The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence
Page 48
This was what many republicans needed to hear, but it was a crude characterization, certainly by de Valera’s standards, and he himself had already taken a more nuanced line. His argument for external association, which would clearly have modified the absolute legal sovereignty of the Irish state, was that it would preserve the substance of independence. So the real argument was not about absolute independence against subjection, but about determining the minimal criteria for ‘substantial’ independence. In this argument, elements of the Treaty such as the British naval bases probably weighed as heavily with republicans as the oath of allegiance itself. The reading of their significance ultimately rested on conflicting expectations of British behaviour. Would Britain exercise the power that was implicit in the Treaty relationship, or had that historical phase passed? The Treatyites perhaps sensed – before the British themselves did – that in future the crude assertion of old-fashioned ‘hard’ power would be in decline. Collins himself, speaking on 19 December 1921 (‘the worst day I ever spent in my life’, as he told his fiancée Kitty Kiernan), identified the underlying shift of power relations that the settlement represented as its key point. ‘They have made a greater concession than we. They have given up their age-long attempt to dominate us.’ This perception was as vital as his famous assertion that the Treaty gave freedom – not the ‘ultimate freedom’ but the ‘freedom to achieve that end’.
We probably get as close as we can to grasping the contingent process by which individuals made up their minds in Liam Archer’s account of his meeting with Rory O’Connor just after the Treaty was signed. O’Connor told Archer, a fellow 1916 veteran – and fellow corporation employee – ‘Oh, we must work it for all it’s worth,’ but added, ‘if I could get enough to support me I would oppose it wholeheartedly.’ Many took the same line, waiting to see how others reacted. The two eventually went opposite ways; as he ‘saw the situation deteriorate’, Archer ‘realised’ that O’Connor was aiming to create a situation where the British would ‘return in force for the purpose of establishing “Law and Order” and we would be plunged into complete submission or complete anarchy’. He made up his mind to take the Treaty side.19
Those who argued for the Treaty were on the back foot on the point of principle, but they countered by setting what Griffith called in his fierce concluding speech the ‘living Irish nation’ against abstract ideals that would consign the nation to ‘the dead past or the prophetic future’. Béaslaí also pleaded for ‘the lives and happiness of the people’ against ‘sophistries and legal quibbles’, but he went further, claiming faith and dreams for his own side. He turned the moral tables by accusing the rejectionists of lacking ‘faith in the nation’, and shrewdly suggested that their idealism would resist any concrete form. ‘Many of us … bred in this hateful atmosphere of foreign occupation … eternally struggling against it, have never visualised freedom … They have not dreamed of the great work of national reconstruction.’ Mulcahy used his military expertise to insist on the limits of what could be achieved by fighting, but also found a resonant metaphor in holding that the Treaty formed the only available ‘solid spot of ground on which the Irish people can put its political feet’.
THE TRUCE CHRISTMAS
Shot through though it was with anguished soul-searching, the intellectual quality of the Treaty debate has never been much admired. The number of deputies who were swayed by the long-drawn-out sequence of often repetitious assertions and denials can only be guessed at. For many, a stronger influence than the formal debate seems to have been the gelling of opinion during the Christmas recess. Public support for the agreement became more assertive; Harry Boland was one of many who ‘had to contend with a chorus of approval’ for the Treaty from his constituents.20 Collins’s opponents later accused him of political motives in proposing the adjournment: Macardle suggested that ‘had the vote been taken on December 22nd the Treaty would probably have been rejected.’ But with over fifty deputies indicating their wish to speak in the debate, it is hard to see what alternative there was, unless the Dáil was to sit through Christmas. This is indeed what Mary MacSwiney urged. It seems, though, that she did not fear the influence of public opinion as much as that of the IRB. But a massive pro-Treaty movement quickly took shape, perhaps appearing even bigger than it was. ‘Small miscellaneous groups which assembled to pass resolutions in favour of the Treaty were reported by the Press as important representative gatherings. Public bodies which showed a majority for acceptance were reported as favouring it “unanimously”. Letters supporting it were published at full length …’21 Todd Andrews found his college lecturers organizing weekly soirees ‘where the evenings were spent denigrating de Valera’.
