I Signed My Death Warrant (22 page)

However, de Valera had plans of his own. Next day he released a revised version of Document No. 2, which some rather derisively called Document No. 3. The six partition clauses of the Treaty had initially been included in Document No. 2, but those had since been dropped and replaced by an addendum stipulating, ‘we are prepared to grant to that portion of Ulster which is defined as Northern Ireland in the British Government of Ireland Act of 1920, privileges and safeguards no less substantial that those provided for in the “Articles of Agreement”.'

The president gave notice of his intention to move it as an amendment to the resolution calling for the approval of the Treaty, even though it had already been agreed that there could be no amendments until the Treaty had been voted on first. This raised the spectre of extending the already drawn-out debate further by allowing each of the more than one hundred deputies to speak again - this time on the amendment.

Collins argued that the vote should be taken on the Treaty first, and he was supported by Kevin O'Higgins, but the president was determined to get his own way. Each person was supposed to speak on the Treaty only once, with the exception of Griffith, who had the right to start and wind up the debate as the pro­poser of the motion. But de Valera spoke virtually at will.

Despite having spoken already and having submitted and withdrawn Document No 2, he now tried to submit an amended version. ‘It is not within any member's power to do such a thing without the unanimous consent of this House, and I entirely object to it,' Griffith complained. ‘A document has been put into our hands this evening that is not Document No. 2.'

‘You are quibbling,' de Valera responded. ‘The Minister for Foreign Affairs is quibbling now.'

‘The President is a touchy man,' a backbench deputy inter­jected. ‘He jumps up very quickly when one puts his own interpretation on this document. Is it in order for the Pres­ident to call the Minister for Foreign Affairs a quibbler?'

‘I say that the word “quibble” has been used here several times,' the president explained. ‘If ever it was once true it is in this case, because there is nothing changed but in the setting up – a slight change to have it in final form.'

Document No. 2 consisted of twenty-three clauses and an app­endix,' Griffith observed. ‘This new document consists of sev­enteen clauses. Six clauses are omitted.'

‘I am responsible for the proposals and the House will have to decide on them,' de Valera declared. ‘I am going to choose my own procedure.'

The Dáil was staggered. Griffith rose and responded in a cold intent manner. ‘I submit it is not in the competence of the President to choose his own procedure,' he declared. ‘This is either a constitutional body or it is not. If it is an autocracy let you say so and we will leave it.'

‘In answer to that I am going to propose an amendment in my own terms,' the president maintained. ‘It is for the House to decide whether they will take it or not.' He seemed to want to ‘hurl another few words across the floor, but the soothing hand of a supporter from the bench behind tapping him gently on the shoulder had a calming effect.' The undignified spectacle was thus mercifully ended and the Dáil recessed for the evening.

Griffith was so annoyed at de Valera's conduct that he gave a copy of the original Document No. 2 to the press. Nine backbenchers representing various shades of opinion – among them Seán T. O'Kelly, Liam Mellows, Paddy Ruttledge, Eoin O'Duffy, and Michael Hayes - met at O'Kelly's home in an effort to find a formula that would prevent a complete split within Sinn Féin. With only Mellows dissenting, they came up with a proposal in line with the idea that opponents should abstain from voting against the Treaty and allow the Provisional Government to function drawing its powers from the Dáil, while de Valera would remain as president in order ‘that every ounce can be got out of the Treaty'.

Griffith and Collins accepted the plan that night, but O'Kelly was unable to contact de Valera. Unfortunately the atmosphere next morning was poisoned by a savage attack on de Valera in the
Freeman's Journal
, whose political correspondent accused him of ‘arrogating to himself the rights of an autocrat'.

‘It seems as though he wanted to wreck the Dáil before a vote could be taken, and then carry the devastating split as far as his influence could reach, throughout the length and breadth of the land,' the correspondent continued. ‘The worst disaster which has befallen Ireland since the Union is imminent, and can only be averted by the deputies who love their country more than they love Mr de Valera, refusing to share his terrible responsibility.'

In the same issue there was also a vitriolic editorial denouncing him for a ‘criminal attempt to divide the nation' by pressing ‘an alleged alternative' that was not really an alternative at all. The editorial continued:

It contains all the articles for which the Treaty has been assailed by the ‘ideal orators of Dáil Éireann,'

Only it is much worse.

It agrees to Partition, but unlike the Treaty, it abandons Tyrone and Fermanagh to Orange domination.

The Document is the answer to all the criticism of the Treaty.

What then is the explanation?

Is it Mr de Valera's vanity?

