by Brendan Clifford

The Oxford University Press history of the Treaty War—The Politics Of The Irish Civil War by Bill Kissane—begins:

“It is a remarkable reflection on Irish history in the twentieth century that the first substantive decision to be taken by an independent Irish parliament led to civil war…  That war began on 28 June 1922…  At issue was the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed on 6 December 1922, but supporters of the Treaty also believed that the military opposition to the settlement called into question the proper basis of social and political order in Irish society.  Paradoxically, a point in Irish history that should have been seen as a triumph of national unity revealed the deep divisions within Irish nationalism and its capacity for internal discord.  Indeed the protagonists could not even agree on how to characterise the events of 1922-3.  Pro-treatyites often resented the appellation ‘civil war’, since they believed that it gave their opponents a degree of legitimacy their cause did not entitle them to.  The fighting was merely a reassertion of law and order in the wake of a disorderly War of Independence.  Anti-treatyites, in contrast, did not believe that independence had been achieved by the Treaty, and liked to describe the fighting as a continuation of the War of Independence against the British which had begun in 1919.”

What was “the first substantive decision to be taken by an independent Irish parliament”?  Kissane does not happen to mention what it was, and in a highly referenced book there is no reference for this statement.

If the first independent Irish parliament was the Dail assembled by Sinn Fein in January 1919, after it won three-quarters of the Irish seats in the December 1918 British election, then the first substantive decision was surely the Declaration of Independence, and the consequent attempt of the Irish Government to join the Versailles Conference—which was sorting out the world in a new order of things, consisting of nation states.

But that did not lead to civil war—unless the British decision to use force to prevent the Irish region of the United Kingdom from seceding from it is to be called a civil war.

If the First Dail was not the first independent Irish Parliament, what was?  Not the Second Dail.  The Second Dail asserted no power beyond the power asserted by the First Dail.

If the first independent Irish Parliament was neither the First Dail nor the Second Dail, what other candidate is there for the title?  There is only the Parliament of Southern Ireland, provided for by the British Act of 1920 and rejected by the Dail.

The Parliament of Southern Ireland came about in this way:  the Dail Government sent a delegation to London to try to negotiate a Treaty with the British Government; the British Government refused to recognise the elected Irish Government as a Government, but it persuaded the delegates to accept an offer to make a Treaty with a Government of Southern Ireland under the British 1920 Act if the delegates would assemble the Parliament of Southern Ireland for it.

The delegates broke their terms of reference from the Irish Government by signing a deal with the British Government on their own authority to set up a Southern Parliament and Southern Government.

They brought the British offer back to the Dail.  They defended their action to the Dail by saying that, if they had not done so, the British would immediately have launched a war of extermination in Ireland.

The Dail voted in support of them by 64 to 57, but that vote did not “ratify” the ‘Treaty’.  The Articles of Agreement for a Treaty” which the delegates brought to the Dail were not for an agreement between the British Government and the Dail Government.  The only Government in Ireland which the British Government would recognise and have dealings with was a Government established on its own authority.

It is not clear what the Dail vote in support of the ‘Treaty’—or of the actions of the delegates in signing it—actually did.  What it did not do was revoke the Declaration of Independence, accept the 1920 British Act, and call on the Viceroy to come and recognise the Dail as the loyal Parliament of Southern Ireland.

The ‘Treaty’ only began to be put into effect when the Treaty delegates took their Dail majority to another place to meet as the Parliament of Southern Ireland and appoint a Provisional Government on which the Viceroy would confer legitimate authority.

That was certainly a “substantive decision” which “led to civil war”.  But how can it be said to have been “taken by an independent Irish parliament”?

The independent Irish Parliament—the Parliament that existed at the behest of nobody but the electorate—by voting in support of the delegates (or of their document)_ hived off a portion of itself to be a rival Parliament and Government—or at least a rival Government for the Southern Parliament—met only once.

