The New Army project seems in the end to have petered out: the Ministry’s decision on 25 November to call it the ‘Re-Commissioned Army’ has been seen as, in effect, an acceptance of the status quo.287 A few days after the 25 November confrontation, Mulcahy explained to divisional commanders that while ‘it might be inferred from this document [the Ministry memorandum] that a New Army is being formed, this is not really so’. The idea was merely ‘to offer fresh commissions to certain Officers’. He added that ‘the whole situation has been examined at a joint Meeting of the Cabinet and GHQ Staff and an understanding arrived at.’ But he did not tell them what the understanding was.288
NEGOTIATORS: PURISTS AND PRAGMATISTS?
The New Army plan erupted at a delicate, maybe critical moment in the Anglo-Irish negotiations. It took its place in a series of disputes which gradually fractured the solidarity of the republican leadership. Tension within the supreme command was bad, but not necessarily fatal in itself. Transferred to the political negotiations with Britain its impact was of a different order. The spat over staff ranks and appointments coincided with the process of selecting the Republic’s delegation to London and setting out its negotiating stance. Simply getting to the point of agreeing a basis for formal negotiations consumed the best part of three months after the Truce. A seemingly interminable and inconclusive correspondence between Lloyd George and de Valera through July and August left the two sides almost as far apart as at the start. The gulf was bridged only after Andy Cope had persuaded the British Cabinet on 7 September that as long as Britain insisted on allegiance to the Crown as a precondition for talks there would be no negotiations. At the end of the month de Valera finally agreed to negotiate on the basis of Lloyd George’s formula – to work out ‘how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’. This long process had made clear that this ‘reconciling’ would be extremely complicated, if it could be done at all. The British aim was clearly to adjust Irish ‘national aspirations’ away from the independence claimed by the Republic, but how far was less clear.
De Valera’s decision not to lead the delegation still strikes many as inexplicable. It has been justified by several arguments, which were anthologized by Dorothy Macardle, ranging from the contention that ‘during this crisis’ the President’s place was at home, and that ‘the appropriate person to head a delegation to England was the Minister for Foreign Affairs,’ to the suggestion (ironic, perhaps) that if a settlement were reached which ‘met with opposition from a section of the Republicans’ de Valera would have more influence in recommending it ‘if he were outside the Delegation which had effected it’. (Yet since he expected the delegation to be in continuous conversation with the Cabinet, it is not clear that the distinction would have been obvious.) None of these explanations is more than inferential. Winston Churchill got the impression that de Valera had refused to go because ‘as a “President” he was senior to Lloyd George.’289 The selection of delegates has provoked almost as much speculation. Brugha and Stack simply refused to go. Brugha ‘refused to leave the army’, according to Macardle, but Collins – who could not use that justification – failed to persuade his colleagues that he would be more effective as a distant threat than as a negotiator. It may well be that he was not so much against going as against going without de Valera.290 His claim that he was no more than a simple soldier was obviously absurd, but the decision to send him still looks bizarre. He had been the most wanted man in the British Empire, and his legendary hair’s breadth escapes had created the myth that the authorities had no photograph of him. Now he was to be set in a global spotlight. He could never reoccupy his former role if the war was restarted. Can this have been Brugha’s intention?
