I Signed My Death Warrant (24 page)

The sectarian outrages were on both sides. In a three week period during February, 138 people were killed – 96 Catholics and 42 Protestants. In Milewater Street, Belfast, a bomb was thrown among teenagers playing in the street, killing five of them. ‘In my opinion,' Churchill wrote to Collins, ‘it is the worst thing that has happened in Ireland in the last three years.'

Andy Cope assured London that members of the Provisional Government ‘are doing their best' in difficulty circumstances. ‘Collins has had great difficulty in holding in certain sections of the IRA who were out for hostages,' Cope wrote.

During March and early April, Collins travelled from Dublin to political rallies in Cork, Skibbereen, Waterford, Castlebar, Wexford, Naas and Tralee. The first of his rallies outside Dublin was fittingly in Cork City, where he was greeted by a large crowd at Glanmire Station and taken through the city in triumph, behind a number of bands, much to the annoyance of some armed republicans. They tried to disrupt the proceedings by firing shots in the air as he being driven through Patrick's Street.

Armed republicans also held up special excursion trains from Fermoy, Newmarket and Youghal. They kidnapped the drivers and firemen, leaving the passengers stranded. But a crowd of about 50,000 people turned up for a rally on Grand Parade.

‘While the captain was away from the ship – that time in America – there was a hurricane blowing,' Collins said. ‘The helm has been left by the captain in the hands of those very same incompetent amateurs who afterwards, in the calm water, had the ship on the rocks, and while he was away, somehow or other, we steered safely through those troubled waters, the roughest through which the ship of the Irish nation had to be navigated in all her troubled history.'

De Valera responded in Carrick-on-Suir and in Thurles on St Patrick's Day, that if the Treaty were ratified, they would have ‘to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government, and through, perhaps, the blood of some members of the government in order to get Irish freedom.' He was widely blamed for inciting the IRA, but he was, in fact, rapidly losing his sway over the organisation.

Some militants, like Rory O'Connor, the director of eng­ineering, had little time for de Valera any more. O'Connor openly declared that he was ‘no more prepared to stand for de Valera than for the Treaty'. On 30 March O'Connor led a raid on the offices of the
Freeman's Journal
, where they wrecked the printing equipment, and issued a statement justifying their actions. Although de Valera later said that he personally ‘heartily disagreed' with O'Connor, he nevertheless publicly defended O'Connor's outrageous behaviour in a series of press interviews.

‘The threat of war from this government is intimidation operating on the side of Mr Griffith and Mr Collins as sure and as definite as if these gentlemen were using it themselves, and far more effective, because it is indirect and well kept in the background,' de Valera argued.

‘If we proceed to fly at each other's throats,' Collins told a rally in Wexford on 9 April, ‘the British will come back again to restore their Government, and they will have justified themselves in the eyes of the world. They will have made good their claim that we were unable and unfit to govern ourselves. Would not Mr de Valera, then, pause and consider where his language, if translated into action, was hurrying the nation? He had much power for good or evil. Could he not cease his incitements – for incitement they were, whatever his personal intentions. Could he not strive to create a good atmosphere, instead of a bad one?'

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Edward Byrne, invited leaders of both sides to a peace conference in Dublin on 12 April. The attendance also included Griffith, Collins, de Valera, Brugha, the archbishop and the respective lord mayors of Dublin and Limerick – Laurence O'Neill and Stephen O'Mara. No progress was made but the two sides agreed to meet again after Easter.

In the early hours of Good Friday, 14 April, Rory O'Connor and a group of anti-Treaty IRA occupied the Four Courts and a number of other buildings in Dublin. Between 300 and 400 men were estimated to be involved in the operation. O'Connor announced that scrapping the Treaty was the only way of avoiding civil war.

The similarity with the start of the Easter Rebellion, six years earlier, was unmistakable. Although de Valera was assumed to be behind the take-over, he had nothing to do with it. In fact, he was not even been informed in advance. Nevertheless he did nothing to disabuse the public misconception.

A Labour Party deputation that called on him later that day, found him particularly unreceptive to their pleas for peace. ‘We spent two hours pleading with him, with a view to averting the impending calamity of civil war', one member of the deputation later recalled.

‘The majority have no right to do wrong,' de Valera told them. ‘He repeated that at least a dozen times in the course of the interview,' according to one of those present. He refused to accept he had a ‘duty to observe the decision of the majority until it was reversed'.

By the time the archbishop's peace conference reconvened at the Mansion House on the following Thursday, the atmosphere had been further poisoned. Brugha accused Griffith and Collins of being British agents. When the archbishop demanded that the accusation be withdrawn, Brugha agreed but explained that he considered those who did the work of the British government to be British agents.

‘I suppose we are two of the ministers whose blood is to be waded through?' Collins asked.

‘Yes,' replied Brugha quite calmly. ‘You are two.'

‘Civil war is certain,' Harry Boland wrote, ‘unless Collins and Company see the error of their ways and come to terms with their late colleagues.' Collins eventually relented and concluded an election pact with de Valera on 20 May. The two wings of Sinn Féin would put forward a united panel of candidates in ratio with their existing strength in the Dáil and, if victorious, the party would form a kind of coalition government in which there would be a president elected as usual and a minister of defence selected by the army, along with five other pro-Treaty and four anti-Treaty ministers. This was supposed to remove the Treaty as an election issue.