It did this because it was assured by the delegates that Britain would destroy it if it did not do so.

Those who voted against the delegates did not believe that Britain was doing what it threatened, and possibly would not even try, but they held that—whether or not Britain attempted a war of extermination—the Dail, having asserted its independence, and having authorised military resistance to British militarism, was in honour bound to stand by its Declaration of Independence.

The ‘Treaty’ delegates, having gained a majority in the Dail for a motion supporting their action in signing the ‘Treaty’ document, did not follow through with a motion that the Dail should give up its pretension to be an independent Government.  What they did was take their followers out of the Dail, leaving the Dail Government in place, set up a rival Provisional Government elsewhere, and then return to the Dail and conduct some of the business of the Provisional Government through the Dail.

But, even though Provisional Government business was dealt with by the Dail, the Dail was not the authority on which it acted.  The Dail had to be reminded sometimes of this fact by Collins, who was the head of the Provisional Government.  He had power which was not conferred on him by the Dail, and it was greater power than the power of the Dail.

The Treatyites camouflaged as far as possible the fact that, when they got a majority for the ‘Treaty’ in the Dail, they had then broken the Dail into two Parliaments and had set up the Provisional Government with one of them, thereby leaving the Dail Government in place but depriving it of power.

During the ‘Treaty’ Debate, Arthur Griffith had repeatedly referred to Collins as “the man who won the war”.  This was sheer demagoguery with no basis in fact, but there is no doubt that it helped to get the ‘Treaty’ over the line.

The War had not been won.  This fact was emphasised by De Valera as President in his speeches to the Second Dail in August 1921, following the Truce of July.  The Truce was not victory.  It was a pause by the British, while they considered whether to launch a war of destruction.  What had happened so far was only skirmishing.

What the Dail had to consider was whether it was in earnest about itself and would stand by its independence if Britain decided to make all-out war on it.

Collins and Griffith did not then question De Valera’s view of the situation.  In a public interview Collins dismissed Dominion status by saying that the effort needed to get Dominion status would get a Republic.  The Second Dail was returned in an Election set up by Britain under its 1920 Government of Ireland Act for the purpose of establishing two Parliaments, Southern and Northern.  The Dail contested it for the purpose of renewing itself as an all-Ireland body.  Griffith gave no hint at these meetings of the Second Dail in August 1922 that he thought there might be some advantage in the Dail acknowledging itself to be the Parliament of Southern Ireland and functioning under the British Act.  Four months later, without informing the Dail Government, he signed an agreement with the British Government to assemble the Parliament of Southern Ireland and form a Provisional Government on the authority of the Crown.  He carried a motion in support of his actions in the Dail, hailing Collins as the man who had won the war, while at the same time declaring that only mad warmongers would defy the British threat of extermination if their “Treaty” was not complied with.

In mid-January Collins appeared suddenly in the full-dress uniform of a General.  If he was the man who had won the War, it would surely have been the uniform of a General of the IRA.  But it wasn’t.  He was a General in the new Army that had been sprung on the situation:  the National Army of the Provisional Government of Southern Ireland.

Did Collins, when signing an agreement with the British to set up a new Army and Government in Southern Ireland, give any thought to the Army that had actually fought against the British, and had“won the war” to the extent that the British agreed to negotiate?  Apparently not.

The War, insofar as it there had been a war, had been fought by the combat formations of the IRA that were formed on local initiative around the country.  The Dail adopted these combat formations as its Army, and they pledged allegiance to it.  During the period of the Truce the Dail Government regularised the position of the IRA as its Army, while the Dail delegates in London tried to establish a Treaty relationship with the British Government.

The central Executive of the IRA, dominated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, tried to resist this development, but the actual combat formations around the country took themselves in earnest, renewed their pledge of loyalty to the Republic established by the Dail, and did not subsequently transfer their allegiance to the Provisional Government which displaced the Dail Republic.

