I Signed My Death Warrant

by Ryle T. Dwyer

  Griffith was particularly cool towards the election pact. He pointedly stopped addressing Collins as ‘Mick’, but called him ‘Mr Collins’ instead.

  Collins stoutly defended the pact in London. When Austen Chamberlain pressed him to disavow the IRA’s campaign, he replied that he would not ‘hold the hands of the northern government when Catholics were being murdered’. He was ‘in a most pugnacious mood,’ according to Tom Jones, who noted that the Big Fellow ‘talked on at a great rate in a picturesque way about going back to fight with his comrades’. He accused the British of being ‘bent on war’, because they were doing nothing about the situation in Belfast. Jones noted that Collins went ‘on and on at great length about the Ulster situation.’

  Collins had ‘become obsessed’ with Northern Ireland, accord­ing to Lloyd George, who found himself in the unenviable position of trying to placate the volatile personalities of both the Big Fellow and Churchill. He felt ‘there was a strain of lunacy in Churchill,’ and he said that ‘Collins was just a wild animal – a mustang’. When someone suggested that negotiating with Collins was like trying to write on water, Lloyd George interjected, ‘shallow and agitated water’.

  ‘We ought to remember the life Collins had led during the last three years,’ Eamonn Duggan explained, according to Jones. ‘He was very highly strung, and over-wrought, and sometimes left their own meetings in a rage with his colleagues.’

  Collins tried to exclude the Treaty-oath from the new con­stitution and he played down the role of the king, seeing that the de facto role of the king was not defined in Canada or even Britain. The British feared ‘Collins might appoint a charwoman’ to the post of governor-general, Jones noted. ‘I see no great objection if she’s a good one,’ he added, ‘but others may take a different view of what is fitting.’

  The British insisted on the inclusion of the Treaty-oath in the constitution, because they argued its omission could be seen as a violation of the Treaty. Griffith had no intention of defending the republican symbols of the draft constitution to the point of breaking with the British, with the result that Collins had to back down. The oath was incorporated into the constitution and the Treaty itself was scheduled to the document, with the stipulation that in any conflict between the Treaty and the constitution, the Treaty would take precedence.

  The text of the constitution was only released on the eve of the election. As a result the Irish people did not have a chance to see it until it was published in the daily newspapers on election day, which fulfilled the strict letter of an earlier commitment by Collins that the constitution would be published before the election. Of course, critics were effectively denied the chance of explaining the document before polling. By then Collins had also run roughshod over the spirit of the election pact.

  Speaking in Cork on the eve of the election, he virtually asked voters to support others, rather than vote for anti-Treaty candidates on the Sinn Féin panel. He appealed to the people of Cork, ‘to vote for the candidates you think best’. He pointedly added, ‘You understand fully what you have to do, and I will depend on you to do it.’

  Of the sixty-five pro-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates, fifty-eight were elected, while only thirty-five of the anti-Treaty people were successful. Even that exaggerated the anti-Treaty support, because sixteen of them were returned without opposition. Where the seats were contested, forty-one of forty-eight pro-Treaty candidates were successful, while only nineteen of forty-one anti-Treaty candidates were elected.

  The popular vote painted an even bleaker picture for the anti-Treaty side, which received less than 22 per cent of the first preference votes cast. No anti-Treaty candidate headed the poll in any constituency and Sligo-Mayo East was the only constituency in the whole country in which a majority of voters supported anti-Treaty candidates. The total vote of the pro-Treaty Labour Party’s eighteen candidates was only 1,353 votes short of the combined total of the forty-one anti-Treaty candidates who faced opposition. Labour candidates actually won seventeen of the eighteen seats they contested.

  In Dublin, anti-Treaty Sinn Féin only won one of the eighteen seats in the city and country. In the city they lost four of their five seats. Only Seán T. O’Kelly won re-election, and they failed to win any seat in the remainder of County Dublin, where Patrick Pearse’s mother lost out, even though she was the only anti-Treaty republican seeking election in the six-seat constituency.

  There was absolutely no doubt that the people were in favour of the Treaty. ‘Labour and Treaty sweep the country,’ Harry Boland noted in his diary.

  With the exception of his prediction of the outcome of the Boundary Commission, Collins would later be proved right about the Treaty but he did not live to see it.

  Shortly after getting back into power in 1932, de Valera pledged to remove any symbol that was ‘incongruous with the country’s status as a sovereign nation’. ‘Let us remove these forms one by one,’ de Valera said at Arbour Hill on 23 April 1933, ‘so that this State that we control may be a Republic in fact and that, when the time comes, the proclaiming of the Republic may involve no more than a ceremony, the formal confirmation of a status already attained.’

  When the Republic was declared in 1949, it amounted merely to a change of name. The country had already demonstrated that it was a republic in fact. The Treaty had provided stepping-stones for the Irish Free State to attain the desired freedom for that part of the island, which was what the Treaty controversy and the civil war were about. Ironically, it was de Valera who proved that Collins was right.

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