The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  But by this stage there was, in reality, very little chance of agreement over any possible Treaty terms. It seems unlikely that de Valera could have persuaded republicans to accept external association, even if the British had been prepared to concede it. When he drew his proposal up under the title ‘Document No. 2’ it was all too clear that it incorporated the Ulster provisions of the draft Treaty, so accepting partition – for the time being at least – pretty much as Griffith had. Neutrality, a key Sinn Féin idea, had been abandoned early in the negotiations, and the Irish draft proposals dropped it in favour of the ‘free state’ concept.3 Document No. 2 followed suit in making no mention of neutrality.

  The delegation returned to London with no agreed idea of the Cabinet’s position on the key issues. Barton and Gavan Duffy were still holding out for British recognition of Irish independence in principle as a prelude to accepting Dominion status. On 4 December the British negotiators furiously walked out of the talks when Gavan Duffy said that ‘our difficulty is to come into the Empire.’ This actually echoed Lloyd George’s own words when he had rejected the Irish delegates’ attempt to modify the first treaty draft in late November. ‘If they are not coming into the Empire, then we will make them.’ His anger was palpable.4 The Irish delegation made another effort to get the British to accept de Valera’s formula for the oath of allegiance – ‘to the constitution of the Irish Free State’ (which would imply rather than explicitly specify the Crown) – but failed. Lloyd George’s threat of ‘war within three days’ if the delegation did not sign on the evening of 5 December created a drama that has been replayed many times in print and on screen. Under the pressure of the moment – pressure that seemingly made them ready to be convinced by Lloyd George’s theatrical gesture of waving two letters and asking which he should send to Craig that night – Griffith forgot about his undertaking to consult the Dáil before signing. This was no great surprise, perhaps. More surprisingly, even the delegates who, unlike him, believed that it was still possible to get better terms – Robert Barton above all – also failed to telephone their Cabinet colleagues in Dublin. When Barton spoke later of the ‘solemnity and the power of conviction’ that Lloyd George ‘alone of all men I ever met can impart by word and gesture – the vehicles by which the mind of one man oppresses and impresses the mind of another’, he was clearly still shaken by it. (He may conceivably have sensed Lloyd George’s withering personal estimate of him as ‘that pip-squeak of a man’.)

  The first direct division resulting from the Treaty came of course in the Dáil Cabinet – with Cosgrave, apparently to de Valera’s surprise, clinching the majority in favour – and then spilled into the Dáil and beyond. Just how far beyond is hard to tell. Daniel Corkery (who would vote against the Treaty) thought that ‘there was at first a general air of rejoicing amongst the public and the IRA.’ Béaslaí suggested that initially there was ‘no great public curiosity’ about the Treaty’s precise terms. For three years ‘the people had been trained to place unlimited confidence in the Dáil Ministry,’ and he suggested that the ‘vague national aspirations’ of ordinary people ‘had not crystallised into reasoned doctrines’. Even active republicans had generally not constructed ‘reasoned doctrines’; but ‘the wording of the Treaty came like a shock of cold water to many sincere Separatists.’5 Todd Andrews’s first reaction to reading the oath of allegiance was incredulity: ‘something must be wrong with the newspaper report,’ since ‘Collins could not have agreed to this.’ Then, as he ‘read the clauses allowing the British to retain the ports, paying pensions to the hated RIC, leaving the defence of our coasts to the Imperial power, substituting the title of Governor-General for Lord Lieutenant’, he became literally ill ‘through rage and disappointment’.6

  De Valera’s decision to issue a public letter stating his position on 9 December – ‘I feel it is my duty to inform you immediately that I cannot recommend the acceptance of this treaty’ – accelerated the process of taking sides. The usually influential Diarmuid O’Hegarty had tried and failed to dissuade him. Even if one does not follow Piaras Béaslaí as far as to brand de Valera’s action ‘insane irresponsibility’, he was surely right to say that de Valera’s reference to his attitude being ‘supported by the Ministers for Home Affairs and Defence’ was the ‘bare announcement of a “split” … calculated to open the doors to centrifugal tendencies, to personal loyalties and personal animosities’. The following day, a week before the Dáil debate began, the most important military unit spoke out against the Treaty. The brigadiers of the 1st Southern Division met in Cork on 10 December and resolved that ‘the Treaty as it is drafted is not acceptable to us … and we urge its rejection by the Government.’

