I Signed My Death Warrant

by Ryle T. Dwyer

  ‘You speak of Great Britain stepping out, but you are not stepping out, because you have set up a boundary already. That is not letting us have a fair go,’ Collins argued when they discussed the Ulster question at the fifth plenary session of the conference on 17 October. ‘The present six counties implies coercion; South and East Down, South Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone, will not come in Northern Ireland and it is not fair to ask them to come in it. We are prepared to face the problem itself – not your definition of it.’

  ‘We do not care in the slightest degree where Irishmen put Tyrone and Fermanagh,’ Lloyd George replied, ‘but it is no use making peace with you if we are going to have civil war with Ulster.’

  ‘But you will have civil war because nearly half the area will come into the Southern Parliament,’ Collins insisted.

  Somebody mentioned that there were 50,000 Protestants in Dublin. If the Catholics in Northern Ireland were to be allowed to transfer, what about the Protestants in Dublin?

  ‘I have yet to meet the Dublin Protestant who wants to come into the Northern Parliament,’ Griffith replied.

  ‘What about ‘scattered non-contiguous areas’ comprising nation­alists pockets deep in unionist hinterland?’ Lloyd George asked.

  ‘There we would have to do a deal in exchange,’ Griffith re­­plied, pointing to north-east Antrim.

  ‘That is not self-determination, but a deal,’ the prime minister said. ‘That is what we had to do. I do not see how you are to get out of that except by dealing yourselves with north-east Ulster. We will stand aside. Whatever agreement you come to we will give whatever sanction is required.’

  ‘But you give an unfair advantage to Ulster,’ Collins argued.

  ‘You are putting a premium on the present status,’ Gavan Duffy interjected.

  ‘That means that Irishmen cannot agree among themselves and we must come in,’ Austen Chamberlain explained.

  The British made a mess of what they did, as far as Collins was concerned. The country was already partitioned before the Truce, but it had hardly gone into effect. ‘You will be faced with the necessity of coercing large districts into allegiance to this new Northern Ireland Parliament,’ he insisted. ‘They have made no arrangements to function.’

  ‘That is because of this conference,’ Lloyd George replied. ‘They would go ahead tomorrow.’

  ‘It will never function,’ Griffith argued. ‘Four hundred thousand people when dragged in will not obey it.’

  The discussions dragged on with Griffith insisting, ‘We can­not agree to the Six County basis.’

  ‘Not as a basis of reason, but for practical action?’ Birkhenhead interjected.

  ‘If Ulster knew the six county area was not to be retained, we could discuss then with her various solutions of the problem,’ Gavan Duffy argued.

  ‘If we are to reach a settlement we cannot leave this in doubt,’ Lloyd George concluded, and they adjourned for the day.

  Immediately afterward the prime minister passed a note to Tom Jones about the situation in Fermanagh and Tyrone. ‘This is going to wreck settlement,’ he wrote.

  As part of the proposed financial settlement, Britain was demanding that Ireland should contribute to her war debt, but this issue never really posed a serious problem during the London conference. It was eventually entrusted to separate negotiations. Of course, the manner in which Collins dealt with the issue – when the sub–committee on finance met for the only time on 19 October 1921 – provided a classic example of his style of negotiation.

  Instead of countering the British demand by building a case to show that Britain owed Ireland money, so that the British might of their own accord suggest an acceptable compromise, Collins began by suggesting a compromise. He contended that, as Ireland had been grossly overtaxed during the nineteenth century, she should now start out with a clean slate.

  As the British were to receive reparations from Germany, Collins demanded that Ireland should get a share of those re­parations. Moreover, citing the 1895 report of a famous royal commission chaired by Hugh Childers, a distant cousin of Barton and Erskine Childers, Collins noted that Ireland had been over–taxed to the extent of £350 million. ‘You say “let by­­gones be bygones” but still you start with your War Debt, and want us to take over a portion of the liability.’ The British were still over–taxing Ireland by about £21 million a year and they were expecting the Irish now to be grateful because they were going to reduced that to £14.5 million a year.

  ‘We are quite willing to consider any proposal you put forward,’ Worthington-Evans said.

  ‘If we go into all past details, you will find that you owe us money,’ Collins argued. ‘I say, let us get rid of these details and let us threat the past as the past.’ But the British persisted.

  ‘I will put some arguments that may surprise you,’ Collins said.

  ‘Mr Collins will never surprise me again,’ Worthington-Evans replied. ‘We would like to have a statement of your counter-claims. Could you put these in now? It need not wait for our memorandum.’

  ‘According to my figures our counter-claim works out at £3,940,000,000,’ Collins replied

  ‘I suppose that dates from the time of Brian Boru!’ Chancellor of the exchequer Robert Horne interjected. ‘How much did we owe you then?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Collins said, ‘it is the capital sum since the Act of Union. Of course I have included in my calculations your restrictions on our capital development.’

  ‘It is really damages for bad treatment then,’ said Horne.

  ‘Perhaps you do not know, but at the time of the Union we had a flourishing tobacco industry,’ Collins explained. ‘The Joint Exchequer board placed a tax on manufactured tobacco and destroyed the industry. In this case I have only put down the capital value of the industry at the time.’