Public opinion, in 1922, effectively meant press opinion: ordinary people’s views emerged only indirectly. The Irish press was not entirely one-sided, but positive endorsement of the Treaty seemed to emerge much quicker than criticism. In Sligo, while the Redmondite Sligo Champion hailed the Treaty on 10 December in a long editorial under the title ‘Peace’ – ‘thus ends the long period of misrule and oppression … which began … in 1172’ – the republican Connachtman withheld judgment, waiting a week before ‘reaffirm[ing] our allegiance’ to ‘the Republic founded by Pearse at Eastertide 1916’.22 By that time the national Freeman’s Journal was suggesting that people in the midlands and west were ‘astonished to find a minority in Dublin opposed to harvesting the fruits of the struggle’, and referring to the Treaty as ‘the Treaty of Independence’.23 The pro-Treaty press was assiduous in finding supporters of the settlement. On the other side, while many IRA leaders who would come out against the Treaty were chairmen of local councils, they did not try to use them as a public platform.
The Church weighed in with some enthusiasm. As early as August 1921 the Bishop of Killaloe had urged on Collins that ‘the people feel that there is in the British proposals something very substantial to negotiate & work upon,’ and warned that ‘a war of devastation without the good will of the people behind it would be a ruinous disaster.’24 Immediately after the Treaty had been signed, the Bishop of Cork ordered a series of thanksgiving masses in his diocese. When the Hierarchy met on 13 December, the overwhelming majority approved the Treaty, though the minority ensured that its public statement was neutral. Cardinal Logue held that there was not ‘a man alive who ever expected that such favourable terms could be squeezed out of the British government in our time’.25 Bishop Michael Fogarty was sure that ‘the great bulk of the nation want acceptance,’ and briskly dismissed the republicans’ argument about ‘surrendering their birthright’ – ‘they know their own minds. They have no idea of surrendering any right.’26 Some clergy seem to have been reluctant to take sides. One parish priest, who wrote to Tom Maguire at Christmas urging him at least to abstain if he could not support the Treaty, admitted that he had been forced to write by his Archbishop. (A second priest, though, wrote to Maguire more aggressively on the issue.)27 In Sligo, local priests kept fairly quiet until the Lenten pastorals of late February 1922, when the Bishop of Killala urged ‘all classes and sections of the people’ to give ‘the most generous assistance and cordial co-operation’ to the Provisional Government, which had by then been in existence for several weeks. The Bishop of Elphin talked of the ‘nation’s resurrection’ (after its ‘crucifixion’ over the last six years), and urged – uncontroversially enough – that a ‘period of national unity and peaceful activity is now essential’.28
Republicans detected a great conspiracy to ‘stampede the people into a panic-stricken terror of rejection, a blind clamour for surrender’, but there were simpler reasons why ordinary people might accept the Treaty. Memories of the grim events of December 1920 were sharp enough to point up the attractions of a normal Christmas. In Seán Moylan’s home town the previous Christmas, for instance, an old man had been shot by a stray bullet through the window of his bedroom; now (as Moylan’s grandson notes) ‘the atmosphere was lighter, less fearful and more hopeful’.29
By the end of the recess, verbal violence was becoming more personal. Just before the Dáil reconvened on 3 January 1922, the Freeman’s Journal denounced de Valera as lacking the ‘instinct of an Irishman in his blood’ and Childers as a renegade Englishman. On the 6th, de Valera used the word ‘crookedness’ when he and Griffith clashed over de Valera’s demand for a Dáil vote on his presidency. The full depth of the split was finally displayed on 7 January when Brugha, riled by Griffith’s reference to Collins as ‘the man who won the war’ (a famous soubriquet of Lloyd George’s), went as far as to suggest that Collins’s military reputation was no more than a figment of the journalistic imagination. In a speech pulsating with icy fury he denounced this mere ‘subordinate in the Department of Defence’ as a self-publicist who had deliberately sought notoriety and had been built up by the press as a heroic ‘romantic figure … such as this person certainly is not’. He dismissed Griffith with equal contempt, saying that if he had not signed up to the clause in the October 1917 Sinn Féin constitution stating that the party aimed ‘to secure international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic’, Griffith ‘would not be now in public life any more than he was in 1916’.
