Kathleen Clarke proposed de Valera for re-election ‘as President of the Irish Republic’. But Collins was ready for the move. ‘We expected something like this,’ he said. ‘We would have been fools if we had not anticipated it.’ If de Valera were re-elected, he warned, ‘everybody will regard us a laughing stock’.
If re-elected, De Valera said he would ‘carry on as before’ and ignore Treaty. ‘I do not believe that the Irish people, if they thoroughly understood it, would stand for it,’ he added. It was not just his arrogance that critics found offensive, but also the smug, self-righteous way in which he sought re-election. It was as if he was saying that he wished to go back to private life but, because he was more intelligent than most Irish people and could see things that they could not understand, he would condescend to serve them. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘I am only putting myself at your disposal and at the disposal of the nation. I do not want office at all.’
‘I do not ask you to elect me,’ he said, re-emphasising the point moments later. ‘I am not seeking to get any power whatever in this nation. I am quite glad and anxious to get back to private life.’
If de Valera was re-elected, Collins said that he would quit. ‘I will go down to the people of South Cork and tell them that I did my best, that I could bring the thing no further.’
‘There is only one man who can lead us properly and keep us all together,’ Brugha interjected. ‘If Eamon de Valera did not happen to be President who would have kept Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and myself together?’
‘That is true,’ replied Collins. ‘It is not today or yesterday it started.’
‘I only wish to God we could be brought together again under his leadership,’ Brugha continued. ‘I only wish it was possible.’
‘It is not, though,’ said Collins.
Griffith depicted the president’s tactics as a ‘political manoeuvre to get round the Treaty.’ It was an attempt to exploit the emotions of deputies. ‘There is no necessity for him to resign today,’ Griffith added. ‘His resignation and going up again for re-election is simply an attempt to wreck this Treaty.’
As nobody else had been nominated for president, Stack argued that de Valera ‘has been re-elected unanimously’.
‘Well, I am voting against anyway,’ Collins insisted. He tried to nominate Griffith, but the Speaker ruled the Dáil would have to vote on de Valera’s nomination first.
As the roll was called de Valera declined to vote in an apparent effort to dramatise that he personally did not want the office. This might easily have been a very costly gesture, because the vote was extremely close. He was only defeated by 60 votes to 58. If just one deputy had voted in favour instead of against de Valera, his own vote would have given him victory by 60 votes to 59.
The difficulties of implementing the Treaty in the face of obstructionist opposition became apparent when Collins proposed Griffith as ‘President of the Provisional Executive,’ rather than as president of the Dáil, or of the Irish Republic. Article 17 of the Treaty stipulated that ‘a meeting of members of Parliament elected for constituencies in Southern Ireland’ should meet to select a Provisional Government – all the members of which had to signify in writing their acceptance of the Treaty.
The Dáil could authorise the establishment of the Provisional Government so that it would have continuity from the Irish people. This would make no practical difference, but de Valera was adamant that the Dáil could not transfer any of its authority, or do anything to implement the Treaty, without the prior approval of the Irish people. He was insisting, that until the Treaty was ratified there would have to be two Irish governments – the Dáil executive, which would be recognised under Irish law, and the Provisional Government, which would take over the administration at Dublin Castle and would thus only be recognised under British law.
In effect, that argument was about whether Griffith could call himself Chairman of the Provisional government as well as president of the Dáil. It was ironic that de Valera, of all people, should be so obstinate over the title, seeing that he had changed the title from priomh aire to president back in 1919 without even informing much less consulting his colleagues. It was more than two years before he asked the Dáil to regularise the constitutional position with an oblique amendment in August 1921.
The wrangle over the Griffith’s title was not resolved until next day when de Valera was given his own way. ‘If I am elected,’ Griffith told the Dáil, ‘I will occupy whatever position President de Valera occupied.’
