt to defend himself with his sword but fell, mortally wounded by their bullets. His assailants were IRA men named Joseph O’Sullivan and Reginald Dunne and both had previously served in the British Army. O’Sullivan had lost a leg at Ypres and his consequent slowness in making a getaway led to the almost immediate capture of himself and his companion.
The killing had been carried out on the order of Collins, the last of the long series of such killings for which he had been personally responsible since 1919. Dunne and O’Sullivan, though they eventually revealed their own identity and membership of the IRA, said nothing of Collins. Whether or not their orders had been issued recently or had been given before the Treaty and the men were now acting on their own initiative in the light of Catholic suffering in Northern Ireland is still uncertain. It seems at least possible that Collins himself had issued the order expressly as a result of recent events in the North. He was anguished by what was happening there and at the extent to which his ability to act was hampered by his obligations to the Treaty. During the Tan war he had been opposed to the assassination of British political figures and there seems little reason why he should then have selected Wilson as an exception. He certainly now did what he could to save Dunne and O’Sullivan from the gallows, though to no avail. The question of responsibility for the deed at this time is however only of academic interest. What was important was its consequence.
Ironically, the British Government automatically put the blame on the anti-Treaty Republicans with their headquarters in the Four Courts. Their first instinct was to order General Macready, who was still in Dublin, to attack the building and force O’Connor’s surrender. But sensibly advised by Macready that the result would be to unite pro- and anti-Treaty men solidly against the British and thus destroy all hopes for the Treaty, the government eventually issued an ultimatum to Collins and Griffith as heads of the Provisional Government to take action at last and do the job themselves. If they did not they would regard the Treaty as abrogated.
The Provisional Government’s own relationship with the men in the Four Courts was at that moment particularly tense. The result of the election and the imminent assembly of the new pro-Treaty Dail had brought about a situation in which the anti-Treaty men would soon be forced to act if they wanted to make themselves effective. There was talk in O’Connor’s executive about an immediate attack on the British, and of a move against the North. For several days there was tension while Collins played for time with the British demand, asking for proof of association between the Four Courts and Wilson’s assassins. There at least he knew he was on strong ground.
Relatively trivial incidents set off the explosion. The Four Courts men ‘commandeered’ sixteen cars from a garage in Dublin, but the officer in charge of their operation was arrested by Collins’s forces. The Four Courts men retaliated by kidnapping one of Collins’s generals, ‘Ginger’ O’Connell. At 3.40 a.m. on the morning of 28 June Collins decided. He sent an ultimatum to the Four Courts to surrender within twenty minutes. There was no reply. At seven minutes past four, two field guns which Collins had borrowed from General Macready, opened fire on the building from across the Liffey. The government’s soldiers wore the new green uniform of what was soon to be the Free State Army. They were so inexperienced that one of the gunners blew a hole in the banks of the Liffey on his own side.13
Most of the available shells were shrapnel and it took two days to reduce the building, though it was only a few hundred yards away, but on 30 June the Four Courts surrendered and the anti-Treaty IRA executive, including Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Ernie O’Malley and a hundred others, were taken prisoner. O’Malley escaped, as he had once done from the British, and made his way south to join Liam Lynch, Seumas Robinson and other legendary IRA figures in a new war for the Republic on a line of resistance that ran roughly from Wexford to Limerick. South and west of that line had been all the most aggressive of the IRA Brigades which Collins had helped to organize against the British. Now they were organized against him.
The rest of the story has something of the quality of the last act of Hamlet.