  This was a serious threat, which the IRA leadership in Dublin moved to neutralize. De Valera had already instructed the army that it ‘was the instrument of the Civil Gov[ernment] and must obey the decision of the Dáil’. He ‘would not discuss Army Opinion’.7 (This suggests he may have thought at first that it might not go his way.) Béaslaí echoed this directly in an An tOglaċ editorial on 16 December: ‘The Army is the servant of the Nation and will obey the national will expressed by the chosen representatives of the people and expressed through the proper military channels.’ Whatever that national decision was, it would be accepted ‘in the true spirit of disciplined soldiers’. It was fairly clear what decision was expected. In Dublin on 13 December Liam de Roiste was surprised to find that ‘practically all the military chiefs here, and certainly all those directing the operations of the last few years, except the Minister of [sic] Defence, are in favour of ratification of the Treaty.’8

  The Dáil debate, starting with private sessions on 17 and 20 December, soon took a line that would decide the issue for many. At the first meeting, Seán MacEoin ‘reported that he had five thousand Volunteers and ammunition enough to last only seven minutes of hard fighting’. He went as far as to say, ‘if England goes to war again she will wipe all out’; and when the people realized that the Volunteers could not defend them, it would be all over. Eoin O’Duffy, weighing the IRA’s improved discipline against its still inadequate equipment, concluded that it could not drive out the enemy. MacEoin, Béaslaí, Seán Hales and others drew attention to the dangerously changed intelligence situation. At the second meeting, ‘All the officers of GHQ who were members of the Dáil, and several who held commands in the country,’ Béaslaí wrote, ‘agreed that a return to the war conditions, which prevailed before the Truce, was out of the question.’ ‘Most of the commandants throughout the country made a report of their fighting strength,’ Batt O’Connor told his sister. Nearly all were discouraging. (O’Connor said he could ‘go on and fill up this whole page [with] reports from the fighting men[;] they all realised the resources of the country could not stand another year of war’.)9

  Next day Mulcahy issued one of his beloved memoranda, insisting that the army must stay out of politics. ‘The Army is merely an instrument of policy in the State,’ he began: ‘as such it has no title to express opinion on public affairs.’ It should, ideally, have no opinion. But ‘contingencies arise in which it is expedient for the State to consult with Army heads.’ This was clearly one of them, and there were ‘certain questions the army was entitled and indeed duty bound to answer’ (the questions were, it is also clear, his own). The first was ‘do the Treaty provisions constitute a military menace by reason of the restrictions imposed?’ Mulcahy’s answer was brusque – ‘they do not.’ It may be said, he suggested, ‘that by the provisions of the Treaty English armed occupation of Ireland comes to an end’. The second question was perhaps more crucial, and certainly more complicated – could the Republic achieve a better settlement by fighting on? Mulcahy sternly lectured his subordinates that ‘when the State consults the Army Chiefs, the matter is very simple.’ The chiefs ‘have only to give their considered opinion as to whether the further objects can in fact be achieved’. If they could not, they ‘must advise the State that such is the case, so that
the State acts with its eyes wide open’.