When the final vote was taken that day, and the Treaty was approved by 64 to 57, Todd Andrews (who had persuaded the University College porters to let him watch the debate from a doorway of the council chamber) ‘saw the mixture of triumph, grief and worry with which deputies received the result’. Worry may well have been the majority position, and with good reason. Opinions were unstable: the narrow pro-Treaty majority was actually reduced in the following vote on the presidency, which de Valera lost by a margin of only two. After that his supporters walked out of the Dáil, and the clash of ideas intensified. Republicans naturally cranked up their ideological labelling. Erskine Childers began to issue a twice-weekly news-sheet, the Republic of Ireland, subtitled An Phoblacht na hÉireann. (The lead title was not, interestingly, ‘the Irish Republic’: now Pearse’s translation into Irish was back-translated.) Early in February de Valera launched a new party, Cumann na Poblachta. Behind its uncompromising republican title, its programme was aimed at finding some means of ‘safeguarding the position of the Republic’ while ensuring that the country remained ‘governed peacefully’. Other leaders were more forthright. Frank Carty in Sligo told an anti-Treaty meeting at the end of February that ‘we were elected as Republicans and not as Free Staters or Home Rulers.’ The oath he had sworn was ‘sacred and binding’, and ‘the spirit of the Republic is unconquerable.’32
The consensual tone of Cumann na Poblachta’s programme was dramatically altered in March. As de Valera toured Munster, the mounting strain was beginning to tell: he seems, as during Easter Week, to have suffered a kind of nervous breakdown.33 At Carrick-on-Suir on 14 March he was reported as warning that ‘if the Treaty was not rejected, perhaps it was over the bodies of the young men he saw around him that day that the fight for Irish freedom may be fought.’ At Thurles on the 17th he said that to complete the work of the last four years, ‘to get Irish freedom’, the Volunteers would now have to complete it ‘over the dead bodies of their own countrymen’. At Killarney on the 18th he insisted that the Republic must exist, because some of the acts that had been performed in its name would have been immoral otherwise. ‘Men and women were shot for helping the enemy, and there would be no justification for the shooting of these if the Republic did not exist.’ He repeated still more emphatically that to achieve freedom the Volunteers would have to ‘wade through Irish blood, the blood of the soldiers of the Irish Government, and, perhaps, the blood of some of the members of the Government’.34 This could be seen either as incitement to violence or as an awful warning against it. His insistence that ‘the people had no right to do wrong’ was less ambiguous. It meant that the Republic could not be disestablished even by an overwhelming popular vote.
HUMAN STRUCTURES OF THE SPLIT
Personal attitudes, loyalties or – as Erhard Rumpf’s pioneering social analysis put it – ‘temperament’ have been the commonest explanations of the choices people made. Rumpf thought it ‘hard to believe that the bitter hostilities of 1922–3 sprang simply from the almost academic differences between the Treaty and Document No. 2’. But if the division over the Treaty was indeed largely ‘a matter of temperament’, then, as he said, analysis could proceed no further.35 In fact, the differences between the Treaty and the imagined Republic were more than merely academic, but because the status of the Republic, and the nature of national ‘freedom’, had never been officially defined, the imagination of individuals had been given free rein. So personal outlook or ‘temperament’ clearly did play a part in their vision. Did it fit, or outweigh, objective qualities like their social status, age, gender, education and occupation?
