Think—what have I got for Ireland? Something she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this—early this morning I signed my death warrant.
Three days later newspapers published an open letter from de Valera in which he stated:
My friends, Irishmen ... the terms of the agreement are in violent conflict with the wishes of the majority of the nation.... I cannot recommend the acceptance of the Treaty either to Dáil Éireann or the country.
Episode 229
THE SPLIT
The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 in London went far beyond Home Rule. The Irish Free State was to become a Dominion, just like Canada. If Northern Ireland refused to come in, then the border would be redrawn by a Boundary Commission. Britain retained three naval bases. Dáil deputies had pledged themselves to a Republic. Now they were asked to take an oath of fidelity to King George V.
The Dáil cabinet accepted the Treaty, but by a margin of only one vote—and President de Valera himself opposed it. Now the debate was taken to the Dáil. Arthur Griffith, who had headed the Irish delegation in London, proposed the motion to approve the Treaty. The following extracts from the official account of Dáil proceedings reveal some of the more dramatic moments in the long and frequently acrimonious discussion that followed.
Deputy Griffith: We have brought back the flag; we have brought back the evacuation of Ireland after 700 years by British troops and the formation of an Irish Army (applause).... We took an oath to the Irish Republic, but, as President de Valera himself said, he understood that oath to bind him to do the best he could for Ireland. So do we. We have done the best we could for Ireland.
Commandant Seán Mac Eoin: A Chinn Chomhairle, I rise to second the motion.... In doing so, I take this course because I know I am doing it in the interests of my country which I love. To me symbols, recognitions, shadows, have little meaning.... I hold that this Treaty between the two nations gives us not shadows but real substances, and for that reason I am ready to support it.
President de Valera: I am against this Treaty.... I wanted, and the Cabinet wanted, to get a document we could stand by.... That document makes British authority our masters in Ireland.... If the representatives of the Republic should ask the people of Ireland to do that which is inconsistent with the Republic, I say they are subverting the Republic. It would be a surrender ... to sign our names to the most ignoble document that could be signed.…
I have been brought up amongst the Irish people. I was reared in a labourer’s cottage here in Ireland. I have not lived solely amongst the intellectuals—whenever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, I had only to examine my own heart and it told me straight off what the Irish people wanted.…
You have an oath to the Irish Constitution which will have the King of Great Britain as head of Ireland. You will swear allegiance to that King.…
Mrs Pearse: It has been said here on several occasions that Pádraig Pearse would have accepted this Treaty. I deny it. As his mother I deny it, and on his account I will not accept it.
Deputy Collins: What I want to make clear is that it was the acceptance of the invitation that formed the compromise.... In my opinion it gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it (applause).
Madame Markievicz: Now, personally, I being an honourable woman, would sooner die than give a declaration of fidelity to King George or the British Empire.... I believe we never sent cleverer men over than we sent this time, yet they have been tricked. Now you all know me, you know that my people came over here in Henry VIII’s time, and by that bad black drop of English blood in me I know the English personally better than the people who went over on the delegation (laughter).
Deputy: Why didn’t you go over?
Madame Markievicz: Why didn’t you send me?
Deputy Childers: If Ireland’s destiny is to be irrevocably linked with England in this Treaty ... the association ... is that of a bond slave.
Deputy O’Higgins: Deputy Childers ... did not tell us as an authority on military and naval matters, how we are going to break the British Army and Navy and get these better terms.
Mrs Clarke: Arthur Griffith said he had brought back peace with England, and freedom to Ireland. I can only say it is not the kind of freedom I have looked forward to.... God, the tragedy of it!
Deputy Cathal Brugha: The Head Quarters Staff ... worked ... patriotically for Ireland, with one exception—
Deputies: Shame! Get on with the Treaty!
Deputy Brugha: … The gentleman I refer to is Mr Michael Collins.
