The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (41 page)

In September, de Valera chose to exclude himself from the proceedings in London, claiming that as a symbol of the Republic he could do more good at home, and sending Collins and Griffith instead. From the beginning of the negotiations, it was clear that British opposition to the prospect of the Republic remained unwavering: a tough British negotiating team (including Lloyd George and the then colonial secretary, Winston Churchill) offered the prospect of a new Irish Free State, with Dominion status inside the empire; Ireland would thus occupy a constitutional position similar to that of New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia and South Africa. The monarch would remain head of this new state; all Irish parliamentarians would be required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown; and the British would retain substantial military rights in Ireland, in the form of naval bases – the so-called Treaty Ports – in counties Donegal and Cork. And the division of Ireland would be fully ratified, with the new Northern Ireland free, if it so wished, to opt out of the Treaty.

This last clause, of course, was a certainty – but the Irish delegation gained what appeared to be a concession: the establishment of a boundary commission that would in time fix a fair and sensible border between the two parts of Ireland. In fact, the issue of partition barely arose in the course of negotiations: the Irish team was focused principally not on the notional issue of national unity but on the emergence, once and for all, of some form of Irish state – albeit one that did not cover the entire island of Ireland. Crucially, the British delegation opted to play a stark game in the closing stages of the talks: it insisted on completion of the negotiations within three days, and in particular made the retention of the new Irish state within the empire a deal-breaker; the alternative would be a return to full-scale war. The Irish delegation, headed by Collins, agreed. The Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921, and the delegation returned to Ireland and to bitter criticism.

Having declined to be present at the negotiations, de Valera now rejected the Treaty: he would not accept Dominion status, holding out instead for the concept of ‘external association’. This idea was encapsulated in his own alternative ‘Document No. 2’, which envisaged a sovereignty that derived from the people rather than the Crown. He further objected to the fact that the Irish negotiators had signed the Treaty without first relaying its final terms back to Dublin, as they had been bound to do. Moreover, it was clear that de Valera was going to bring a large proportion of the Dáil with him. In the course of an acrimonious debate, Collins and his supporters were condemned and harangued as ‘oath breakers and cowards’, who had been foolishly deceived by high London living and by the perfidious English. Yet on 7 January 1922, the measure was passed by 64 votes to 57: de Valera resigned as president, then offered himself for re-election, but was defeated and replaced by Arthur Griffith – so, with his supporters, he walked out of the Dáil. (‘Deserters all!’ shouted Collins.) The Treaty had been accepted by the Dáil: on 22 January, Dublin Castle was handed over to Collins and a massive evacuation of British soldiers and military equipment was speedily completed. The Irish Free State was now indeed free to order its own affairs.

The narrowness of the Dáil vote did not reflect the mood of the majority of the people, who were by and large less exercised by the constitutional niceties embedded in the Treaty. In general, the more prosperous were more likely to welcome the new order: the middle classes of various stripe and profession, as well as shopkeepers, farmers, the press and the Catholic Church, were all anxious to see the measure take effect smoothly. Cumann na mBan came out in opposition, echoing the opinion of the female deputies in the Dáil, all six of whom had walked out in protest; the labour movement was divided; and a host of garrison towns, accustomed to the trade and prosperity brought by the British army, soon learned what an impact an overnight evacuation would have on their commercial activities. As for the IRA, it is a measure of Collins’s influence that enough members of the organization fell in with his wishes to keep a lid on dissent – at least in the short term.

Politics was marked now by a general fluidity. Both pro-and anti-Treaty sides were divided between moderates and extremists; and both Collins and de Valera grappled with the need to retain their existing supporters and at the same time to build up their power bases. The two men agreed to postpone the looming general election for several months; and in the meantime, Collins focused on building up his army’s strength. De Valera, meanwhile, moved between the politics of conciliation and extremism: he and Collins agreed, for example, to field common panels of candidates in the coming election, for it suited them both to fend off conflict if at all possible. But simultaneously, de Valera made a series of speeches that could be read as incitement to civil war: the IRA, he proclaimed in a speech at Thurles, would have to ‘wade through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government…to get their freedom’.

In the early days of 1922 Collins also had talks with the new leader of Northern Ireland, James Craig. The aim was to arrive at a degree of inter-island diplomatic understanding: the outline of an all-Ireland council and a revised boundary commission were pencilled in; and Craig agreed to take measures to bolster Catholic interests in Northern Ireland – especially in the sectarian cauldron of Belfast, where killings had become a dreadful commonplace. Collins for his part undertook to end the boycott of Northern Ireland businesses that had been gathering pace south of the border: it was understood that both sides would do what was necessary to protect the minorities – southern Protestants and northern Catholics – in each jurisdiction.

By February of that year, however, Collins was assuring the nationalist population of Northern Ireland that the new Dublin government would insist on the transfer of large swathes of Northern territory into the Free State, thus rendering the former economically unviable. Raids and kidnappings across the border had begun to escalate; Collins facilitated the transfer of arms via anti-Treaty forces to IRA units operating in the North; and by June, Southern forces had crossed the border and briefly occupied districts of County Fermanagh. War between the two parts of Ireland appeared as likely as not; at the same time, sectarian violence was flaring up anew in Northern Ireland – ‘on a per capita basis, Protestants were scoring four kills to every one by Catholics’ – while violence against Protestants escalated in parts of the Free State.
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But now a change was coming that would shift attention away from the relationship between the two parts of Ireland, and usher in the Free State’s brief but vicious civil war.