There were other individual anti-Treaty IRA units installed in different buildings in Dublin. In the first serious fighting after the Four Courts surrender, the opposite side of O’Connell Street to that which had been destroyed in Easter Week was burned and battered to the ground. Out of one of the blazing buildings in which a group of anti-Treaty men had eventually surrendered there emerged after a pause, into the dust and rubble, a small dark man carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun. He had shaken off a St John’s Ambulance man who tried to make him give himself up, and suddenly started firing.14 It was Cathal Brugha. He was brought down in a hail of bullets, and died two days later. Altogether some sixty people were killed and three hundred wounded in the eight days’ fighting in Dublin.15
Beaten in Dublin, the anti-Treaty IRA who began to be referred to simply as Republicans or, from the government side, ‘irregulars’, consolidated in the South. De Valera, temporarily an irrelevant figure, joined them, as did Erskine Childers whose virulent propaganda techniques were now effectively displayed against the Free State. For the Free State, Collins, liberated suddenly from the insidious toils of politics into the field of action, threw himself into the campaign with his old gusto. Though the Republican forces had the initial military advantage in the South, with many of the best brigades of the old IRA in arms, it was inevitably only a matter of time before the superior resources of the Free State, with the official machinery of government at its disposal, began to tell. Collins received considerable supplies of rifles from the British Government. ** To the nucleus of the pro-Treaty sections of the old IRA he recruited new raw young Irish country boys, many of whom only learnt to load their rifles shortly before going into action,16 together with ex-professional Irish elements from the British and even American armies and some former members of the RIC.
At the end of July 1922, units of the new Free State Army were sent round by sea to the South and West of Ireland and by 10 August Cork, the only large town occupied by Republicans, had fallen into Free State hands. From then on the Republicans were more and more forced to fight a guerrilla war of ambushes and flying columns in the countryside similar to that which they had fought against the British. The major difference now, however, was that the support of the ordinary people in the countryside could no longer be counted on and without such support a guerrilla movement is doomed. ‘The Republic’ and many of the dreams that had been made to go with it began to disappear from view in increasingly senseless acts of gunmanship and in the roar of flames of country houses burned as often as not in vindictive impotent rage as for any ‘military’ purpose. In the course of the fighting in July and August 1922 about five hundred men were killed on both sides.
Military success in any civil war is a bitter thing. In Ireland after the historic climax to seven hundred years which had just been achieved, victory seemed more than ever like self-destruction, and death ate into every triumph like acid. Though Cathal Brugha had made a savage attack on Collins in the Treaty debates his death caused him only sadness. ‘Because of his sincerity,’ he wrote, ‘I would forgive him anything. At worst he was a fanatic though in what has been a noble cause.’17
One of the worst consequences of the Treaty for Collins had been his disagreement over it with his old friend and companion of happier days, Harry Boland. When the civil war fighting broke out Boland took the Republican side. ‘Harry – it has come to this! Of all things it has come to this!’ Collins wrote to him on 28 July 1922.18 Three days later, in the middle of the night, Free State Army troops went to arrest Boland in the Grand Hotel, Skerris, where he was staying. The soldiers who came into his bedroom seem to have been nervous. Boland insisted on seeing the officer in charge of the raid and moved towards the bedroom door. A soldier fired, hitting him in the stomach. He died soon afterwards, asking to be buried beside Cathal Brugha. Collins passed the hospital that night. ‘My mind went in to him lying dead there,’ he wrote. ‘… I only thought of him with the friendship of 1918 and 1919.’ A few days later he wrote, ‘There is no one who feels it all more than I do.’ But Nemesis, of which he seems to have been unconscious, was at work. ‘My condemnation,’ he continued, ‘is for all those who would put themselves up as paragons of Irish Nationality and all the others as being not worthy of concern.’19
A week later, on 12 August 1922, the day after the Free State troops had taken Cork, a new and completely unexpected blow struck Ireland. Arthur Griffith, now Prime Minister of the new Free State Government, who had been spending a few days recovering from overwork in a Dublin nursing-home, suddenly collapsed and died. Collins, who, as Commander-in-Chief of the Free State Army, had been touring positions in the South and West, returned to Dublin for the funeral where he marched beside Mulcahy, MacEoin and other IRA heroes of the past, all in their new uniforms. Two of his men, Dunne and O’Sullivan, had just gone to the gallows for the killing of Sir Henry Wilson. ‘Oh! Pray for our poor country,’ wrote Dunne in his last letter.20
Ten days later Collins himself was dead.