The division in the Cabinet over the delegation followed the lines that were becoming worryingly familiar. With Collins and Griffith, supported by Cosgrave, pressing de Valera to go to London, and Brugha, Stack and Barton supporting his refusal, the President in effect had the casting vote. The division was transmitted into the delegation, with a new strain of animosity added by the inclusion of Erskine Childers as secretary. This was not helpful: Griffith’s bitter dislike of Childers was already clear and it would have very serious effects in the longer term. During the negotiations, as Childers told Nora Connolly, Griffith’s ‘absolute contempt’ for him kept him from playing any meaningful part.291 Was there any intention of balancing ‘more’ or ‘less’ republican commitment within the delegation, or was the key issue that of negotiating capacity? When Mary MacSwiney asked de Valera to put her on the delegation, he apparently replied, ‘You would not do, Máire, you are too extreme.’292 De Valera later told Joe McGarrity ‘that Griffith would accept the Crown under pressure I had no doubt’; more surprisingly, ‘from my own weighing up of’ Collins, ‘I felt certain that he too was contemplating accepting the Crown.’ His argument that this ‘would simply make them both a better bait for Lloyd George – leading him on and on, further in our direction’, was a puzzling one.293
De Valera’s own republican commitment has often been questioned – then and since. Though his messages to America in 1921 necessarily remained unequivocally separatist (‘Sinn Féin will conduct no peace negotiations that do not provide for the recognition of the Irish Republic and complete political separation of Ireland from England’), at home his language was less strident. Ernest Blythe had several conversations with him after his return from the USA, and maintained that they had agreed on the inevitability of a compromise settlement. At one point, de Valera perceptively argued that they should try to negotiate while the Lloyd George coalition government was still in office, since they would get better terms from its ministers than from any likely successors.294 De Valera mentioned the Republic only twice during the extended correspondence with Lloyd George. Opening the second Dáil on 16 August, he seemed to revert to the old Sinn Féin mantra in saying that the people had voted for freedom rather than a particular type of government. ‘I do not take it that [the electorate’s] answer was for a form of Republican Government as such, because we are not Republican doctrinaires.’ But he said ‘it was obvious’ that ‘Irish independence could not be realised in any other way so suitably as through a Republic’ – at least ‘at the present time’. As the London talks went on, though, he tended to speak of ‘our principles’ without specifying them exactly. Thus, at Ennis on 1 December, at the crisis of the negotiations, he reassured ‘anybody who thinks that we can be driven beyond a point to which we are entitled to go by our principles’ that ‘we are going to stand upon the rock of truth and principle.’
By contrast, on 16 August Brugha had immediately reminded the Dáil that it had taken an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic, and added (‘not in a threatening sense, but as a manifest fact’) that ‘the fighting men … are prepared to stand by that Oath no matter what the consequences might be.’295 The post-1919 formula was incorporated in the oath of allegiance taken by the TDs four days later to ‘the Irish Republic and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Éireann’. At a public meeting of the Dáil on the 26th (after a series of private or ‘secret’ sessions) de Valera’s title was apparently changed from president of Dáil Éireann to ‘President of the Irish Republic’.296 There is some uncertainty about this, though. Seán MacEoin, who proposed this motion, recorded that he was instructed to do so by the previous President of the Republic, but for some reason he did not give his name.297 Diarmuid O’Hegarty, who certainly should have known, later insisted that the term was never used in the Dáil until the motion to re-elect de Valera after the Treaty vote, and was incorrect even then. The correct title remained ‘President of the Ministry or Príomh-Aire [prime minister]’ as in the original constitution of Dáil Éireann, revised in August 1921.298 If O’Hegarty was right, the only individual called President of the Irish Republic at this stage, ironically, was the President of the Supreme Council of the IRB, who had always
been given this honorary title.