‘Hear, hear,’ exclaimed de Valera. He had won his point. ‘I feel that I can sit down in this assembly while such an election is going on.’ But minutes later, however, he changed his mind and announced that he was walking out of the Dáil ‘as a protest against the election as President of the Irish Republic of the Chairman of the Delegation who is bound by the Treaty.’ He and his supporters left the chamber in what could only be described as a contemptuous insult towards what he insisted was the sovereign assembly of the nation. It was all the worse in the face of the conciliatory attitude adopted by his opponents.
Collins was indignant. ‘Deserters all!’ he shouted at those leaving. ‘We will now call on the Irish people to rally to us. Deserters all!’
Countess Markievicz turned and shouted back: ‘Oath breakers and cowards.’
‘Foreigners – Americans – English,’ snapped Collins.
‘Lloyd Georgeites,’ cried Markievicz. Mary MacSwiney also shouted something but her words were drowned out amid cries of ‘Up the Republic’ and the counter taunts of those remaining in the chamber. The sordid spectacle was mercifully ended as the last of the dissidents left the chamber.
Griffith was then elected without further opposition. He proceeded to call a meeting of the southern parliament, but in obvious deference to the de Valera group, he did not do so as president of the Dáil, but as chairman of the delegation that negotiated the Treaty. The southern parliament was a smaller body than the Dáil, because everyone elected to the Stormont was entitled to sit in the Dáil. In practice this made little difference because all the deputies who took their Dáil seats, with the one exception of Seán Milroy – a pro-Treaty deputy from County Fermanagh – had been elected in the 26 counties.
Members of the second Dáil had been elected under the machinery to set up the southern parliament, which was supposed to set up the Provisional government. It was therefore summoned but only pro-Treaty deputies and the unionists elected at Trinity College turned up at the Mansion House on Saturday, 14 January 1922. The gathering promptly approved the Treaty without a division. The appointment of an eight-man Provisional Government under the chairmanship of Collins was the approved. The Dáil cabinet had agreed this in advance. They were just going through the motions of duplicating everything to satisfy both de Valera and the British. It was really only a cosmetic exercise. Others might have highlighted the significance of the occasion with some kind of ceremonial address, but not Collins.
‘We did not come here to speak, but to work,’ he said. The whole thing was over in forty-five minutes.
Ever since the establishment of the Dáil there had been two administrations in Ireland – the Dáil and the crown regime at Dublin Castle. In theory this arrangement was continuing with Collins and the Provisional Government taking over at Dublin Castle. With the exception of Griffith and Mulcahy, members of the Dáil cabinet were appointed to the same portfolios in the Provisional Government, so the two administrations were effectively combined under the dual leadership of Griffith and Collins. They had worked well together while de Valera was in the United States, and again during the Treaty negotiations. Hence the dual set up established to placate de Valera, was never likely to be more than a minor inconvenience.
When Collins went to Dublin Castle to receive his commission as chairman of the Provisional Government from the lord lieutenant, he was uncharacteristically late. As he alighted from a taxi an official approached him looking at his watch. ‘Mr C
ollins,’ he said, ‘you’re seven minutes late, and you have kept the Lord Lieutenant waiting.’
‘You people are here 700 years,’ Collins replied. ‘What bloody difference will seven minutes make now that you are leaving?’
There was a kind of ceremonial changing of the guard, as Irish soldiers marched in and British soldiers marched out. The Big Fellow, who was obviously uncomfortable at the thought of receiving his commission from the representatives of the British king, put his own spin on the events, not just by keeping the lord lieutenant waiting, but more especially by issuing a formal statement afterwards: ‘Members of Rialtas Sealadacht na hÉireann [Provisional Government of Ireland] received the surrender of Dublin Castle at 1.45 pm today,’ he announced. ‘It is now in the hands of the Irish nation.’ Thereafter the events of the day would be remembered as ‘the surrender of Dublin Castle’.
One of the more surprising aspects of the Treaty was the paucity of opposition to the partition clauses. Most of the Dáil seem to accept the interpretation of Collins that if Stormont did not agree to be subservient to the Dáil, the Boundary Commission would transfer so much territory than Northern Ireland would become an unviable economic entity, and partition would be ended one way or another. Why did people so readily accept this interpretation?