He was killed in an ambush at Bealnamblath on the Macroom–Bandon road in his own home county of Cork. The ambush party, which had learnt of his presence in the neighbourhood quite accidentally that morning, had been waiting for him all day. They had just given up hope and were dispersing in the fading evening light when the convoy of a motor-cycle outrider, Collins’s open touring Rolls, a Crossley tender and an armoured car drove up into the position. The fight, in which Collins took part with a rifle, lasted about half an hour and he was hit towards the end of it by a ricochet bullet in the back of the head.**
But Nemesis was only just beginning. Leadership of the Free State Government, which had just lost its two principal leaders, was now assumed by William Cosgrave and Kevin O’Higgins, both former Ministers of Griffith and earlier of de Valera. Saddled with their sudden responsibility, the one over-riding task in their own eyes seemed understandably to be to preserve the new State from disintegration at all costs and to restore law and order. Both had long been identified with the movement. Cosgrave had been out in Easter Week and condemned to death; O’Higgins, a young law student, had been imprisoned in 1918, and elected at the General Election. Earlier for a time he had been a member of the IRB. But both were less immediately entangled in the conflicting loyalties which had tortured Collins, and thus less concerned with reconciliation as an end in itself than he might have been if he had lived. They had the staunch support of Collins’s old Chief of Staff, Richard Mulcahy, new Minister of Defence. Mulcahy obtained, through the new pro-Treaty Dail, emergency powers to set up military courts and Cosgrave specifically stated that the government were not going to treat rebels as prisoners of war. They offered an amnesty for surrender before a certain date and thereafter, armed with their emergency powers, set out to break the Republican guerrilla war of attrition with a sternness which was sometimes to cause even their supporters to gasp.
Unauthorized possession of a revolver was now punishable, as it had been in the final phases of the conflict with the British in martial law areas, by death. On 10 November Erskine Childers, who had been conducting Republican anti-Treaty propaganda with all his old single-minded zeal, was trapped by Free State troops and arrested in County Wicklow. He was armed with a revolver which had been given him by Collins as a token of comradeship in arms in other times. On the day he was tried by court-martial in camera it was suddenly announced by the government that four rank-and-file members of the Dublin anti-Treaty IRA who had been arrested at night under arms in the streets of Dublin had been shot by a firing squad.
The emergency powers had been granted two months before and these were the first executions under them. Mulcahy explained the decision to a shocked Dail. ‘We are faced,’ he said, ‘with eradicating from the country the state of affairs in which hundreds of men go around day by day and night by night to take the lives of other men.’21 Another Minister, Ernest Blythe, the old Sinn Fein organizer, who in his day had vigorously incited Volunteers to kill policemen in An t Oglach, declared that there was now no such thing in reality as a Republican movement but only a movement of anarchy; so-called Republicans were for the most part criminals and stern measures were essential to put down the ‘conspiracy of anarchy’.22 But Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs, gave a more ominous-sounding explanation of the four unknown men’s execution, though none of the uneasy members of the Dail then picked him up on it. ‘If,’ said O’Higgins, ‘If you took as your first case some man who was outstandingly active or outstandingly wicked in his activities the unfortunate dupes throughout the country might say, “Oh, he was killed because he was a leader”, or, “He was killed because he was an Englishman.”…’23
It was a common gibe among opponents of Erskine Childers that he was an Englishman, though his mother was Irish, and, having been brought up in Ireland, he had given many years of his life to the cause first of Irish Home Rule and then of a Republic. But even Griffith had jeered at him as an Englishman in the Dail. Now in O’Higgins’s use of the term, though he did not name Childers, there was a sinister ring.
A week later Childers was taken from his cell and shot at dawn at Beggars Bush barracks. A week after that three more rank-and-file Republican IRA were executed, bringing the total number of executions for the month to eight. Even more shocking news was to come.
Ever since the surrender of the Four Courts in July the government had held in prison the hundred or so men captured there, including the members of the then Republican executive: Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett. These men, of course, in the nature of things had no direct responsibility for what was being done now in November, though Mellows was in fact nominated ‘Minister for Defence’ in a new underground government which de Valera set up in agreement with the IRA in October. But it was a military and not a political situation in this period and the effective military personality was the Republican Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch. There was a particular poignancy typical of the Irish tragedy of the time about Rory O’Connor’s imprisonment, for in the days of the fight against the British he had been the much loved and highly praised secretary of Kevin O’Higgins himself. O’Connor had even been best man at O’Higgins’s wedding.
