‘It is not a question of individuals now,’ the president told Collins in an obvious appeal to his vanity. ‘It is a question of the nation and you and I and the cabinet know that the British will not make their best offer in your absence.’
‘I had no choice,’ Collins explained afterwards. ‘I had to go.’ But he made it clear to everyone that he was going against his better judgment.
‘Brugha was next proposed and flatly refused to have his name considered,’ according to Barton. ‘His business he said was Minister of Defence, and with the Army he would stay. As far as I remember none urged him to change his mind for all realised that negotiations were not likely to last more than a first session if Cathal was present.’
‘Cathal is the honestest and finest soul in the world, but he is a bit slow at seeing fine differences and rather stubborn, and the others would not seek to convince him, but would rather try to out-manoeuvre him, and there would be trouble,’ de Valera explained afterwards. ‘If I were going myself,’ he added, ‘I would certainly have taken him with me.’
Collins suggested Stack, ‘but he too definitely refused saying he was not fitted for such work and would not consent to go in any circumstances,’ Barton recalled. ‘I then proposed that Gavan Duffy should go as the inclusion of a man with knowledge of law and legal terms was essential. Collins proposed [Eamonn] Duggan as a more suitable legal man. Duggan was approved. I then suggested Mulcahy, but Brugha refused his consent. Collins proposed “either Barton or Childers or preferably both should go.” Dev stated that he was anxious that Childers should be secretary, and this was agreed to without demur. Stack supported my selection and it was agreed. Personally I was opposed to going, feeling I had not the necessary knowledge or ability, but after so many had made objections I felt diffident about refusing, especially as I had made a strong appeal to Collins to sink his objections in the national interest. Dev finally proposed Gavan Duffy and the team was complete.’ It was significant that nobody suggested the one remaining member of the cabinet, W. T. Cosgrave.
The final three were selected ‘to work in well’ with Griffith and Collins, according to de Valera, who described Duggan and Gavan Duffy as ‘mere legal padding’. Although born in Cheshire, England, George Gavan Duffy had a sound nationalist pedigree. He was the fourteenth of seventeen children of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the founders of the Young Ireland movement in 1840s. Charles Gavan Duffy emigrated to Australia in the 1850s and became prime minister of Victoria in the 1870s. George was born after his father returned to Europe in 1882. Brought up in Nice, George spoke French and Italian fluently. He returned to England in his teens to study at Stonyhurst, and he was a member of Roger Casement’s legal team at his trial in 1916. Elected to the First Dáil in 1918 Gavan Duffy was sent as an envoy of the Irish Republic to Paris and later to Rome.
Gavan Duffy, Barton, and a young rather volatile Collins had served together on a delegation that went to London in December 1918 to try to enlist the help of President Woodrow Wilson, who was in Britain on his way to the Paris Peace Conference. Gavan Duffy drew up the petition, but it was ignored by Wilson, much to the annoyance of Collins, who suggested they kidnap the president to make him listen to them. Now the three of them were selected to go back to London under very different circumstances.
Throughout the remainder of his life, de Valera went to great pains to justify his decision to exclude himself from the delegation. While the reasons he gave to the cabinet were undoubtedly factors, there were other reasons that he was only prepared to elaborate on privately. In December 1921 he explained these in some detail in a letter to Joe McGarrity, and again to Lord Longford more than forty years later.
He admitted that he was using Griffith and Collins as mere bait. ‘I felt convinced on the other hand that as matters came to a close we would be able to hold them from this side from crossing the line.’
Following the selection by the cabinet, the Dáil met in private session on 14 September to ratify the delegation. W. T. Cosgrave moved that the president should head the delegation. But his own assistant, Kevin O’Higgins, promptly undermined Cosgrave by endorsing de Valera’s decision. ‘It was a matter of tactics,’ O’Higgins argued, according to the official report. ‘They had to safeguard the Republic and the symbol of the Republic and to face the unpleasant fact that the plenipotentiaries might have to discuss other proposals than the sovereign independence of Ireland and it was not right the President should discuss such proposals.’
Griffith was then ratified as chairman, but when Collins’ name was submitted for formal ratification, he explained that he ‘would very much prefer not to be chosen’. He said that he believed de Valera should head the delegation.
If he was not president and, as such a symbol of the republic, de Valera said, he would go himself. As this was out of the question, he argued, ‘It was absolutely necessary that the Minister for Finance should be a member’ because he ‘was absolutely vital to the delegation.’
‘To me the task is a loathsome one,’ Collins told colleagues. ‘If I go, I go in the spirit of a soldier who acts against his better judgment at the orders of a superior officer.’
After Collins relented, the Dáil and promptly approved his nomination, and the other names were approved without any discussion. But Gavan Duffy did object to members of the delegation being categorised as plenipotentiaries. He thought they were being given too much power. De Valera – who had twice previously threatened to resign if full and unfettered plenipotentiary powers were denied to the delegation – was insistent. He wished to use the term plenipotentiaries ‘to give to the world the impression that they are sent over with full powers – to do the best they could to reconcile the Irish position with the British position. They should have full powers because if they go over they needed to have the moral feeling of support of the position to do the best they could for Ireland.’