It seems that Collins, in his Treaty reckonings, had left the Irish Army around the country out of account.  He relied on the Executive, which he controlled through the IRB, and the reputation which he had cultivated with the general public, to carry the Army along with him.

He possibly assumed that, through the spread of IRB membership in those years, he would have effective control of the combat formations, as he had of his Assassination Squad.  But it seems that, for the most part, IRA members treated IRB membership as an aid to their military activity, and as being in no way in conflict with their pledge of loyalty to the Republic established by the Dail.

In all his scheming Collins had left the most important thing out of account, and so he ended up making war on the IRA with the Army Britain gave him.

*

Paradox is usually a device which enables slipshod reasoning to pass muster.  It should be resorted to only in case of necessity.  There is no necessity for Kissane’ paradox:

“Paradoxically, a point in Irish history that should have been seen as a triumph of national unity revealed deep divisions within nationalism…”

Why should the signing of the ‘Treaty’ by the delegates in breach of the instructions of their Government have been seen as a triumph of national unity?  By signing that ‘Treaty’, they destroyed the Government that appointed them and undertook to form a Government hostile to it in its place.  That action brought them into conflict with the Government which they subverted.

Arthur Griffith knew when signing that he did so in breach of Government authority, and that his action would split the country.  After he had signed, he claimed to know that 95% of the country thought he had been right to sign, but he had never put that case to his Government before signing, and he had never hinted to the Government before signing that he considered he had been given independent authority by the Dail to sign a deal with Britain without Government approval.  None of this is in dispute.

The British Government on December 5th suddenly put the Irish delegates on a few hours’ notice that they must put their names to the offer it was making, and agree to advocate it when they returned to Ireland, or else Britain would launch immediate and terrible war against nationalist Ireland.

Twenty years earlier Britain had won its war of conquest against the Boer Republics by building chains of military blockhouses around the country, sweeping much of the civilian population into Concentration Camps, and establishing tight control over the movement of the rest.

When I was young the general understanding was that Lloyd George’s threat in December 1921 was to apply these methods in Ireland.  And, in the Dail’s ‘Treaty’ Debates, many of the Treatyites said that what Griffith had averted was a British War of Extermination.

What was paradoxical about the submission of the delegates to the threat—that the greatest Empire the world had ever seen would mobilise its resources to crush all that they represented—or about the refusal of others to submit, even to the threat of extermination?  Has it not also been the case in the history of the world that there are people who submit to brute force and there are people who do not, and that the one cannot be told from the other until the event actually occurs?

The delegates saved the nation from extermination by Britain by signing the document called the Treaty:  that was the strongest Treatyite argument.  It was the basic case.

Unfortunately it was unacceptable to Collins that it should be put clearly.  It was therefore mixed up with an entirely different argument:  that the Treaty was a good thing and should be accepted on its merits, regardless of the alternative to it being extermination.

It did not accord with Collins’s amour propre, or perhaps with his respect for the new Imperial friends he had made in London (Lord Birkenhead etc.) that the Treaty should be justified only as a means of warding off extermination by his Imperial friends.

(It is curious—maybe even “paradoxical”!—that Griffith, who at the final meeting of the Government on 3rd December 1922 said that an even weaker form of the ‘Treaty’ than the one he signed was agreeable to him, and only signed because of the threat of exterminationist war by Britain, while Collins—who had never expressed approval of the ‘Treaty’ beforehand—insisted that he did not sign under duress but only on the merits of the document.)

We will give you freedom to achieve freedom if you submit for the moment, or else we will exterminate you!  Was that really the choice given by the British Government to nationalist Ireland in the second year of the existence of the League of Nations, which Britain constructed?

There were many on the Irish side who did not see it that way.  “Freedom to achieve freedom” was Collins’s spin on the Treaty.  The British view was more that the British State, in all its ramifications, was the structure of Freedom in the world, that freedom outside it was problematic, and that conferring Dominion status on the Irish was conferring freedom on them.  And, on the other hand, the implied British threat of a War of Extermination in the circumstances of the world in 1921-2 was not deliverable.