That President, Michael Collins, went on record as saying, indeed ‘emphasising’ more than once, that ‘the declaration of a Republic by the leaders of the [1916] rising was far in advance of national thought.’299 That remained substantially true five years later. As Robert Barton glumly reflected, ‘great numbers of the people were never Republican.’ He believed, as we have seen, that although the demand for independence might have seemed spontaneous, the people were drawn into it by their separatist leaders, and (in a striking echo of de Valera’s eggs-in-a basket metaphor) likened the strength of the national demand to the strength of an egg. ‘So long as the shell was intact, compromise and disruption were impossible. The army and political leaders were the shell, the people were the fluid contents.’300
When the Dáil confirmed the choice of delegates, Mary MacSwiney (just back from eight months in the USA lecturing for the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic) insisted that they were going to England for one purpose only – to secure British recognition of the Republic. Ernest Blythe recalled that ‘she wound up pointing her finger directly at me and saying: “If anyone here has a contrary opinion, let him speak now or be forever silent.” ’ This rare attempt to pin down the objectives of the negotiations was sidelined by what has been called the ‘casual misogyny’ that Blythe shared with many of his colleagues: ‘I only laughed at her.’301 But her suspicions had been growing for some time. While she was in America she had worried about the republican commitment of both de Valera and Collins. Harry Boland had reassured her that both were sound, and that ‘there can be no compromise between Ireland and England.’ But as they sailed back to Ireland together in August she had been disturbed by Boland’s own conversation – ‘the nonsense you talked on shipboard about “Dual Monarchy” etc. etc.’ – and warned him that should he go to London ‘please leave your Dual Monarchy nonsense behind you. Our oaths are to the Republic, nothing less.’302
Boland – who would become one of the most prominent casualties on the anti-Treaty side – certainly toyed with various formulations at this stage. This may have been a product of his enforced diplomatic duties (as he told Mary MacSwiney, his experience in the USA had made him cynical, and ‘vague and unsatisfactory in my speech and actions’) rather than of ideological flexibility. But when he was sent to Scotland in mid-September to deliver one of de Valera’s letters to Lloyd George at Gairloch, he was plainly impressed by the vehemence of the Prime Minister’s insistence on the impossibility of sovereign independence. That month he remarked more than once that he would be returning to the USA to ‘prepare the people for something less than a Republic’, ‘the fact that we would not be getting a Republic’.
De Valera showed that separatism was not such an unequivocal concept as many republicans believed when, after the preliminary London talks, he began to set out the idea of ‘external association’. This was really a recognition that without entrenched security guarantees the British would never agree a settlement. De Valera had long since been prepared to offer such guarantees: in February 1920 he had angered Irish-American hardliners by saying that permanent Irish neutrality might be enshrined in an instrument akin to the 1903 US–Cuba treaty. The problem was how to entrench the guarantee in a form acceptable to both sides. Republicans like Stack and Brugha saw any guarantee as a breach of sovereignty. De Valera struggled to clarify his conviction (most carefully elaborated in a letter to Joe McGarrity after the Treaty had been signed) that external association ‘would leave us with the Republic unless the people wished to change it’, and ‘would commit us to nothing more than consultation with the representatives of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, etc., on matters of common concern’.303 Though it would also ‘rid us … of all British forces in occupation of our territory and coasts’, this would happen not immediately but ‘after a short period’ – a more gnomic formulation.
External association has been recognized as a ‘novel and imaginative’ attempt to rethink the standard notion of sovereignty to find a way out of the impasse. But it struck most hardline republicans as at best baffling, at worst a betrayal. It proved too imaginative not only for Irish republicans, but for the British as well. De Valera’s argument that such an arrangement would be no different from any treaty agreed by, say, the French government – and hence a confirmation rather than a denial of sovereignty – showed just why the British would never accept it. For the British, the security guarantee could be entrenched only by a formal recognition of the supremacy of the Crown. In the end, the negotiators did not push the idea very hard. If de Valera had managed to convince his Cabinet colleagues that he was committed to it, they might have tried harder, but it seems clear that neither Griffith nor Collins thought that it represented his ‘last word’.304 And de Valera was quite specific on the point that he could not provide a written draft – the delegates must draft the treaty.305
When the delegation arrived in London they carried a letter of accreditation, carefully worded to empower them as ‘Envoys Plenipotentiary from the Elected Government of the REPUBLIC OF IRELAND to negotiate and conclude … a Treaty or Treaties of Settlement, Association and Accommodation between Ireland and the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth’. (It was signed by de Valera ‘as President’ – of what, was not said.)306 Whether the British might have fallen for this indirect recognition of the Republic’s existence, or if not whether the talks would have been stymied at the start, are interesting questions. In the event, the delegation’s credentials were never asked for and, perhaps more oddly, Griffith made no attempt to present them.