On 30 November 1922 Liam Lynch issued an order which the government captured, stating that all members of the government or members of the Dail who had voted the emergency powers were to be shot on sight. On 7 December two deputies were shot at as they were leaving their hotel for the Dail and one of them, Sean Hales, whose brother was actually a Brigade Commander on the Republican side, was killed. As a deterrent to more such shootings Mulcahy asked the rest of the cabinet to take an unprecedentedly severe form of action, to which after considerable discussion they agreed – O’Higgins, to do him justice, one of the last.24 During the following night Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett were woken in their cells and told to prepare themselves for death. They were shot without trial in the yard of Mountjoy gaol at dawn.
Altogether, in just over six months the new Free State Government executed seventy-seven Republicans by shooting, more than three times the number executed by the British Government in the two and a half years of the ‘Anglo-Irish war’. Thirty-four of the Free State’s executions were in the month of January 1923 alone. The executions ended when de Valera, speaking as political head of a movement whose one chance of success had appeared to rest on its military effectiveness, and whose military effectiveness had patently collapsed, issued with IRA agreement an order to dump arms. ‘Soldiers of the Rearguard,’ he told the 8,000 or so gunmen who were by May 1923 now the only free scattered remnants of the anti-Treaty IRA, ‘other means must be sought to safeguard the nation’s right.’ There were also by then some 13,000 Republican prisoners, including Ernie O’Malley, who had been severely wounded. But one former hero was not among them. Liam Lynch, refusing stubbornly to face up to the realities of the Republicans’ hopeless situation, had been killed in a running fight with Free State troops in the Knockmealdown mountains of Tipperary on 10 April 1923.
The last few months of the civil war, though they presented no serious threat to the political stability of the new Free State Government, presented a continuous and horrible threat to the peace and order of ordinary citizens’ everyday lives. With only the newly-created police force, the unarmed ‘Civic Guard’, and a Free State Army of some 35,000 men it was often impossible to eliminate or even contain the small bands of irregulars who created for themselves fastnesses in mountainous country and descended from time to time to rob and terrorize and kill on behalf of the Republic. One of the many individuals murdered by the Republicans in this time was O’Higgins’s own father. And in such an atmosphere, and in the atmosphere created by the government’s ruthless severity, other things besides human values got lost sight of. For all the corpses and all the burned houses, the worst casualty of the civil war from the point of view of the ideals of Irish nationalism was the cause of One-Ireland.
In the first place such events in the South hardened a determination among the Protestants of North-East Ulster to retreat into the self-protected isolation offered by their border. The long tradition of fear and prejudice on which the division between the two sections of the population was based became still more deeply entrenched. O’Higgins himself expressed this aspect graphically and bitterly:
We had an opportunity [he said, referring to the North-East] of building up a worthy State that would attract and, in time, absorb and assimilate those elements. We preferred the patriotic way. We preferred to burn our own houses, blow up our own bridges, rob our own banks, saddle ourselves with millions of debt for the maintenance of an Army and for the payment of compensation for the recreations of our youth. Generally, we preferred to practise upon ourselves worse indignities than the British had practised on us since Cromwell and Mountjoy and now we wonder why the Orangemen are not hopping like so many fleas across the Border in their anxiety to come within our fold and jurisdiction.25
It was a reproof, however, which could have been extended to other Republicans besides those who now got called ‘irregular’. On the question of national unity, O’Higgins put his faith in the Boundary Commission clause of the Treaty which still had to be implemented. Like Collins, he believed that the Commission’s findings must lead to such a substantial adjustment of the Border in favour of the Free State that the remaining Northern Ireland territory would cease to be viable and eventual national unity be assured. It would be the ultimate vindication of the Treaty. But unlike Collins, O’Higgins was temperamentally inclined to trust the British Government.26 If Collins had lived it is difficult to think that he would have accepted the disastrous collapse of the Boundary Commission principle with which the Free State were soon to be presented as a fait accompli.