Deputy Dan MacCarthy: Now we know the reason for the opposition to the Treaty ... (applause)
Deputy Brugha: ... Mr Michael Collins does not occupy that position in the Army that newspaper men said he occupied—
Seán MacGarry: I think we have had enough.
On 7 January 1922 the vote was taken: 64 votes for the motion and 57 against it. The Treaty had been approved by a majority of seven.
This was the ‘Treaty split’. Passions now ran so high that, six months later, the Irish Free State would be plunged into civil war.
Episode 230
TROUBLES NORTH AND SOUTH
When Dáil Éireann accepted the Treaty on 7 January 1922, Eamon de Valera, bitterly opposed to it, stood for re-election as its President. In a bitter exchange, Arthur Griffith, for the Treaty, and Erskine Childers, against it, demonstrated in the Dáil the tension felt by all:
Deputy Griffith: Now (striking the table) I will not reply to any Englishman in this Dáil (applause).…
Deputy Childers: My nationality is a matter for myself.…
Deputy Griffith: ... I will not reply to any damned Englishman in this Assembly.…
Deputy Childers: ... I am not going to defend my nationality.... If he had banged the table before Lloyd George in the way he banged it here, things might have been different (cries of ‘Order’ and applause).
De Valera failed to be re-elected and Griffith became President in his place. De Valera then rose to leave the room with all his supporters. Collins led the trading of insults as they left:
Deputy Collins: Deserters all! We will now call on the Irish people to rally to us. Deserters all! ...
Deputy Ceannt: Up the Republic!
Deputy Collins: ... Deserters all to the Irish nation in her hour of trial! We will stand by her.
Madame Markievicz: Oath breakers and cowards!
Deputy Collins: Foreigners—Americans—English! Madame Markievicz: Lloyd-Georgeites!
De Valera and his supporters would not return to the Dáil until 1927. A Provisional Government of the embryonic Irish Free State, an administrative body recognised by the British, was formed with Collins as Chairman. Desperately he and Griffith strove to prevent civil war.
And how was the Treaty received in Northern Ireland? The main Unionist concern was the means by which Lloyd George been able to get Sinn Féin to agree to remain within the Empire. This had been effected by Article XII, which provided for a Boundary Commission. Convinced that this could tear great lumps out of Northern Ireland, Prime Minister Craig went immediately to London to protest. Tom Jones, a cabinet secretary, reported to his superior: ‘Sir James Craig was closeted with the PM.... He then went off to his Doctor to be inoculated—I suppose against a Sinn Féin germ. Anyhow, yesterday he charged the PM with a breach of faith.... Carson ... wrote a nasty letter.’ Failing to get any satisfaction, Craig returned to Belfast to write a bitter missive to the Lord Privy Seal, Austen Chamberlain:
What attitude will the British Government adopt if the government of Northern Ireland finds it necessary to call upon their friends and supporters—more especially the members of the Loyal Orange Institution—to come to their assistance by means of arms, ammunition and money from Great Britain, the Dominions and other parts of the world?... Violence is the only language understood by Mr Lloyd George and his Ministers
.
In London Article XII of the Treaty was judged to be a political masterstroke. In Ulster it immediately magnified uncertainty and unrest. The truce of July 1921 had not stopped the killing in Northern Ireland. At peace in the south for the moment, the IRA used the truce to step up its campaign in the north. Then, in January 1922, whatever their views on the Treaty, IRA units united in an all-out attempt to destabilise Northern Ireland.
In Belfast loyalists attacked Catholic districts, now reinforced by IRA volunteers. Both sides perpetrated assassinations and reprisals of frightful barbarity. Altogether sixty-one people died in Belfast in the violence of March 1922. Isolated Catholic and Protestant families were particularly vulnerable, and intimidation, house-burning, rioting and murder drew the lines between the two communities in the city more tautly than ever. Atrocity followed atrocity, counter-assassination followed almost every death, and large areas of Belfast were virtually at war.