The delegation’s powers would eventually become an acutely controversial issue. Nobody seemed to be sure, then or later, if they were ‘plenipotentiaries’ in the normal sense – with full powers to agree a settlement. (So that, as the Viceroy Lord FitzAlan told Lloyd George, they should ‘not take advantage of de Valera’s absence to delay and refer back to him’.) Since, if Macardle was right, de Valera was already preparing for the possibility of dispute over the eventual agreement, it is hard to fathom why the situation was left ambiguous. The instructions issued to the delegation along with their credentials on 7 October 1921 made clear that ‘the Plenipotentiaries have full powers as defined in their credentials’, but they were to refer ‘the draft text of any treaty about to be signed’ to the Cabinet, and await a reply before signing.307 Any ambiguity here was more apparent than real, since the Cabinet could not reduce the plenary powers conferred by the Dáil. The Cabinet’s instructions were ‘really nothing more than suggested guidelines’. If de Valera really believed that the two strongest members of the delegation would ‘accept the Crown’, he must have been, as he told McGarrity, ‘convinced that as matters came to a close we would be able to hold them from this side from crossing the line’. This was surely a very high-risk strategy.
‘OUR CIVIL FUNCTIONS’
In the midst of the London negotiations de Valera told Collins it was ‘very important that you stipulate that our civil functions – police, courts, etc. – go on’. Their work could proceed ‘unostentatiously as I explained to MacCready [sic] initially’, but ‘cannot be given up, otherwise the truce if continued long enough would mean that we had gone out of business’. The republican justice system had indeed been brought to a near-standstill in the last six months of the guerrilla conflict. Austin Stack admitted that ‘owing to enemy action’ the courts ‘for a time fell into abeyance in many places’. Under the Truce, though, they revived. Stack, as he told the Dáil on 18 August, interpreted the clause prohibiting ‘interference with the movements of Irish persons, military or civil’ as permitting republican justices, registrars and clerks to conduct their circuits. Courts were to be held ‘as publicly as possible, without making the holding of them provocative’.308 By mid-August, they were ‘going again in almost every part of the country’. (In Longford, Dublin city, Cork city and parts of Cork, Clare and Limerick they ha
d ‘never for a day ceased work’, he claimed.)309
But the key figures in keeping the courts going, the TDs and district registrars, still seem to have been doing little. After the Truce, Stack renewed his exhortation to TDs – ‘Kindly take off your coat and give whatever help you can in this work, which is of the very highest importance.’310 He urged registrars to seize the ‘great opportunity at present afforded for thoroughly reorganising the Courts in your area’. The local judicial machinery needed ‘to be capable of withstanding the most violent attempts that may be made by the enemy to render it ineffective’. Rather mysteriously, he told them that ‘should hostilities be resumed, the Courts, for reasons which it is yet premature to disclose, will be called upon to play a mighty part in the struggle.’ ‘This is the golden hour. Therefore be prepared.’ Stack’s warning that any justice who was ‘not prepared to perform his duty at all costs should resign and make room for a better man’ indirectly acknowledged that many had been intimidated by British action. Parish courts, he added, should be ‘an easy matter to keep going’, and there could be ‘no excuse for any Parish which in the future is found wanting’. As long as they had regular fixed sittings – once a fortnight – ‘the people will in a short time submit all their disputes to them.’ The enemy would try to disrupt them, but ‘it should be very easy to outwit the forces of the enemy in holding these.’ District courts might be more difficult to convene, but if they were split into five sub-districts, each with its own district justice, the ‘work could be done with greater dispatch and less risk of detection’.311
Stack instructed the district registrars that ‘it is not at present desirable to invite too much publicity’. There should be ‘no relaxation of our efforts to empty the enemy courts, but the work should go on quietly and unostentatiously’. The dates of court sittings should not be publicized, and press reports of proceedings ‘must be avoided’. Decrees and court orders should be executed ‘with as little display as possible’. Early the following month, after the police had dispersed a republican court in Donegal, Stack stipulated that ‘should the enemy interfere, the justices should take a strong stand on the matter and point out that such interference is a glaring breach of the terms of the truce.’ But he was careful to add a further instruction that ‘everything possible should be done to mislead the enemy as to the time and venue of the courts.’ Courts confronted with ‘enemy interference’ should adjourn under protest and report the matter to the Home Affairs Department – ‘so that the complaints can be dealt with through the liaison officers’. In case ‘interference’ was too vague a term, another week later he insisted that ‘on no account should the Justices adjourn a Court until force has actually been used to disperse it.’312
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 45