Griffith was particularly cool towards the election pact. He pointedly stopped addressing Collins as ‘Mick', but called him ‘Mr Collins' instead.

Collins stoutly defended the pact in London. When Austen Chamberlain pressed him to disavow the IRA's campaign, he replied that he would not ‘hold the hands of the northern government when Catholics were being murdered'. He was ‘in a most pugnacious mood,' according to Tom Jones, who noted that the Big Fellow ‘talked on at a great rate in a picturesque way about going back to fight with his comrades'. He accused the British of being ‘bent on war', because they were doing nothing about the situation in Belfast. Jones noted that Collins went ‘on and on at great length about the Ulster situation.'

Collins had ‘become obsessed' with Northern Ireland, accord­ing to Lloyd George, who found himself in the unenviable position of trying to placate the volatile personalities of both the Big Fellow and Churchill. He felt ‘there was a strain of lunacy in Churchill,' and he said that ‘Collins was just a wild animal – a mustang'. When someone suggested that negotiating with Collins was like trying to write on water, Lloyd George interjected, ‘shallow and agitated water'.

‘We ought to remember the life Collins had led during the last three years,' Eamonn Duggan explained, according to Jones. ‘He was very highly strung, and over-wrought, and sometimes left their own meetings in a rage with his colleagues.'

Collins tried to exclude the Treaty-oath from the new con­stitution and he played down the role of the king, seeing that the
de facto
role of the king was not defined in Canada or even Britain. The British feared ‘Collins might appoint a charwoman' to the post of governor-general, Jones noted. ‘I see no great objection if she's a good one,' he added, ‘but others may take a different view of what is fitting.'

The British insisted on the inclusion of the Treaty-oath in the constitution, because they argued its omission could be seen as a violation of the Treaty. Griffith had no intention of defending the republican symbols of the draft constitution to the point of breaking with the British, with the result that Collins had to back down. The oath was incorporated into the constitution and the Treaty itself was scheduled to the document, with the stipulation that in any conflict between the Treaty and the constitution, the Treaty would take precedence.

The text of the constitution was only released on the eve of the election. As a result the Irish people did not have a chance to see it until it was published in the daily newspapers on election day, which fulfilled the strict letter of an earlier commitment by Collins that the constitution would be published before the election. Of course, critics were effectively denied the chance of explaining the document before polling. By then Collins had also run roughshod over the spirit of the election pact.

Speaking in Cork on the eve of the election, he virtually asked voters to support others, rather than vote for anti-Treaty candidates on the Sinn Féin panel. He appealed to the people of Cork, ‘to vote for the candidates you think best'. He pointedly added, ‘You understand fully what you have to do, and I will depend on you to do it.'

Of the sixty-five pro-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates, fifty-eight were elected, while only thirty-five of the anti-Treaty people were successful. Even that exaggerated the anti-Treaty support, because sixteen of them were returned without opposition. Where the seats were contested, forty-one of forty-eight pro-Treaty candidates were successful, while only nineteen of forty-one anti-Treaty candidates were elected.

The popular vote painted an even bleaker picture for the anti-Treaty side, which received less than 22 per cent of the first preference votes cast. No anti-Treaty candidate headed the poll in any constituency and Sligo-Mayo East was the only constituency in the whole country in which a majority of voters supported anti-Treaty candidates. The total vote of the pro-Treaty Labour Party's eighteen candidates was only 1,353 votes short of the combined total of the forty-one anti-Treaty candidates who faced opposition. Labour candidates actually won seventeen of the eighteen seats they contested.

In Dublin, anti-Treaty Sinn Féin only won one of the eighteen seats in the city and country. In the city they lost four of their five seats. Only Seán T. O'Kelly won re-election, and they failed to win any seat in the remainder of County Dublin, where Patrick Pearse's mother lost out, even though she was the only anti-Treaty republican seeking election in the six-seat constituency.

There was absolutely no doubt that the people were in favour of the Treaty. ‘Labour and Treaty sweep the country,' Harry Boland noted in his diary.

With the exception of his prediction of the outcome of the Boundary Commission, Collins would later be proved right about the Treaty but he did not live to see it.

Shortly after getting back into power in 1932, de Valera pledged to remove any symbol that was ‘incongruous with the country's status as a sovereign nation'. ‘Let us remove these forms one by one,' de Valera said at Arbour Hill on 23 April 1933, ‘so that this State that we control may be a Republic in fact and that, when the time comes, the proclaiming of the Republic may involve no more than a ceremony, the formal confirmation of a status already attained.'

When the Republic was declared in 1949, it amounted merely to a change of name. The country had already demonstrated that it was a republic in fact. The Treaty had provided stepping-stones for the Irish Free State to attain the desired freedom for that part of the island, which was what the Treaty controversy and the civil war were about. Ironically, it was de Valera who proved that Collins was right.

Manuscript Sources:

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– Witness Statement 979, Bureau of Military History, NAI.

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De Valera, Eamon. de Valera Papers, UCD Archives, Dublin.

Devoy, John. Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

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Gavan Duffy, George. Witness Statement 381, NAI.

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Knightly, Mike. Witness Statement 833, NAI

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