‘Remember what you are asking them to do,’ the president said. ‘You are asking them to secure by negotiations what we are totally unable to secure by force of arms.’
Afterwards Collins was still uneasy about his appointment.
‘I should not have been asked to go,’ he told his friend Batt O’Connor afterwards as he paced about the room. ‘I pleaded strongly against my selection.’
‘You will get betters terms for us than anyone else,’ O’Connor argued.
‘It is a mistake to send me. De Valera should go. Who ever heard of the soldiers who fought the enemy in the field being sent to negotiate the peace,’ he said. ‘I am being put in an impossible position.’
‘Sit down man,’ O’Connor pleaded. ‘He did not seem to hear me, but continued to stride up and down the floor.’
‘I fought hard against my selection,’ he blurted out again. ‘De Valera pressed me. For no other man living would I have consented.’
He should have been allowed to remain a hidden force behind the scene, and his name used during the negotiations to extract the maximum terms from the other side, he argued. ‘Peace must mean of necessity some adjustment of the extreme demands on both sides – on our side as well as theirs,’ he said. ‘It is not the soldiers who fought on either side who should settle the adjustment. Who is to direct the fight if we have to go back to war, which is only too likely?’
For months Collins had an uneasy feeling about the hostility mounting towards him within the movement. Having been the most wanted man in Ireland over the past couple of years, it would have been understandable if he was becoming somewhat paranoid, but there were some people out to get him. He was being warned not to trust de Valera, and while he clearly had reservations, he still had not come down on the side of distrust. But the hostility of Brugha and Stack were something else.
Collins admired Brugha’s bravery and respected his sincerity but this respect was not mutual. Brugha was not among the brightest people. De Valera considered him dull witted, while Richard Mulcahy considered him ‘as brave and as brainless as a bull
’. Brugha had been mercilessly questioning the manner in which Collins had handled some of the finances. Collins had not been able to explain all the money used for arms purchases. He had used money as if it had been his own to pay some of the men working for him, much to the annoyance of Brugha, a dedicated and selfless fanatic. There was no question of Collins misappropriating money for his own use, but he was prepared to be generous with those he thought deserved the few extra pounds. Brugha resented this and needled Collins to account for every pound spent, if not every penny.
Another matter began to surface when it became apparent that a young man connected with the Yost typewriter firm had been ordered to leave the country on insufficient information in the course of hostilities. Brugha and Mulcahy agreed that the young man should be allowed to return, but the intelligence branch under Collins, which had been involved in the original mistake, was slow to act. Brugha was incensed and he wrote a stinging letter to the adjutant general on 30 July.
Mulcahy believed that Brugha really wished to break the hold that Collins had on the army, and that he was trying to insert Stack as deputy chief of staff as a means to that end. Mulcahy appointed Eoin O’Duffy as his deputy chief of staff on 1 August, and he took particular exception to the tone of Brugha’s letter to the adjutant general. It was not conducive to discipline to have the minister for defence undercutting the chief of staff by going behind his back and dealing directly with one of his officers, especially in an abusive manner. ‘Unless something can be done to eliminate the tendency to revert to this tone when differences arise,’ Mulcahy wrote on 2 September, ‘I cannot be responsible for retaining harmony and discipline among the Staff.’
‘Before you are very much older, my friend,’ Brugha wrote four days later, ‘I shall show you that I have as little intention of taking dictation from you as to how I should reprove inefficiency or negligence on the part of yourself or the D/I1 as I have of allowing you to appoint a deputy chief of staff of you own choosing.
‘In regard to your inability to maintain harmony and discipline among the Staff, it was scarcely necessary to remind me of the fact, as your shortcoming in that respect – so far at least as controlling the particular member already mentioned is concerned – have been quite apparent for a considerable time.’
The following week Brugha gave Mulcahy an ultimatum to furnish him with details of the Yost case within twenty-four hours, and when this was not done, he suspended the chief of staff and ordered him to ‘hand over to the Deputy Chief of Staff all monies, papers, and books, and other property of the Department in your possession.’ In short, Mulcahy was being ordered to hand over his command to Stack.
Brugha’s real grievance was that Mulcahy had not been ‘controlling’ Collins. He was, therefore, anxious to insert Stack in order to control the Big Fellow.
The IRA headquarters staff had reservations not only about Stack’s bungling in relation to the arrest of Casement, but also his poor performance in relation to republican courts, and his failure to attend any staff meetings while he was officially the deputy chief of staff during the Black and Tan conflict. As a result the staff backed Mulcahy, who also got the support of influential divisional commanders for his replacement of Stack. Even people like Liam Lynch, Frank Aiken and Seán Russell, who would all later break with Mulcahy and Collins, strongly supported the chief of staff in the Stack controversy.
De Valera therefore overruled Mulcahy’s suspension. But
talk of reorganising the IRA roused serious suspicions that sending Collins to London was part of a wider scheme to undermine his influence within the IRA. In the midst of what was going on many people urged Collins to stay in Dublin.