  Mulcahy’s answer here was again definite: even recognizing ‘the greater preparedness of the Army as compared to five months ago’, they could not. He hinted that this increased military efficiency might be ‘counterbalanced by a different attitude of the civil population’ (though this was ‘an imponderable quantity in any case’). But the real issue was purely military: ‘it is evident that the improved power of the Army falls short of that required for a military decision.’ Anticipating his much quoted speech in the Dáil debate the following day, he insisted that ‘the English could not be driven into the sea, nor even expelled from their fortified centres.’ In short, acceptance of the Treaty was ‘a quicker way to complete independence’ than was rejection of it. To this highly political analysis he added a psychological one which must have been designed to counter the invocation of the republican dead already in full swing on the side of those opposed to the Treaty: ‘Any good Irishman, if assured that by dying he would secure for Ireland the benefits included in the Treaty would have died without hesitation.’10

  ‘IN ONE YEAR OR TEN IRELAND WILL REGAIN THAT FREEDOM WHICH IS HER DESTINY’

  In the first Dáil public sessions, in the council chamber of University College, Dublin, on 19–22 December, the shape of the debate emerged. As people began to grasp the scale of the impending split, many attributed it to deeply opposed attitudes. Frank O’Connor would speak of ‘two worlds, two philosophies, running in very doubtful harness’ long before the Treaty. He instanced the mismatch between Michael Collins and Terence MacSwiney: ‘hard sense and warm humanity’ versus ‘a fervid nobility’ (to the point of priggishness).11 MacSwiney was gone, of course, but nobody – least of all his sister – could doubt what side he would have taken. For those against the Treaty, the split set principle against compromise; for supporters (‘Treatyites’ as they were immediately labelled) it pitted reality against fantasy. One Treatyite would identify a ‘Scientific Spirit’ – accepting doubt – struggling against the ‘Romantic Spirit’ – cleaving to ‘certitude’. (The latter ‘start off with a castle in the air, and end up minus two damn fine public buildings’.)12

  Many neutrals have diagnosed a conflict of idealism against realism, and some participants certainly adopted such roles. Seán MacEoin was an explicit realist: ‘To me, symbols, recognitions, shadows, have very little meaning.’ What counted for him was that the Treaty would give him ‘my own army’. Piaras Béaslaí insisted that ‘the bullets and bayonets of the British government’ could not be ‘conjured away by the repeating of some magic phrases’. He set out what now became the official GHQ interpretation of IRA strategy: ‘The reason why we found it necessary to send out our young men half-armed, half-equipped to attack the enemy was not because we hoped to drive him from our country by force of arms – we were not such fools.’ The ‘true motive’ of the war had been ‘simply to break down that prestige which the enemy derived from his unquestioned superior force’. Most of those who supported (or accepted) the Treaty took the line that the Volunteers had effectively reached their military limit by 1921. Mulcahy, in ramming this point home, went as far as to say that far from winning ‘We have suffered a defeat.’

  Some ‘anti-Treatyites’ may have been ‘such fools’ as to believe that the IRA could physically drive out the British; others no doubt believed that it remained capable of pushing the process of psychological attrition further. But, for most of them, principle did seem to outweigh pragmatism. Mulcahy’s suggestion that ‘any good’ Volunteer would have accepted the gains secured through the Treaty was rejected. Dan Breen, hearing that Seán MacEoin had said that the Treaty gave him and his comrades what they had fought for, angrily declared, ‘I would never have handled a gun or fired a shot … to obtain this Treaty.’ As so many did, he invoked dead comrades to ram home his point; writing on ‘the second anniversary of Martin Savage’s death’, he asked, ‘do you suppose that he sacrificed his life in attempting to kill one British Governor-General in order to make room for another British Governor-General?’13 The fact that to him a governor general evidently was no different from a viceroy showed how little bearing constitutional provisions had on the republican imagination.

