I Signed My Death Warrant

by Ryle T. Dwyer

  ‘The British people will never give you this choice,’ Smuts replied. ‘You are next door to them.’ He then talked about the difficulties in South Africa following the Boer War and noted that when the people were subsequently asked if they wanted a republic, ‘a very large majority’ preferred free partnership with the British empire. ‘As a friend,’ Smuts added, ‘I cannot advise you too strongly against a republic. Ask what you want but not a republic.’

  ‘If the status of dominion rule is offered,’ de Valera replied, ‘I will use all our machinery to get the Irish people to accept it.’

  Smuts reported on his Irish visit to a cabinet level meeting in London next day. It was decided to accede to de Valera’s demands for a truce, and it was left to him to take the initiative for Craig’s exclusion. He did this by agreeing to meet the prime minister to discuss ‘on what basis such a conference as that proposed can reasonably hope to achieve peace.’

  Robert Barton, one of those recently released from jail in order to promote the peace initiative, helped to conclude what he called ‘an armed truce. It was, as I understood, agreed to by our side for one reason only, mainly to enable to volunteers to rearm and equip,’ he explained. ‘I was one of those who negotiated it.’

  William Darling, who later became chancellor of Edinburgh University, was serving as Major-General Tudor’s secretary in Dublin Castle at the time. He recalled a strange incident one night before the Truce when he was sent out to collect a ‘high official’ following an accident in Newry. A police car was in collision with the vehicle containing the official. When Darling arrived at the scene he found a group of men standing around with the official. They had been going from Belfast to Dublin, and they piled into Darling’s car.

  Collins got into the front with Darling and the driver. He could feel the gun that Darling was carrying. ‘Are you carrying a gun?’ Collins asked.

  ‘I am.’

  He then guessed at Darling’s name but was wrong, so he said he was one of two other people. This time he was right.

  ‘Do you know me?’

  ‘No,’ Darling replied. ‘I think I know your friends, but I don’t know you.’

  ‘I am Michael Collins.’

  ‘Are you the Michael Collins whom the British police have made famous?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘A police force has a duty to apprehend criminals,’ Darling explained. ‘If they fail to apprehend criminals one defence is to say that the criminal whom they cannot apprehend is the most astute, remarkable, astonishing criminal in history, and so I say: “Are you Michael Collins whom the British police force have made famous?”’

  Collins laughed at that. The talked on the way to Dublin and they were driven to ‘an hotel in one of Dublin’s squares’. The official went into the hotel with the other two, while Collins and Darling followed and had a couple of bottles of stout and chatted together until the official was ready to leave.

  ‘That was an astonishing thing meeting Michael Collins,’ Darling remarked when they got into the car.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the official asked.

  ‘You knew that was Michael Collins with whom I sat in the car?’

  The man rushed back into the hotel, but Collins was not there. Darling did not identify the official, but it may well have been Cope, because very shortly afterwards, just before the Truce came into effect, Cope and Collins met. Tim Kennedy, who had worked for Collins in Dublin and was the intelligence officer in charge of the Kerry No. 1 Brigade of the IRA, was in Dublin to meet with Collins. He called to Vaughan’s Hotel in Parnell Square. Christy Harte, the porter was rather drunk, and he called Collins out to meet Kennedy as he had a companion with him. Collins brought the two of them in.

  ‘When we got inside the door in the hall he told me the war was over and Sir Alfred Cope of the Castle was in the room to which he was taking me and that I wasn’t to disclose anything to him and his two bodyguards. Collins introduced Kennedy under an assumed name to Cope and the two RIC head constables accompanying him. One of the head constables had actually been stationed in Castleisland, County Kerry, so he and Kennedy recognised each other immediately.

  ‘Mick again announced about the Truce’, and they drank brandy and champagne to celebrate it. ‘Cope and I got talking and we discussed the troubled times,’ Kennedy noted. ‘I was regretting it was over and said I enjoyed it. Both Cope and I and Mick kept drinking glass after glass and Mick pretended to be drunk but I discovered afterwards he was drinking some coloured liquid.’ Kennedy said that he and Cope passed out, and Collins arranged for Kennedy to be taken back to his hotel in a taxi. ‘I awoke that evening in a bed fully clothed, with the taxi driver, also fully clothed, outside me,’ Kennedy continued. ‘Apparently he was warned by Mick to look after me and to stay with me ’til he knew that I was all right and over the shock of the war ending.’