‘I had warned Collins not to go unless de Valera also went,’ Tim Healy wrote, ‘but he was too unselfish and unsuspecting to refuse.’ Whatever about being unselfish, he was far from unsuspecting, though he did try to give a contrary impression afterwards. ‘Before the negotiations began,’ he later contended, ‘no doubt of de Valera’s sincerity had a place in my mind.’ That was patently untrue, but he did give the president the benefit of his doubts.
The proposed conference at Inverness hit a snag over de Valera’s reply accepting the invitation. ‘In this final note,’ he wrote, ‘we deem it our duty to reaffirm that our position is and can only be as we have defined it throughout this correspondence. Our nation has formally declared its independence and recognises itself as a sovereign State. It is only as the representatives of that State and as it chosen guardians that we have any authority or power to act on behalf of our people.’
‘Lloyd George was aiming to treat with us as if we were simply another “Irish Parliamentary Party”,’ de Valera later explained to Joe McGarrity. ‘It was necessary for us to make quite explicit that we regarded ourselves in no such light. We were the Government of a nation that had declared its independence and we were prepared to face a renewal of the war rather than abandon that position. If there were members of the cabinet who felt otherwise they certainly did not express it. They approved the reply as I sent it, and a day or two after, in secret session, despite the threats which Lloyd George conveyed to us, Dáil Éireann endorsed it unanimously, and this after I had gone out of my way to make certain that every Member of the Assembly should realise to the full what the consequence of our standing firmly by that paragraph might involve.’
Maybe Collins openly supported it in cabinet and in the Dáil, but he certainly had reservations. Harry Boland and Joe McGrath were to deliver de Valera’s reply to Lloyd George at Gairloch, Scotland. Collins realised the letter accepting the invitation would scupper the talks.
‘You might as well stay where you are,’ he told McGrath.
Lloyd George cancelled the conference, insisting that there could be no question of recognising Irish independence. De Valera replied that he did not necessarily expect the British to recognise that independence but merely to realise that the Irish recognised it themselves. There followed a protracted exchange of letters and telegrams as Lloyd George and de Valera sought an agreeable basis for the conference.
‘De Valera always drafted these letters,’ according to Barton. ‘We sometimes suggested amendments.’ There were essentially two points at issue in their correspondence. Initially de Valera stated that the conference should consider Ireland’s right to self-determination, while Lloyd George insisted that it could only consider the detailed application of his July offer.
De Valera promptly modified his demand to a request for unconditional discussions, but Lloyd George held his ground. In six of his seven communications he stressed that only the July proposals could be considered, but in his final telegram he backed down and agreed that the conference could ‘explore every possibility’ of settlement ‘with a view to ascertaining how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations.’ This formula was essentially a compromise on their original positions, but de Valera seemed to get the better of the argument because he had taken the more flexible stand.
The second point at issue involved recognition of Irish sovereignty. Although de Valera contended he was only stating that the Irish representatives recognised their own government, Lloyd George wanted no confusion on the point. There would be no question of his government affording recognition to the Dáil regime or even acknowledging that the Irish recognised their own regime. He stressed this point in his telegram on 29 September when he extended another invitation for the Irish side to send representatives to a conference, this time in London.
De Valera’s acceptance of this invitation involved dropping the self-recognition stand, though he did try to confuse the issue by stating that ‘our respective positions have been stated and are understood.’ This was an attempt to give the impression he was still holding to his earlier position, but his remarks were not a condition. They were a statement, which could only be logically interpreted as an admission that he understood and accept
ed Britain’s insistence that there could be no conference, if he persisted with his claim of self-recognition.
‘In these preliminaries the English refused to recognise us as acting on behalf of the Irish Republic and the fact that we agreed to negotiate at all on any other basis was possibly the primary cause of our downfall,’ Barton later argued. ‘Certainly it was the first milestone on the road to disaster. It is important that you must remember that every member of the Cabinet was party to and equally responsible for this decision. Many and long were the Cabinet meetings we held. The final decision to meet the English was a unanimous one.’
‘The communication of September 29th from Lloyd George made it clear that they were going into a conference not on the recognition of the Irish Republic, and I say if we all stood on the recognition of the Irish Republic as a prelude to any conference we could very easily have said so, and there would be no conference,’ Collins noted. ‘What I want to make clear is that it was the acceptance of the invitation that formed the compromise. I was sent there to form that adaptation, to bear the brunt of it.’
1 Director of intelligence, Michael Collins
5 - ‘The same constitutional rights that Canada and Australia claimed’
De Valera had indicated in the Dáil that he intended to appoint Harry Boland as one of the secretaries to the delegation, along with Erskine Childers and somebody with a good command of the Irish language. But then he decided to send Boland to the United States instead, to prepare people there for a settlement incorporating less than the desired Republic. ‘I have a nice job now to prepare Irish-America for a compromise,’ Boland said. He told Joe McGrath that he ‘was going back to America on the President’s instructions to prepare the American people for something short of a Republic.’
Collins and Boland, who had been the best of friends for years, were involved in a classic love triangle, as both were in love with Kitty Kiernan. Before leaving for America Harry told Collins that he had proposed to Kitty and she had accepted. ‘Of course, he was upset and assured me that it did not follow if you did not marry me that you would marry him,” Harry wrote to Kitty.
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