The minds of O’Higgins and Cosgrave had in any case been seriously deflected from the Boundary Commission by the need to fight for the very existence of the infant Free State. Again, if Collins had lived this might not have happened, either because he would not have allowed it to or because he would have achieved the end of the civil war earlier. In fact it was not until 1924 that the Free State asked the British Government to constitute the Boundary Commission as prescribed.
Differences of opinion as to what exactly the Commission’s function was to be had existed between North and South from the beginning, and Sir James Craig for the North had, of course, specifically repudiated it altogether in 1922. He now refused to nominate one of the three members of the Commission as stipulated by the Treaty – the other two to be nominees of the British and Free State Governments.
Craig was not a signatory of the Treaty. But the British Government was and thus found itself unable to honour its word. The clause was in fact reasonably precise, defining the Commission’s function as being to determine the border ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions’. There could be no doubt that the inhabitants of large parts of Tyrone and Fermanagh, and smaller parts of Derry, South Down and South Armagh wished to be incorporated with their fellow nationalists in the Free State, while the inhabitants of a strip of East Donegal and North Monaghan wished to be incorporated in Northern Ireland. And with the reservation, accepted by the Treaty clause, that economics and geography laid down certain limitations, there was no practical reason why such a rearrangement of the Border should not be made. The clause had been instrumental in bringing the Irish to sign the Treaty. It could not simply be ignored.
The British Government therefore appointed an extra Commissioner of their own, reasonably enough in the circumstances an Ulsterman who was a close friend of Craig’s named Fisher. The Free State Commissioner was to be Eoin MacNeill, himself an Ulsterman from the Catholic and nationalist part of County Antrim. The other British nominee, the Chairman, was a South African judge, Mr Justice Feetham, a former protégé of Lord Milner’s and therefore a man whose mind was cast politically in an imperial mould. Deadlock between Fisher, who wished to preserve as much of Northern Ireland as possible, and MacNeill, who wished the reverse, was inevitable and it would be Feetham’s role to resolve it. He assumed the task in an atmosphere conditioned by statements from Birkenhead and Austen Chamberlain, both signatories of the Treaty, to the effect that the clause had been intended to consolidate the Northern Ireland Government’s jurisdiction over the six counties, and to affect only a few parishes. A voice by which he was less likely to be influenced was that of the Irish Independent which declared that but for the Boundary Commission and the interpretation Collins and Griffith had placed on it the Treaty ‘would never have received five minutes’ consideration in this country’.
The Commission sat for a year during which MacNeill proved a most ineffectual advocate of the Collins’ and Free State Government interpretation of its function. At the same time the Free State Government allowed itself to become curiously out of touch with what was transpiring. Finally, in November 1925, after an accurate leak to a newspaper had revealed that only very minor adjustments of the Border were intended and that these would actually include a transfer of territory in East Donegal from the Free State to Northern Ireland, MacNeill resigned in an embarrassingly late protest. It was Mr Justice Feetham’s conclusion that the Commission could not recommend any adjustment of the order which would affect materially the political integrity of Northern Ireland.27
The Commission’s findings were in fact never officially published or implemented. Instead, Cosgrave, O’Higgins and Ernest Blythe went to London and negotiated an amendment to the Treaty by which the Boundary Commission was revoked in its entirety in return for a revocation of the Free State’s financial obligations to the United Kingdom under the Treaty. In a phrase which now seems curiously unfortunate, Cosgrave told the Dail he had got from the British what he wanted: ‘a huge O’.28
The financial part of the transaction could legitimately be regarded as a success. But it was difficult for nationalists in Tyrone, Fermanagh, Derry, South Down and South Armagh not to feel that they had been sold. As for the eventual collapse of partition which had been so implicit to Collins in the Boundary Commission concept, that could be a hope no longer. All-Ireland unity had been abandoned more permanently than in any compromise Redmond had ever considered. In order to survive at all the movement had had to forsake for all practical purposes that very principle which had enabled it to claim the support of the Irish people in the first place.
This, surely, was the final act of Nemesis.