  The Truce came into effect at noon on 11 July. The terms were the subject of an honourable understanding with no signed, formal agreement. In the following months each side tended to interpret the terms differently, even though there was a remarkable similarity in their understanding of the Truce. De Valera issued instructions to the IRA to cease all attacks on crown forces and civilians, to prohibit the use of arms, to cease military manoeuvres, to abstain from interference with public and private property, and to avoid any disturbances of the peace that might necessitate military interference.

  De Valera selected a delegation consisting of four cabinet colleagues, Griffith, Stack, Count George N. Plunkett, and Robert Barton, as well as Erskine Childers, the acting minister for propaganda, to accompany him along with a number of others.

  On the evening of the Truce Kathleen O’Connell noted that ‘Collins called out this evening and spent several hours with the President’. He tried to insist on his own inclusion in the team going to London, but the president flatly refused to have him, saying that he feared the negotiations ‘might end in a stalemate and that war might be resumed, so he saw no reason why photographers should, at this stage, be given too many opportunities of taking pictures of Collins.’ They had an acrimonious meeting, with the Big Fellow refusing to accept the explanation because, for one thing, it could not be squared with de Valera’s attempt to send him to the United States earlier in the year. ‘Hot discussion,’ Kathleen noted. ‘President rather upset’.

  Having been demoted in favour of Stack, of all people, Collins was now being ignored for peripheral figures like Laurence O’Neill, the lord mayor of Dublin, and the Dáil deputy, Robert Farnan, who had been invited along with his wife. In addition, there were two secretaries, Kathleen O’Connell and Lily O’Brennan. The delegation set up headquarters at the Grosvenor Hotel, but de Valera and Kathleen stayed with the Farnans in a private house acquired for them.

  It was in the context of these events that Collins wrote the opening words of this foreword about the ill will among members of the Dáil. He was clearly despondent.

  ‘I think you would be warned of the changes here,’ he wrote to Harry Boland in the United States some days later. ‘There’s something about [them] which I don’t like, and I have the impression that the whole thing is pressing on me. I find myself looking at friends as if they were enemies – looking at them twice just to make sure that they really are friends after all. I mention no names. After all it may be a wrong impression that’s got into me. Frankly, though, I don’t care for things as they are now.’

  Prior to his arrest in February 1920 ‘all members of the Cabinet were, as far as I knew, fast friends with complete trust in one another,’ Robert Barton noted. ‘There was not a sign of disunion, suspicion or ill feeling. I verily believe that had the occasion arisen each of us would have given his life for any other member without a thought. We acted like a one-man team. If we disagreed it was upon matters of detail rather than of policy or principle. Every member appeared to have implicit faith in the integrity of his comrades.’

  ‘Seventeen months later when
I returned from imprisonment a great change had come over relationships in the cabinet,’ Barton added. ‘Michael Collins whom I knew best, for we had worked together every evening in Cullenswood house for more than 6 months told me that efforts were being made to get rid of him as he and Richard Mulcahy were distrusted by Cathal Brugha and Stack. I soon found this to be true.’ Barton found had difficulty meeting other cabinet colleagues. ‘All ministers were too busy with their own departments to meet except for cabinet meetings or when necessity required.’ He had ‘practically no acquaintance’ with either Austin Stack, or W. T. Cosgrave, and he had never even met Kevin O’Higgins before. The cabinet was apparently split. ‘There was an obvious rift between Brugha and Stack on one side and Collins and Griffith on the other,’ according to Barton. As he saw it IRA chief of staff Dick Mulcahy was ‘at logger heads’ with Defence Minister Cathal Brugha, with ‘Collins obviously supporting Mulcahy,’ and ‘Stack supporting Brugha’. In fact, the real rift was between Brugha and Collins, with Mulcahy being drawn into the vortex, because of his support of Collins.