The second Dáil was cruelly characterized by the veteran separatist P. S. O’Hegarty as ‘a collection of mediocrities in the grip of a machine’, leaving all its thinking to a handful of leaders.36 A one-party assembly, the second Dáil was unrepresentative even of Sinn Féin itself, since it was dominated by the militant Volunteer side of the republican movement. Socially it was even less representative, with commercial, agricultural and industrial backgrounds swamped by professional and clerical ones. The slender Dáil majority in favour of the Treaty was certainly narrower than that in the country at large. Teachers – the biggest identifiable occupational group in the Dáil – divided eight–seven in favour of the Treaty. Among 1916 veteran TDs, twenty-three supported the Treaty, twenty-four opposed it. Local government people divided exactly fifty–fifty. The forty-seven IRB men, a hefty segment of the assembly that might have determined the result, also split surprisingly evenly, twenty-seven to twenty. Also surprisingly, for those who saw revolutionary ardour as an attribute of youth, the average age of Treaty supporters (just under thirty-eight) was lower than that of the irreconcilables (nearly forty-two).
Nine out of thirteen GHQ staff were in favour, eleven out of nineteen divisional staffs against, as were a substantial majority (70–80 per cent) of brigades. Florrie O’Donoghue made the point that the seven commanders who would sign the order to call the Army Convention in March 1922 – the decisive breach with the Provisional Government – ‘represented’ 71,250 officers and men, over 63 per cent of total IRA strength. But this was equally a geographical division – GHQ in Dublin was acutely conscious of the national weaknesses of the IRA, while the opposite view was taken by the most active divisions in the south-west; the less active north-east had most to lose from the Treaty.
Rumpf’s work, first published in German in 1959, was a rare attempt at a systematic analysis of the split. Rumpf wanted to demonstrate that rejection of the Treaty could not be ‘explained simply in terms of the attitude of a few IRA commandants’ – a commendable aim, certainly, but surprisingly hard to achieve. A recent study of the civil war remarks that ‘no scholar has convincingly argued that the conflict emerged out of objective social and political conditions.’37 Few indeed have even tried. Rumpf saw the split as coinciding with a wid
er line of social division which he called ‘the west–east gradient’. The small farmers of the west ‘owed the preservation of their traditional Gaelic outlook to a remote situation and economic backwardness’.38 Rumpf made a larger claim, that the intensity of the ‘national struggle’ of 1919–21 created a pattern for the anti-Treaty struggle: ‘anti-British and subsequent anti-Treaty activity went together,’ in fact, indicating that ‘the animosities developed during the earlier campaign produced a deep-rooted spirit of intransigence’ in the most active areas. The statistics he used to plot the intensity of armed action were fairly crude, however, and he did not resolve the problem that some of the most intransigent anti-Treaty areas had not been in the forefront of the ‘national struggle’. Kerry and Mayo, with their erratic military performance, had almost troubled Mulcahy more than they had the British. Their resistance to the Treaty stemmed, perhaps, more from pre-political hostility to government than from political principle.
Were women especially likely to stay loyal to the Republic? Certainly all six of the women TDs voted against the Treaty, and it struck many people that the majority of active nationalist women took the anti-Treaty side. Jennie Wyse Power saw her former colleagues as ‘running wild’, and thought Mary MacSwiney’s influence Rasputin-like. She was stung by their immediate recourse to personal attacks – they were ‘very free in their criticisms’ – a tendency noticed by many others.39 To Batt O’Connor, ‘the women are “holy terrors”, mud-slinging and name-calling’. P. S. O’Hegarty’s complaint that ‘women jumped to conclusions without any consideration whatever, save their emotions’ may look like crude stereotyping. But the most vocal women did seem disinclined to debate the practical merits of the Treaty. The first woman to speak in the Dáil debate, Kathleen O’Callaghan, declared that to her the issue was simply one of ‘principle, a matter of conscience, and a matter of right and wrong’. And women did use particularly emotional language: one Cumann na mBan member recalled the movement ‘speaking with one clear and emphatic voice rejecting the Treaty of surrender and all that its evil and unnatural clauses stood for, when the people of Ireland staggered under the foul threat of utter extermination’.40 It seems likely that such intense emotionalism exerted some pressure on men. One English journalist plausibly portrayed the Dáil Cabinet in August ‘quailing … before the accusing forefinger of Miss MacSwiney’.41 Her two-and-three-quarter-hour ‘tirade’ during the Treaty debate echoed with words like ‘dishonour’, ‘surrender’ and ‘betrayal’.