During the War of Independence the British government had not sent the notorious Black and Tans into the six north-eastern counties. Instead it had raised a Special Constabulary: A Specials, full-time and uniformed like the RIC; B Specials, by far the largest section, part-time, uniformed and unpaid, serving only in their own areas; and C Specials, an unpaid reserve force. From the outset the Special Constabulary had been an almost exclusively Protestant force. Whole units of the pre-war Ulster Volunteer Force, with their commanders, now joined the Specials. The Westminster Gazette, certainly not a radical publication, concluded that this ‘is quite the most inhuman expedient the government could have devised [because] all the eager spirits who have driven nationalist workmen from the docks or have demonstrated their loyalty by looting Catholic shops will be eligible’.
The British government handed over control of the Specials to the Northern Ireland government. By the spring of 1922 the very survival of Northern Ireland seemed to be at stake. Craig responded to the crisis by greatly expanding the B class of the Special Constabulary. Protestant farmers and workers for the most part, on duty in their spare time and with no pay, the B Specials now bore the main brunt of the campaign to restore order in Northern Ireland.
Episode 231
CIVIL WAR
Robert McElborough, a gas worker, described conditions in east Belfast in the spring of 1922:
I was taken off meter work and was told by the superintendent to keep the lamps in Seaforde Street and the Short Strand in repair.... Anyone who lived in the area remembers the cross-firing that was kept up day and night. No one would venture out and trams passed this area at full empty, or with passengers lying flat on the floor.…
I can’t tell you how I got the cart into this area. I ran with it and got safely into Madrid Street ... with rifles cracking overhead.... It was the snipers on the roofs and back windows who were the danger. Anyone seen on the streets within the range of their gun was their target, and they found out later through the press what side he belonged to. I had seen men who were going to work shot dead as a reprisal for some other victim. My only dread was when I was standing on the ladder putting up a lamp, bullets that I suppose were meant for me went through the lamp reflector.
Conditions were little better in the Ulster countryside. On 5 April 1922 the government set up the Royal Ulster Constabulary, an armed police force closely modelled on the now disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary. In addition, more men joined the Special Constabulary—by the early summer there were no fewer than 50,000 regular and part-time policemen, that is, one policeman for every six families in the region.
On 7 April 1922 the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Bill became law. This gave the Home Affairs minister authority to detain suspects without charge and to set up courts of summary jurisdiction. On 22 May the IRA assassinated W. J. Twaddell, Unionist MP for Woodvale. This led to the immediate imposition of internment. All 200 men arrested in the first sweep were Catholics, most of them held on board the Argenta, an old ship moored in Larne Lough.
Murders, ambushes and incendiary attacks continued unabated. Then, quite suddenly, this internecine conflict calmed down. The reason for this was that civil war had broken out in the south.
Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and the newly formed Provisional Government desperately tried to prevent disagreement over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 from descending into a civil war. A majority of senior IRA commandants supported the Treaty but most of the rank-and-file Volunteers did not. As British troops pulled out, the anti-Treaty IRA—soon to be known as the ‘Irregulars’—began to occupy abandoned army barracks. On 14 April Irregulars seized the Four Courts, the Kildare Street Club and other prominent buildings in Dublin. Rory O’Connor, the anti-Treaty IRA commander in the Four Courts, when asked whether he supported military dictatorship, replied: ‘You can take it that way if you like.’ The anti-Treaty political leader, Eamon de Valera, told an audience in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, that if the Treaty was enforced, its opponents would
have to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of soldiers of the Irish government, and through, perhaps, the blood of the members of the government in order to get Irish freedom.
A trade union leader recalled: ‘We spent two hours pleading with de Valera, with a view to averting the calamity of civil war, and the only statement he made was this: “The majority has no right to do wrong.”’
The citizens of the Irish Free State gave their verdict in a general election on 16 June 1922: pro-Treaty Sinn Féin, 58; anti-Treaty Sinn Féin, 36; Labour, 17; Farmers’ Party, 7; Independents, 10.