Apparently, he cannot forgive the Irishmen who have made the Treaty for their success.

And for this he is ready to sacrifice the country.

He has not the instinct of the Irishman in his blood.

It is the curse of Ireland at this moment that its unity should be broken by such a man acting under the advice of an Englishman who has achieved fame in the British Intelligence Service.

Document No. 3 is largely the work of Mr Erskine Childers.

Mr Childers won his spurs as a fighter against the South African Republic.

His next achievement was his ‘Riddle of the Sands', a record of British spying on the German coast.

As a Flight Commander of the Navy he fought against Roger Casement's ally.

These are the men for whom the nation is to put aside Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and Richard Mulcahy.

When the fight was on Mr de Valera and Mr Erskine Childers fell accidentally into the hands of the military.

They were immediately released.

That was the time there was £10,000 for the corpse of Michael Collins.

The Irish people must stand up, and begin their freedom by giving their fate into the hands of their own countrymen.

Whether or not Collins had wished to draw attention to the president's foreign background in his own Dáil speech a fortnight earlier, he quickly disassociated himself from the
Freeman's Journal
attack. He not only denounced it in the Dáil but also complained to the editor that he did not want his ‘name associated with any personal attack on those who are opposed to me politically in the present crisis.'

De Valera remained deeply irritated by the attack. Flatly rejecting the backbench initiative, he insisted that Document No. 2 be accepted instead.

Next morning, 6 January, 1922, the Dáil went back into private session to consider the backbench initiative, but the president was adamantly opposed. ‘I am going to settle all this thing by resigning publicly at the public session,' he stated banging the table in front of him. ‘I am not going to connive at setting up in Ireland another government for England.'

Erskine Childers believed that Harry Boland, who had re­turned from the United States the previous day, persuaded de Valera to announce his resignation and force and election of president before any vote on the Treaty.

The public session reconvened in an air of expectation on the afternoon of 6 January. The president began by announcing his resignation in the course of a truly extraordinary speech. ‘Even in his happiest moments Mr de Valera has scarcely surpassed himself in declaratory power,' one reporter noted. The remarkable address claimed the full attention of the whole Dáil.

De Valera began slowly and deliberately, but his voice be­came charged with emotion as he defended his alternative. ‘Now, I have definitely a policy,' he explained, ‘not some pet scheme of my own, but something that I know from four years' experience in my position – and I have been bought up among the Irish people. I was reared in a labourer's cottage here in Ireland.'

The Dáil applauded. This was obviously the president's answer to the snide questioning of his credentials as an Irish man by the
Freeman's Journal
. ‘I have not lived solely amongst the intellectuals,' he continued. ‘The first fifteen years of my life that formed my characters were lived among the Irish people down in Limerick; therefore, I know what I am talking about; and whenever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted I had only to examine my own heart and it told me straight off what the Irish people wanted.' Consequently, he said, he knew that the Irish people did not want the Treaty, and he was determined to wreck it. He announced his resignation as president and said the Dáil would have ‘to decide before it does further work, who is the be the Chief Executive in this Nation'. And he was going to stand for re-election.

‘If you elect me and do it by a majority,' he said, ‘I will throw out that Treaty.' This was a naked attempt to turn the whole Treaty issue into a personal vote of confidence. ‘It looked like a last effort to reach the hearts of the deputies and obscure their judgment in a storm of emotion, passion, and personal attachment – in a word, anything but the consideration of the Treaty on plain, matter-of-fact lines,' the political correspondent of the
Freeman's Journal
wrote. ‘The Strangers Gallery was left gasping. Everything considered, it was a sensation of the first magnitude.

‘Even in his happiest moments Mr de Valera has scarcely surpassed himself in declaratory power,' the report continued. ‘His address last evening claimed devoted attention. Coolness, calmness and solemnity; passion, emotion and that fire that outsteps passion, characterised his remarkable speech.'

His tactics provoked so much criticism that he felt compelled to withdraw his resignation, but not before making some self-righteous remarks. It was then proposed and seconded that the standing orders should be suspended to discuss the crisis caused by the president's resignation. Collins was enraged.

‘The other side may say what they like, and they may put in any motion they like, and they may take any action they like, but we must not criticise them. That is the position that we have been put into,' he declared. ‘We will have no Tammany Hall methods here. Whether you are for the Treaty or whether you are against it, fight without Tammany Hall methods. We will not have them.' He went on to complain that the backbench initiative to avoid a division had been frustrated by ‘three or four bullies'.