  ‘I tried to discover from Collins what was the root cause of his antipathy to Brugha,’ Barton wrote. ‘I failed but learned that he bore resentment to Dev also for the impartial attitude he adopted regarding this quarrel with Brugha. Brugha was, I consider, a difficult man to work with. A man of iron will and scrupulous honesty he often argued fiercely over details that were of little moment and in a manner that was at times offensive though generally unintentionally so. At every meeting Dev exercised self-control and patience that filled me with admiration in his endeavours to prevent an open rupture between Brugha, Collins, Stack and Griffith. Brugha had, I believe, always distrusted Griffith as a Republican.’

  Barton would later come to the conclusion that the rift with Collins was at least partly the result of the Big Fellow’s ‘effort to control the national movement through the IRB of which he was the leader.’ The IRB had been ‘strengthening its hold upon the Volunteers by appointing its nominees to all the important positions in the Army as vacancies occurred through capture or casualties.’

  ‘De Valera on all occasions played the role of peacemaker and I endeavoured to support him,’ Barton added. ‘I never spoke to him alone and knew as little about him as I did of my other colleagues.’ Barton concluded that his lack of familiarity with cabinet colleagues was partly the result of the circumstances of being in jail for so long, but it was also partly due to his own upbringing as a member of the Protestant landowning class, who were generally unionist in outlook. He had worked with Collins, but their relationship was tempered more by the ‘risks to which we were subjected than by temperamental affinity’.

  Barton was obviously more sympathetic to de Valera than to Collins, as he was clearly not impressed with the manner in which the Big Fellow was critical of the president. Barton held de Valera in enormous regard.

  ‘He is a patriot without personal ambition,’ Barton wrote. ‘A supremely honest and conscientious leader.’ The faults of other leaders were conspicuously lacking in de Valera. In the light of history it was absurd to suggest that de Valera had no personal ambition. He grew up as an unwanted child with enormous ambition. He had a driving need to be recognised as somebody, and this was a significant factor in his difficulties in the United States, where he admitted that his problems were largely the result of his personal determination to block Daniel Cohalan, unless the judge was prepared to consult him first. De Valera would demonstrate his ambition by serving as head of government more than twice as long as any other Irish leader in the twentieth century, He also served as chancellor of the National University from 1919 to his death in 1975.

  Collins had a different kind of appeal. On Tuesday night, 12 July 1921 Collins sent a message to Brigid Lyons to arrange for him to accompany her to see Seán MacEoin in Mountjoy Gaol the following afternoon. He entered the prison with her under the name of James Gill.

  ‘It was a joy to see Seán MacEoin’s surprise when he saw Mick Collins walk into Mountjoy that day,’ according to Brigid. ‘Seán just greeted him as a visitor but there was no hiding his inner delight.’

  ‘I don’t know how to explain to you how grateful I am to you for your visit yesterday,’ MacEoin wrote to Brigid next day. ‘My old heart beat high with joy and all I could do was stare and murmur to myself “Thank God”. I am sure you understand how I felt.’

  ‘I will be forever grateful to you for that visit,’ he continued. ‘Never were you so welcome and that welcome will always re­­main so long as I remain.’

  There was no doubting the intensity of MacEoin’s appreci­ation at the gesture by Collins. Part of the loyalty that Collins attracted was prompted by the sense of caring that he generated. Men believed that he was really concerned about them as individuals and that he would go to extraordinary lengths to try to help them.

  Even though de Valera brought a whole delegation with him to London, he essentially suggested that he and Lloyd George should meet privately. ‘For my own part,’ he wrote to the prime minister on 13 July, ‘I am quite ready, if you prefer it, to meet you alone.’

  Lloyd George would almost inevitably have preferred such a meeting because, despite his personal popularity, he was in a virtually unique position of political weakness. He was in a coalition with the Conservative Party, which had traditionally been opposed to even Home Rule for Ireland, but unlike any normal coalition, the Conservatives actually enjoyed an overwhelming majority in parliament. Thus, they could bring down the government at will, and they had the numbers to form a government on their own.