The Irregulars refused to accept this verdict. Then, on 22 June, the IRA shot dead Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson on the doorstep of his London home. Lloyd George’s cabinet demanded that action be taken against the Irregulars if the terms of the Treaty were not to be broken.
In Dublin, shortly after midnight on Wednesday 28 June, troops of the Provisional Government’s National Army, fully equipped for battle, took up their positions on the quays. Uniformed men trundled a field gun down the slope of Winetavern Street. Across the Liffey Irregulars in the Four Courts waited to see whether Irishmen would fire on Irishmen. Underneath the copper dome Father Albert told the assembled Irregulars to say an act of contrition. Tears ran down his cheeks as the men kneeled in the light of candles.
The dull yellow lights on the tram standards glowed through a steady drizzle as Commandant Emmet Dalton of the National Army stood by the field gun. Only a year before he had been fighting the British alongside the men now facing him across the river.
At 4.29 a.m. the field gun opened fire. Moments later a torrent of bullets poured from both sides of the Liffey. The Irish Civil War had begun.
Episode 232
GREEN AGAINST GREEN
Just after dawn on Wednesday 28 June 1922 the National Army of the Irish Free State, with an eighteen-pounder borrowed from the British, began shelling the Dublin Four Courts. Here, from the dome and the roof, the Irregulars, IRA men opposed to the Treaty, responded with sustained machine-gun and rifle fire.
By Thursday afternoon the relentless artillery bombardment had made a breach in the walls. Two thousand National Army troops—popularly known as ‘Staters’—surged across Whitworth Bridge for the final assault. On Friday morning a temporary truce allowed twenty doctors, brought up on a horse-drawn coal dray, to treat the wounded of both sides. Inside the Four Courts, Ernie O’Malley ordered his men to pour paraffin on the scattered lawbooks. By midday the conflagration reached two lorry-loads of gelignite sticks stacked in the Public Record Office. A huge explosion rocked the city. An eyewitness recorded:
Black as ink, shot up, 400 feet into the sky, a giant column of writhing smoke and dust.... It spread into an enormous mushroom some 200 feet up and glared in the sun with lurid reds and browns, through which could be seen thousands of white snowflakes, dipping, sidling, curtsying, circling, floating as snowflakes do.
Documents going back to the twelfth century drifted over the city.
On Saturday after
noon the Four Courts garrison surrendered. The Irregulars now took the unequal fight to O’Connell Street. Cathal Brugha emerged from the burning Hammam Hotel and fell mortally wounded in a hail of bullets.
Sidelining Eamon de Valera, Liam Lynch took command of the Irregulars and carried the conflict to the countryside. At first former comrades in arms showed a reluctance to kill each other. A Kilkenny land agent wrote to his employer:
There was a terrible battle here today between the Staters and Irregulars. They were shooting at one another all day, and it was a terrible battle. They stopped for a cup of tea and both sides admired your ladyship’s chrysanthemums.
But this war between brother and brother soon surpassed the War of Independence for savagery. The bitterness and hostility generated by the conflict found open expression:
Take it down from the mast, Irish traitors!
The flag we republicans claim.
It can never belong to Free Staters,
You brought on it nothing but shame.
Limerick and Waterford cities fell to government troops on the same day, 20 July. Cork followed on 11 August. On 12 August President Arthur Griffith died suddenly. Ten days later the commander of the National Army, Michael Collins, fell mortally wounded in west Cork. His convoy had run into an Irregular ambush at Bealnablath, close to the area where he had spent his childhood.
The two leading signatories of the 1921 Treaty lay dead. William T. Cosgrave now headed the government. His cabinet did not flinch from adopting draconian special powers when the Irregulars launched a systematic campaign of assassination. On 7 December men from the anti-Treaty Dublin Brigade killed Seán Hales, a west Cork TD. Next morning, in reprisal, came the execution of four men who had surrendered at the Four Courts—one for each province: Liam Mellows, Rory O’Connor, Richard Barrett and Joe McKelvey:
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 63