De Valera objected to the use of the term bullies and the speaker asked Collins to withdraw the remark. There followed an uneasy silence. Collins seemed to seek inspiration from the papers in front of him. Almost a minute passed before he responded.

‘I can withdraw the term,' he said slowly and deliberately, ‘but the spoken word cannot be recalled. Is that right, sir?'

A showdown with the speaker had been averted. Deputies laughed and the gathering applauded. But Brugha, who felt that he was one of those alluded to as a bully, was unhappy with the way the remark was withdrawn.

‘I don't know to whom he referred when he mentioned this word “bullies”,' Brugha said. ‘Possibly he may have referred to me as being one of them. In the ordinary way I would take exception and take offence at such a term being applied to me, but the amount of offence that I would take at it would be measured by the respect or esteem that I had for the character of the person who made the charge. In this particular instance I take no offence whatever.'

If the standing orders were suspended, however, Brugha said that Collins and the others should be free to discuss Document No. 2.

‘In that case I am satisfied,' Collins replied.

But Griffith was not. He accused the president of violating the agreed procedure. ‘He agreed that I should wind up the discussion,' Griffith explained. ‘I have listened here for days – during all that time – to arguments and attacks on my honour and the honour of my fellow-delegates and I have said nothing. I have waited to wind up this discussion.

‘Why we should be stopped in the middle of this discussion and a vote taken on the personality of President de Valera I don't understand,' Griffith continued. ‘And I don't think my countrymen will understand it.'

‘I am sick and tired of politics,' de Valera responded, ‘so sick that no matter what happens I would go back to private life. I have only seen politics within the last three weeks or a month. It is the first time I have seen them and I am sick to the heart of them.' Depicting himself as straight and honest in the face of the twisted dishonesty of his opponents, he continued. ‘It is because I am straight that I meet crookedness with straight dealing always,' he said. ‘Truth will always stand no matter from what direction it is attacked.'

Of course, it was disingenuous of de Valera to feign inn­ocence about the seamier side of politics. He had been up to his neck in such politics while in the United States and, arguably, he had more political experience than anyone else in the Dáil. In fact, he refuted his assertion of innocence in the same speech by referring to his American experiences.

‘I detest trickery,' de Valera said. ‘What has sickened me most is that I got in this House the same sort of dealing that I was accustomed to over in America from other people of a similar kind.' It was particularly significant he should compare his critics in the Dáil with his opponents in the United States, because there was a remarkable similarity between his attitude towards the Treaty and his actions during the Republican Party's National Convention at Chicago in June 1920.

‘It was a case of Cohalan and his machine over again,' de Valera wrote to McGarrity.

‘Insinuations about me have hurt me,' he told the Dáil. ‘I am straight with everybody and I am not a person for political trickery; and I don't want to pull a red herring across. If there is a straight vote in this House I will be quite satisfied if it is within forty-eight hours.'

‘One of the most irritating features of Mr de Valera's be­haviour at the this time,' Piaras Beaslaí wrote, ‘was that, having used every device of a practical politician to gain his point, having shown himself relentless and unscrupulous in taking every advantage of generous opponents, he would adopt a tone of injured innocence when his shots failed, and assume the pose of a simple sensitive man, too guileless and gentle for this rough world of politics.'

Maybe Collins would have been willing to allow the debate to be diverted, but Griffith was not about to allow it. It was a political ploy to defeat the Treaty by turning it into a personal vote of confidence in de Valera.

Just as he knew there was no realistic chance of securing diplomatic recognition in the United States in 1920, he had already admitted to the Dáil that no British politician would now be prepared to accept his alternative proposals in Document No. 2.

For the Dáil to have accepted the president's suggestion that the Treaty be rejected and Document No. 2 presented to the British instead would have been as foolhardy as he was naive if he really believed that the propaganda campaign advocated by him had any more chance of success than the pathetic failure of his comparatively similar effort to win over the American electorate in 1920.

A successful campaign in 1922 would have needed the sympathetic understanding of at least some sections of the press, and there was little chance of securing this, seeing that the only organs which opposed the Treaty had done so on the grounds that the agreement was too generous towards Sinn Féin. Not one Irish daily newspaper supported de Valera's position. A total of 328 statutory public bodies – county councils, urban councils, rural councils, and borough corporations – had already voted openly in favour of the Treaty, while only five came out against it. Moreover, there was little prospect of getting international support because even American opinion was strongly in favour of the settlement.