  ‘We are making a claim for reparation,’ Collins continued. ‘You may not think we have a claim, but we have.’

  Afterwards John Chartres was furious at Horne’s remark about Brian Boru. ‘Did you see how they laughed at us?’ he asked. ‘It was infamous.’

  The two sides exchanged a number of detailed memoranda arguing the case. Collins enlisted the services of Joseph Brennan, who had been serving with the British administration in Ireland. Even though Brennan was technically on the crown side, Collins was always prepared to enlist the help of such Irishmen, regardless of past political affiliation. Indeed such people had made a vital contribution to his intelligence system.

  ‘Never mind what the record of these people was in the past,’ Collins told Childers, ‘let us assume now that they are in the Irish cause up to their necks.’

  Examining the further financial aspects of the negotiations would be both tedious and somewhat pointless, because the two sides ultimately concluded that a financial settlement should be left to separate negotiations later. But it should be mentioned that the choice of advisers was causing resentment with some of those in Dublin. De Valera wrote that Brugha felt that as he was minister of defence, the defence advisers – who included Eoin O’Duffy, J. J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell and Emmet Dalton – ‘should have been summoned through him.’ The president added that Brugha ‘would like to know why that course was not followed.’ Likewise, constitutional advisers should have been summoned through Stack, according to de Valera.

  Griffith accepted the principle, but by then the advisers had already been chosen, so it did not matter. Yet it was another instance in which the delegation did not challenge an apparent infringement of its powers. The plenipotentiaries were only answerable to the Dáil, which appointed them, and certainly not to any individual members of the cabinet, especially those who had refused to be part of the delegation.

  If Collins saw ominous implications in the president’s letter, these were only minor to the sense of foreboding he must have felt next day when the delegation learned from the morning press that de Valera had sent an open telegram to Pope Benedict XV in response to an exchange of messages b
etween the pope and King George V.

  ‘Isn’t this grand?’ Gavan Duffy said, producing the morning newspaper with a report about the president’s telegram.

  In responding to a message from the pope, the British king had expressed the hope that the negotiations would ‘achieve a permanent settlement of the trouble in Ireland and may initiate a new era of peace and happiness for my people.’ De Valera com­­­plained that this implied the Irish strife was an internal British problem and the Irish people owed allegiance to the King whereas Ireland had already declared her independence.

  Although de Valera’s inference was not unreasonable, the King’s message was vague enough to be interpreted differently. His use of the term, ‘my people’ could be interpreted as just the British people, seeing that the Irish Republic had already been declared.

  The whole matter was ambiguous, as the president himself admitted in his own telegram to the Vatican. De Valera had backed off on the self-recognition issue in accepting the final invitation to the conference, but he was exploiting the pope’s telegram to raise the issue again. He actually used the king’s message as an excuse to reproach the pope, whose telegram was the offensive one from the Irish standpoint. If the pope had been evenhanded, he should have sent a similar telegram to the president in Dublin. But de Valera was not about to insult the pope publicly, so he complained about the king’s message instead.

  ‘I am sure this was somewhat disconcerting but it could not be helped,’ de Valera explained to Griffith. ‘They must be taught that propaganda stunts, such as the exchange of messages between themselves and the Vatican, will not be allowed to pass unchallenged by us. Though it might be explained on the Vatican’s part, the balance of the probabilities to my mind is that the inspiration of the Vatican’s message came from British sources. We cannot expect the Vatican to recognise us, but we have a right to expect that it will not go out of its way to proclaim its denial of recognition as it did by addressing King George alone as if he were the common father, so to speak, of both disputant nations.

  ‘By this message,’ de Valera continue, ‘the Vatican recognised the struggle between Ireland and England as a purely domestic one, for King George, and by implication pronounced judgment against us.’

  Griffith and Collins were understandably annoyed that while they were involved in tense and delicate negotiations, the president had – without even notifying them – revived the self-recognition issue by insulting the British king in an attempt to chide the pope. The British press, which was particularly critical of de Valera’s actions, variously accused him of churlishness, childishness, clumsiness, impertinence, truculence, wounded vanity and a desire to wreck the talks by ‘insulting the King.’

  The telegram was not an attack on King George V, according to the Irish Bulletin. It was aimed at the ‘statement drafted by the British cabinet’, which had tried to secure a momentary political advantage by essentially suggesting that the Irish nego­tiators had not got ‘their authority to speak in the name of the nation’.

  ‘We knew nothing about it until it appeared in the press,’ Griffith complained. ‘In the negotiations we had been trying to hold back on the question of the crown until we knew what we were going to get in exchange for some accommodation regarding it. The telegram projected the crown right into the forefront of the negotiations.’ It also fuelled Collins’ suspicions that de Valera was preparing to blame the delegation for any compromises by covering up the fact that he had compromised on the self-recognition issue by agreeing to the conference.