  Next day de Valera had the first of four private meetings with Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street on the afternoon of 14 July. Immediately afterwards the prime minister dictated a note to his private secretary, Edward Grigg, indicating that de Valera had been more inclined to listen than he had ex­pected and had ‘listened well’. The same evening, however, he gave a very different account to another secretary, Geoffrey Shakespeare, as the latter drove him to an official dinner.

  ‘I listened to a long lecture on the wrongs done to Ireland starting with Cromwell, and when I tried to bring him to the present day back he went to Cromwell again,’ the prime minister said. ‘It reminded me of a circus roundabout when I was a boy. I used to sit on a rocking horse that raced round and round after the horse in front, and when the roundabout came to rest I was still the same distance from the horse in front as when I started. That’s how I ended with de Valera.’

  Lloyd George, of course, was not renowned for his honesty. The account dictated to Grigg was probably the more accurate, because on this occasion de Valera had come to listen, but it was the fanciful version given to Shakespeare which found credence and would come back to haunt de Valera in later years.

  From the outset of the talks the Irish leader’s aim was to show as little of his own hand as possible while trying to get the British to make some definite proposals. ‘You will be glad to know that I am not dissatisfied with the general situation,’ he wrote to Collins after a second meeting next day. Lloyd George had indicated he would be making a definite offer.

  ‘The proposal will be theirs,’ de Valera explained. ‘We will be free to consider it without prejudice.’

  ‘You confirm exactly what I was thinking about,’ Collins replied in a letter exuding his own arrogant temperament next day. ‘Apart from the little unpleasant things on Monday evening, have you got some little value from the talk?’ he asked.

  He did not record his advice to de Valera, but there can be little doubt that the Big Fellow did not take the president’s advice about keeping a low profile himself. ‘I have made millions of discoveries,’ Collins wrote. ‘For instance, their civilian and military heads have said that it would not be wise for Michael Collins to appear too publicly.’ He was therefore determined to go right into the lion’s den by requesting permission to visit his brother in the internment camp on Spike Island in Cork harbour.

  ‘They said they could no
t be responsible for my safety in the Martial Law area, which means that they could not and would not be responsible for my non-safety,’ he continued. ‘The whole thing is an effort on their part to make us believe that they have irresponsible forces. My effort, of course, is the very contrary, and it will be seen later how I mean to make them responsible.’

  Although Collins realised the British were unlikely to make an acceptable offer at such an early stage, he warned de Valera not to reject the proposals without allowing the Dáil to consider them. This would afford the Irish side the opportunity of demanding the release of all imprisoned members of the Dáil so that they – the democratically elected representatives of the people – could consider the offer. Several deputies had already been released since the Truce, but Collins was particularly anxious to secure the release of Seán MacEoin, who was under sentence of death. ‘No matter how bad the terms are,’ Collins wrote to de Valera, ‘they would be submitted to a full meeting’ of the Dáil.

  Rather than adopt a low profile, Collins deliberately kept himself in the news. He had the Republican Publicity Bureau disclose that a literary agent in Southampton had offered him £10,000 for his memoirs.

  ‘Sorry I cannot comply,’ Collins responded. ‘The time is not yet opportune, but as your offer reached me first, I shall at some time give you the offer of the first refusal.’

  De Valera had a third meeting with Lloyd George on 18 July. The prime minister began by observing that the notepaper on which de Valera had written to him was headed ‘Saorstát Éireann’, which literally translated as ‘Free State of Ireland’.

  What did Saorstát mean? Lloyd George asked.

  ‘Free state,’ replied de Valera.

  ‘Yes,’ remarked the prime minister, ‘but what is the Irish word for republic?’

  De Valera was taken aback. Although his own command of the Irish language was not nearly as complete as he liked to pretend to non-speakers, he must have known that the leaders of the Easter Rebellion had used the term Phoblacht na hÉireann (Republic of Ireland), but he now played dumb, possibly because he had no convincing explanation as to why the original term had been dropped and Saorstát adopted instead in 1919.