Next day the
New York Times
carried an editorial that was highly critical of de Valera:

Apparently he essayed a Napoleonic or Cromwellian stroke in resigning, at the same time that he demanded re-election with all power placed in his hands; but when this failed, he talked and acted like a hysterical schoolgirl. Whatever happens in Ireland, de Valera seems to have hopelessly discredited himself as a leader. Narrow, obstinate, visionary and obviously vain, he has now, in his representative capacity, wrought immense harm to the Ireland of his professed entire devotion.

Harry Boland admitted that ‘the great public opinion of America is on the side of this Treaty.' Indeed, he added, the American press had adopted ‘a unanimous attitude in favour' of it. There was even strong support among some of de Valera's supporters in the United States.

The president of American Association for Recognition of the Irish Republic had, for instance, come out in favour of the agreement. Boland had done so also, but he told the Dáil on 7 January that he had issued his statement before the Treaty was published in the United States. He said that he had made the mistake of assuming the Treaty would be favourable because de Valera had assured him nothing less than External Association would be acceptable. But this did not explain why, after the terms were published, he actually denounced Cohalan and Diarmuid Lynch, the secretary of the Friends of Irish Freedom, for criticising the agreement. The latter pair of them had, ironically, been among the first to denounce the Treaty, but they subsequently supported it after they learned de Valera was opposed to it. Such vicissitudes certainly lent credence to the idea that personalities figured largely in the controversy.

At one point during his address Boland turned to Collins. ‘Is this, in your opinion a final settlement of the question between England and Ireland?

‘It is not,' Collins replied.

After Boland finished, Joe McGrath spoke and told how Boland had told him back in August that he was going to America on de Valera's behalf ‘to prepare the American people for something short of a Republic.'

De Valera objected that what he meant was that instead of ‘an isolated Republic' that External Association would have to be accepted. ‘It was because I was honest and wanted to be honest with the American people that I said that an isolated Republic would have to be changed into some sort of association,' he added.

Stripped of its polemical distortions and insinuations, the debate centred on bizarre irrelevancies. Despite the national significance and momentous implications of the Treaty, it was painfully obvious that personalities were playing an inordinate role in determining how people were lining up on the issue. On the one side people were backing de Valera, while on the other side they were gathering behind Collins.

It was the personality of Collins, which loomed largest during the closing speeches. Winding up the debate on the anti-Treaty side, Cathal Brugha delivered a speech that quickly turned into a tirade against the Big Fellow, whom he described as ‘merely a subordinate in the Department of Defence'.

‘Brugha is a little man, with a slight limp and a singularly immobile face,'
The Irish Times
reported. ‘He speaks quietly weighing every word before he utters it, and makes little or no attempt to secure rhetorical efforts. But his speech was saturated with bitterness. He heaped scorn Cosgrave, Duggan and most of all Collins.'

Amid cries of ‘Shame' and ‘Get on with the Treaty,' Brugha complained that Collins had originated the stories that there was a price on his head, and the press had built him into ‘a romantic figure' and ‘a mysterious character' which he was not. But it was Griffith's reference to Collins as ‘the man who won the war' that was most irritating to Brugha, who actually questioned whether Collins ‘had ever fired a shot at any enemy of Ireland'.

Shortly after Brugha had finished Arthur Griffith wound up the debate. He made no apology for his earlier reference to Collins: ‘I said it and I say it again; he was the man that made the situation; he was the man, and nobody knows better than I do how, during a year and a half, he worked from six in the morning until two next morning. He was the man whose matchless energy, whose indomitable will carried Ireland through the terrible crisis; and although I have not now, and never had, an ambition about either political affairs or history, if my name is to go down in history I want it associated with the name of Michael Collins. Michael Collins was the man who fought the Black and Tan terror for twelve months until England was forced to offer terms.'

The Dáil erupted with a roar of approval and thunderous applause. It was without doubt the most emotional response of the whole debate. Having listened to Brugha's invective in embarrassed silence, deputies jumped at the opportunity of disassociate themselves from those bitter remarks.

Griffith speech, which was described by
The Irish Times
as ‘by far the most statesmanlike utterance that has been made in the Dáil.' He made some telling points in favour of the Treaty.

‘The principle I have stood for all my life is the principle of Ire­land for the Irish people. If I can get that with a Republic, I will have a Republic; if I can get that with a monarchy, I will have a monarchy. I will not sacrifice my country for a form of government,' he concluded. ‘I say now to the people of Ireland that it is their right to see that this Treaty is carried into oper­ation, when they get for the first time in seven centuries, a chance to live their lives in their own country and take their place among the nations of Europe.'