For one thing, Lloyd George had indicated during the Treaty debate in the House of Commons that if Stormont did not agreed to a united Ireland, counties like Fermanagh and Tyrone could only remain within Northern Ireland by force, and he made it clear that he was opposed to such force. Moreover, Collins indicated privately that he had received some kind of informal assurance from the British during the negotiations.
During the Treaty debate in the Dáil, for instance, Collins used to meet regularly with IRB colleagues like Seán Ó Muirthile, Joe McGrath, and P. S. O’Hegarty. One evening O’Hegarty mentioned he was surprised at how the anti-Treaty people were essentially ignoring the partition issue.
‘It’s an astonishing thing to me,’ he said, ‘that in the attack on the Treaty practically nothing is said about partition, which is the one real blot on it.’
‘Oh, but that is provided for,’ Ó Muirthile replied. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘How is it provided for?’ O’Hegarty asked. ‘Ulster will opt out.’
‘Before they signed,’ Ó Muirthile explained, ‘Griffith and Collins got a personal undertaking from Smith [Birkenhead] and Churchill that if Ulster opted out they would get only four counties and that they would make a four-county government impossible.’
O’Hegarty looked over at Collins, who grinned. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
De Valera and Collins soon began travelling to political rallies throughout the country at which the Treaty was the main issue. At a rally in Cork on Sunday, 19 February, de Valera raised the political temperature. ‘If the Treaty was signed under duress,’ he said, ‘the men who went to London broke faith with the Irish people. If it was signed without duress they were traitors to the cause.’ The following weekend he addressed rallies in Limerick and Ennis.
Collins and Griffith responded with a massive rally near Trinity College, Dublin, the following Sunday, 5 March. Collins accused de Valera and his supporters of exploiting the situation. ‘They are stealing our clothes,’ Collins said. ‘We have beaten out the British by the means of the Treaty. While damning the Treaty, and us with it, they are taking advantage of the evacuation.’
‘The arrangement in regard to North-East Ulster is not ideal,’ he said. ‘But then the position in North-East Ulster is not ideal. If the Free State is established, however, union is certain.’ Rejecting the Treaty, on the other hand, would ‘perpetuate partition’. Behind the scenes Collins was contributing to the unrest in northern Ireland by secretly supplying the IRA in the north with weapons as the British armed the forces of the Provisional Government. He even connived at the kidnapping of unionists to be held as hostages against the execution of three men in Derry, whose sentences had actually been commuted hours earlier.
The sectarian outrages were on both sides. In a three week period during February, 138 people were killed – 96 Catholics and 42 Protestants. In Milewater Street, Belfast, a bomb was thrown among teenagers playing in the street, killing five of them. ‘In my opinion,’ Churchill wrote to Collins, ‘it is the worst thing that has happened in Ireland in the last three years.’
Andy Cope assured London that members of the Provisional Government ‘are doing their best’ in difficulty circumstances. ‘Collins has had great difficulty in holding in certain sections of the IRA who were out for hostages,’ Cope wrote.
During March and early April, Collins travelled from Dublin to political rallies in Cork, Skibbereen, Waterford, Castlebar, Wexford, Naas and Tralee. The first of his rallies outside Dublin was fittingly in Cork City, where he was greeted by a large crowd at Glanmire Station and taken through the city in triumph, behind a number of bands, much to the annoyance of some armed republicans. They tried to disrupt the proceedings by firing shots in the air as he being driven through Patrick’s Street.
Armed republicans also held up special excursion trains from Fermoy, Newmarket and Youghal. They kidnapped the drivers and firemen, leaving the passengers stranded. But a crowd of about 50,000 people turned up for a rally on Grand Parade.
‘While the captain was away from the ship – that time in America – there was a hurricane blowing,’ Collins said. ‘The helm has been left by the captain in the hands of those very same incompetent amateurs who afterwards, in the calm water, had the ship on the rocks, and while he was away, somehow or other, we steered safely through those troubled waters, the roughest through which the ship of the Irish nation had to be navigated in all her troubled history.’