In March, an IRA convention had opened up barely hidden divisions: members voted to reject the authority of the provisional Irish government; and after this point, it was evident that neither Collins nor anyone else controlled the organization in its entirety. On 14 April, IRA members opposed to the Treaty occupied the Four Courts in central Dublin, home to the country’s Public Record Office. On 28 June, under intense pressure from the British to resolve the situation, the pro-Treaty government began shelling the building; like the Custom House before it, the Four Courts went up in flames. Shortly before the surrender, however, a massive explosion destroyed one side of the building: the anti-Treaty forces had packed the Public Record Office with gelignite – which had now been detonated, obliterating centuries of Irish history. By the end of this period of bloodletting, pro-Treaty forces were in control of Dublin; by mid-July, anti-Treaty forces had been driven from Limerick, Cork and Waterford; and within months, government forces controlled most of the Free State. Emergency powers were introduced and between November 1922 and May 1923 seventy-seven executions took place, some of them, with fine historical irony, at Kilmainham Gaol.

Collins himself was killed in August 1922, in an ambush in his native County Cork. He had continued to show a steely resolve throughout the civil conflict: the army of the Free State, for example, was equipped with British arms and munitions, and this military advantage was used ruthlessly. To his enemies (not least the British he had sought to undermine), Collins had been no more than a terrorist and a begetter of assassination squads – though ultimately these same enemies had to negotiate with him. To his admirers, however, Collins was truly charismatic – and a military and administrative genius. His dominance of the Irish political scene helped to establish a myth and cult that would stand the test of time; his stature in Irish history, however, also owes much to the fact of his death at the age of thirty-one, before he could prove or disprove himself as a peacetime political leader.

There are no firm tallies of deaths in the course of the Free State’s civil war, though estimates of over a thousand seem realistic. Its psychological effects, as with all civil conflicts, were profound, lasting and poisonous to the politics of the new Irish state; and a veil of silence settled over many communities. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, had become a ‘Protestant land for a Protestant people’, a process accompanied by further paroxysms of ferocious sectarian rioting and completed formally in December 1922, when the new Northern administration opted not to unite with the Free State. The violence that had accompanied the creation of this new entity was also not easily forgotten, in addition to which its large nationalist minority felt itself abandoned and isolated. The future, for both parts of the island of Ireland, was daunting.

Chapter Twelve

Division

In 1925, work began on an enormous hydroelectric scheme at Ardnacrusha in County Clare. The aim was to harness the power of the river Shannon – for years, the dream of a host of engineers – in the service of the new Irish Free State. The contract was awarded to the German firm Siemens, for Ireland could not itself supply such engineering expertise. The construction period, however, supplied both thousands of jobs and a substantial lift to the local economy – although Siemens, backed by the government, refused to pay workers at the going industrial rate. The vast sluice gates opened for the first time in 1929, and by the mid-1930s the works were supplying most of the country’s (modest) electricity needs.
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They displayed to the world the confidence and ambition of the new Ireland: a fact that was made explicit both in the unabashed concrete modernity of the design and in the muscular realist-style paintings – such as Seán Keating’s
Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out
– commissioned by the State to chronicle the event.

This scheme was nevertheless hardly representative of the reality of life in the Free State. By the time the vast works at Ardnacrusha were completed, the cautious and conservative character of the new Cumann na nGaedheal government – which had emerged in 1923 from the pro-Treaty ranks of Sinn Féin – had become evident. Ardnacrusha was not, for example, teamed with much else by way of industrialization: the government was rather more concerned with facilitating stability, order and a modest degree of tax collection than with fostering innovation or economic dynamism. This attitude was best exemplified in the shape of the institutions established to administer the state, which were scarcely distinguishable from their British predecessors. The civil service was retained essentially intact; many members of the RIC enlisted in a new (unarmed) civil guard, An Garda Síochána; while the Dáil courts were dismantled with all speed and replaced with a legal system that was identical in virtually all respects to that of England. The country’s new leader, W. T. Cosgrave, was solidly uncharismatic – the
Irish Times
opined that ‘he looks rather like the general manager of a railway company’ – but he exemplified the dour character of a new order.
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Cumann na nGaedheal was also deeply authoritarian. This was an attitude that had been displayed as early as the autumn of 1922, when restive postal workers had been stripped of their right to strike and forced back to work by calling the army on to the streets; one striker was even shot to set an example to her colleagues. (Happily, the bullet was deflected by a garter buckle.) The Cumann na nGaedheal government was able to run the new state as it saw fit, and without having to seek much in the way of popularity or support from the people. The prospect of swearing the repugnant oath of allegiance kept de Valera out of parliament for four years, and Cosgrave had only to deal with opposition from the small Labour Party. De Valera at length broke with anti-Treaty Sinn Féin: in 1926 he founded the Fianna Fáil Party, and in the general election of the following year entered the Dáil for the first time. He now took the oath with the aid of mental reservation: he covered the text of the oath as he signed it, had the accompanying Bible placed in the furthest corner of the room, and declared the entire exercise to be an ‘empty formula’. Cosgrave would remain in power until 1932.