  9 - ‘Having walked in I had to stay’

  At the sixth plenary session of the London negotiations on 21 October, Lloyd George cited the seizure of an Irish arms shipment by German police in Hamburg as evidence of a Truce violation. He added that there were other provocative acts – the worst of which was de Valera’s telegram to the pope. ‘This situation cannot be prolonged,’ the prime minister insisted. ‘We must know where we are. We have discussed in the best spirit on both sides various proposals but we have not really come to the question on which settlement depends.’

  Collins had, that morning, submitted a document on de­fence drawn up by Childers. Lloyd George described it as ‘a formidable document,’ that ‘challenged the whole position with regard to what is vital to our security against attack.’

  Members of the British delegation had risked their political futures by negotiating and they had to know where the Irish stood on some of the more vital issues. ‘We must know your attitude on certain vital questions,’ he said. ‘Is allegiance to the King to be finally repudiated? Can you under no condition accept the sovereignty of the King in the sense that Canada and Australia accept it? Is the communicating link of the Crown to be snapped forever? Are you prepared to be associated with the fraternity of Nations known as the British Empire? Do you accept in principle that we must take necessary measures to give us facilities for our security not as a treaty which can be cancelled, but as a fundamental part of an arrangement?’

  He did not expect immediate answers, as he knew that Irish would have to consult among themselves. ‘I suggest an adjournment until this afternoon or longer,’ Lloyd George said. ‘You are entitled to ask that. At any rate there should be an answer to these questions given early.’

  Griffith, who had deliberately been delaying consideration of External Association and the country’s relations with the crown, bought some more time by promising to put forward counter proposals the following week. The conference then turned to the defence document submitted in the name of Collins that morning.

  ‘Dominion status is not our claim,’ Griffith explained, ‘but the British offer falls short of it in every way.’ The British offer was being exaggerated. The July proposals would not accord Ireland the same freedom as the dominions. Ireland’s status was being demeaned by the demand for unprecedented defence con­cessions.

  ‘All the dominions can have an army and a navy if they wish,’ Griffith noted, but this right was being denied to Ireland and the British were demanding unprecedented bases in Ireland. The British had not demanded bases from Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. They did have a base for a time at Simonstown, near Cape Town, in South Africa but this ‘has been handed over to the South African Government, and there is no naval station or dockyard in the hands of the Imperial Government in South Africa,’ Griffith stated, quoting from an official British document. The demand for unprecedented concessions was an affront to Ireland.

  ‘We began with each Dominion in this way,’ Lloyd George argued. ‘We ask you to go through the same process as the Dominions. The memory of recent events will pass away but you must allow a few years to pass. We cannot take risks for 40,000,000 people.’

  “It is not a question of building a navy – it is a question of our having the right to build it,’ Griffith insisted. ‘In this you are putting us in an inferior position to the Dominions.’

  Collins defended the document drafted by Childers. ‘How does it interfere with your security?’ he asked. An internationally guaranteed neutrality would provide better protection for Bri­tain.

  ‘We cannot be sure that the Irish would have power to keep an effective neutrality,’ Churchill replied. ‘We could not guarantee the confluence of trade in an area where submarines were lurking unless we had Queenstown and other ports. I pointed out how mines could be laid as has been done in the case of the Audacious.’ It had been sunk off the north coast of Ireland by a German mine in October 1914. Churchill insisted that no British government could entertain Irish neutrality. ‘I urged Collins to consider what possible safeguards he could give us and reiterated that our demand could not be minimised in any important respect, but that if they could be clothed in some form more acceptable to the Irish people I should offer no objections,’ Churchill noted.

  ‘Do you not agree that if neutrality were a greater safeguard to you than anything else it would be a greater value to you than your proposals?’ Collins asked.

  ‘I
do not accept that,’ Churchill replied. ‘A completely honest neutrality by Ireland in the last war would have been worse for us. Ireland’s control of her neutrality might be ineffective.’ Even assuming good will on the part of the Irish, Britain’s security would be endangered. ‘But there may be ill will and bitterness,’ Churchill continued. ‘If Ireland were equipped with craft she could deny her ports to the British and afford nesting place for our enemies.’

  ‘All your argument depends on your security,’ Collins said. ‘We propose a condition which I contend is a better guarantee of security.’ He went on to explain neutrality in the context of External Association, which was the first time that External Association had been mentioned during the negotiations.

  Lloyd George asked that the promised Irish counter–proposals clarify the situation. ‘It is essential,’ he said, ‘that they contain the clear and definite attitude of the Irish Delegation on three points, namely, (1) Allegiance to the Crown. (2) The question whether Ireland is prepared to come freely of her own accord within the fraternity of nations known as the British Empire. (3) Whether Ireland is prepared to accept in principle our claim that we must have necessary facilities to ensure the security of our shores from attack by sea.’

  Before tackling the issue, the Irish delegation had Childers write to de Valera for advice on the best way of approaching the allegiance issue. The plenipotentiaries felt they could respond with an outright refusal to consider allegiance, he explained, or they could ‘obtain a field of manoeuvre and delay the crucial question’ by saying that ‘they would be prepared to consider the question of the Crown’, if agreement were reached on all other issues. But the cabinet never responded.