De Valera responded in Carrick-on-Suir and in Thurles on St Patrick’s Day, that if the Treaty were ratified, they would have ‘to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government, and through, perhaps, the blood of some members of the government in order to get Irish freedom.’ He was widely blamed for inciting the IRA, but he was, in fact, rapidly losing his sway over the organisation.
Some militants, like Rory O’Connor, the director of engineering, had little time for de Valera any more. O’Connor openly declared that he was ‘no more prepared to stand for de Valera than for the Treaty’. On 30 March O’Connor led a raid on the offices of the Freeman’s Journal, where they wrecked the printing equipment, and issued a statement justifying their actions. Although de Valera later said that he personally ‘heartily disagreed’ with O’Connor, he nevertheless publicly defended O’Connor’s outrageous behaviour in a series of press interviews.
‘The threat of war from this government is intimidation operating on the side of Mr Griffith and Mr Collins as sure and as definite as if these gentlemen were using it themselves, and far more effective, because it is indirect and well kept in the background,’ de Valera argued.
‘If we proceed to fly at each other’s throats,’ Collins told a rally in Wexford on 9 April, ‘the British will come back again to restore their Government, and they will have justified themselves in the eyes of the world. They will have made good their claim that we were unable and unfit to govern ourselves. Would not Mr de Valera, then, pause and consider where his language, if translated into action, was hurrying the nation? He had much power for good or evil. Could he not cease his incitements – for incitement they were, whatever his personal intentions. Could he not strive to create a good atmosphere, instead of a bad one?’
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Edward Byrne, invited leaders of both sides to a peace conference in Dublin on 12 April. The attendance also included Griffith, Collins, de Valera, Brugha, the archbishop and the respective lord mayors of Dublin and Limerick – Laurence O’Neill and Stephen O’Mara. No progress was made but the two sides agreed to meet again after Easter.
In the early hours of Good Friday, 14 April, Rory O’Connor and a group of anti-Treaty IRA occupied th
e Four Courts and a number of other buildings in Dublin. Between 300 and 400 men were estimated to be involved in the operation. O’Connor announced that scrapping the Treaty was the only way of avoiding civil war.
The similarity with the start of the Easter Rebellion, six years earlier, was unmistakable. Although de Valera was assumed to be behind the take-over, he had nothing to do with it. In fact, he was not even been informed in advance. Nevertheless he did nothing to disabuse the public misconception.
A Labour Party deputation that called on him later that day, found him particularly unreceptive to their pleas for peace. ‘We spent two hours pleading with him, with a view to averting the impending calamity of civil war’, one member of the deputation later recalled.
‘The majority have no right to do wrong,’ de Valera told them. ‘He repeated that at least a dozen times in the course of the interview,’ according to one of those present. He refused to accept he had a ‘duty to observe the decision of the majority until it was reversed’.
By the time the archbishop’s peace conference reconvened at the Mansion House on the following Thursday, the atmosphere had been further poisoned. Brugha accused Griffith and Collins of being British agents. When the archbishop demanded that the accusation be withdrawn, Brugha agreed but explained that he considered those who did the work of the British government to be British agents.
‘I suppose we are two of the ministers whose blood is to be waded through?’ Collins asked.
‘Yes,’ replied Brugha quite calmly. ‘You are two.’
‘Civil war is certain,’ Harry Boland wrote, ‘unless Collins and Company see the error of their ways and come to terms with their late colleagues.’ Collins eventually relented and concluded an election pact with de Valera on 20 May. The two wings of Sinn Féin would put forward a united panel of candidates in ratio with their existing strength in the Dáil and, if victorious, the party would form a kind of coalition government in which there would be a president elected as usual and a minister of defence selected by the army, along with five other pro-Treaty and four anti-Treaty ministers. This was supposed to remove the Treaty as an election issue.
I Signed My Death Warrant Page 27