  But in the middle, positions were more complicated, or less coherent. Frank Aiken recalled going to a ceilidhe in Clones to meet Eoin O’Duffy, ‘hoping in a vague way that he might have some explanations to give’. In the presence of Joe McKelvey, Seán MacEoin and several other high-ranking officers, O’Duffy ‘assured us with great vehemence that the signing of the Treaty was only a trick’. He would never take the oath, and nobody would have to take it. GHQ had only approved the Treaty ‘in order to get arms to continue the fight’. In the same breath, though, O’Duffy fired off a more divisive salvo: ‘there are people who are now calling Mick Collins a traitor who were “under the bed” when there was fighting to be done.’ This, as Aiken noted, was ‘the first time I remember hearing the “under the bed” phrase: alas, it wasn’t the last!’ Aiken’s own reaction to the Treaty was ‘instinctively’ different. To him, it was ‘wrong, and if it were allowed to come into operation it would be an obstacle instead of an aid to independence’. This was because of ‘the type of men who would work it’ – a warning that Aiken would sound again over the following weeks.14

  As a northerner, Aiken was bound to see the Treaty – above all its acceptance of partition – as unsatisfactory. But unlike many anti-Treatyites he recognized that the long delay of the Truce had weakened the republican position (‘if it had been possible to have had the crisis about two months after the truce, Britain would have got a very different answer to the “Treaty” or “War” proposition’). He also refused to brand the signatories as traitors – this was not just ‘untrue’ but, perhaps more importantly, ‘unwise’. He even argued that public acceptance of the Treaty was ‘due, in a large measure, to some people of the Republican side failing to rise above the bitter “you have let us down” attitude’.15

  On 12 December Liam Lynch wrote to his brother that fighting for the Republic meant not voluntarily accepting being part of the British Empire. But he seemed to think that the Treaty might be worked – ‘if we must temporarily accept the treaty there is scarcely another lap to freedom and we will certainly knock her off next time.’16 But in the new year, his position hardened and the military reaction became increasingly outspoken. Lynch indicated the battle front to Mulcahy on 4 January 1922, writing that his officers and men ‘realise that the Government, GHQ Staff and the Army in the rest of Ireland outside the Southern Divisions and the Dublin Brigade have outrageously let them down’. When the Free State came into existence, discipline would ‘I have grave fears … be hard to maintain’; this would be GHQ’s responsibility. Two days later he issued a barely veiled ultimatum to the Chief of Staff. ‘It is with deep regret that I have to acquaint you that while at all times I shall do my utmost to carry out your orders, maintain general discipline and above all insist on Truce being maintained, I cannot carry out any order against IRA principles … when such principles stand the danger of being given away by our unthankful Government.’

  Not all opponents of the Treaty took their stand purely on abstract principle. Liam Mellows contended that ‘the Republic does exist.’ It was not just an aspiration or an ideal but ‘a living and tangible thing’. (Lynch told his brother somewhat gnomically, ‘we can scarcely realise what a fine country Ireland will be when freedom comes.’) And Griffith’s practical arguments may well have meant little even to some supporters of the Treaty. The most persuasive idea was probably Collins’s ‘stepping stone argument’, which deftly preserved the ideal ultimate ‘freedom to which all nations aspire’, while offering the immediate attraction of seeing the back of the British army. As Seán Hales of Cork put it in the Dáil, ‘it is to be a jumping off point’ – ‘in one year or in ten years, Ireland will regain that freedom which is her destiny and no man can bar it.’ Collins seems to have gone further in private,
telling Hales (the most important Treaty supporter in Cork apart from Collins himself), ‘the British broke the Treaty of Limerick [which ended the Jacobite war in 1691], and we’ll break this Treaty too when it suits us, when we have our own army.’17

  Alongside the kind of otherness that has led some to paint republicanism as ‘quasi-millenarian’, even suggesting that ‘the cult of the Republic stands in for the kingdom of Christ,’ we can see disagreements that do not look to have stemmed from a clash of principles. Most republicans read the Treaty in a way that was neither idealist nor realist; they saw the abandonment of republican symbolism as straightforward subjugation to imperial power. In their view the Treaty absolutely negated national self-determination, and every argument made by separatists for it. It threw Ireland back to the status of a British colony.18 De Valera’s angry charge that by accepting the Treaty the Irish people would ‘voluntarily abandon their independence and the republican form of government which enshrined it’ not only maintained the republican assertion that Ireland had actually achieved independence in 1919, it equated the idea of the republic with the idea of national freedom.