The position which de Valera, as head of government of the Republic (a position clarified by the Second Dail in August 1922), was prevented from putting by the rogue action of the delegates on December 6th, was to present Lloyd George with the offer of Irish membership of the Commonwealth form of the Empire‚ with indirect recognition of the Crown as head of the Commonwealth association—but not as head of the Irish state, which would remain a republic—and leave it to Lloyd George to see whether he could make a war out of that distinction.  That was the position that was aborted by the response of the delegates to Lloyd George’s bluff of December 5th—which within Lloyd George’s close circle was seen as a bluff.

*

I have found that Kissane’s book was reviewed at the time of publication by Garret FitzGerald, the former Taoiseach (Irish Times, 1 Oct. 2003).

FitzGerald was the son of a prominent Treatyite, Desmond FitzGerald.  Desmond was a colleague of Erskine Childers in the production of the Irish Bulletin:  the Dail Government’s record of British terrorist activity against the Dail system of 1919-21;  he accompanied the negotiating team to London as Director of Publicity; and he was a Junior Minister in the Provisional Government which had Childers—a damnable Englishman according to Arthur Griffith—shot for being in possession of a decorative revolver given to him by Michael Collins.  FitzGerald was criticised in the Treaty Debates for failing to hold the British to the agreement that the negotiations should be strictly confidential.

Garret wrote:

“When on the evening of December 7th my father and Eamon Duggan handed de Valera the text of the Treaty just as he, as newly-elected chancellor of the NUI [National University of Ireland], was about to attend a Dante Commemoration in the Mansion House, they recognised from his expression that he had already made up his mind to oppose it—a turnabout they attributed to weaknesses in de Valera’s character, played upon by more extreme colleagues…”

It would have been a remarkable thing, worth dwelling on, if Desmond FitzGerald and Eamon Duggan had brought the news to de Valera of what the delegates had done and he had brushed them aside impatiently in order to get on with his lecture on Dante.  But they did not bring the news.  The British Government had broadcast the news around the world, in breach of the agreement on confidentiality, with their own slant on it.

De Valera already knew that the delegates had signed a deal with Britain, in breach of the instructions of their Government, and he knew what they had signed, and he knew that the position he had been preparing to confront Britain on had been given away.  So, when they arrived at the Mansion House with their belated news of what they had done, he brushed them aside and delivered his lecture.  The alternative would have been to order their arrest.

There was supposed to be a sovereign Irish Parliament in being, and a Government based on that Parliament, and a President who was the actual head of that Government.  These things had been made clear at the meetings of the Second Dail in August.  De Valera had been at pains to emphasise the seriousness of the situation.  He said that Britain had been fighting something less than war since 1919 but that, if they persisted with the Declaration of Independence, they might well be facing a war.  He wanted to know if they were in earnest about what they had committed themselves to.  He would accept nomination for re-election as President only if they were in earnest, and if it was understood that he would be an actual Head of Government with wide discretionary authority in the making of a settlement with Britain.

De Valera was given no reason to doubt that the Dail remained in earnest about what it committed itself to in January 1919, and that he was conducting an actual Government—until Collins suddenly pulled the plug on it, without a moment’s warning, during the night of December 5th/6th.  It then transpired that half the Dail was in earnest about itself and half was not.

*

The Treaty leaders had made no preparations whatever for the consequences of their action in signing a deal with Britain against Government instructions.  When they got a majority in the Dail for a motion supporting their action, this became evident.  That motion was not a ratification of the ‘Treaty’.  The ‘Treaty’ made no mention of the Dail.  What it mentioned was a Government which the Irish delegates undertook to set up under the Viceroy, a Government of Southern Ireland which would be established if a Parliament of Southern Ireland was assembled as its basis.

The British undertook to establish Treaty relations with such a Government if it was set up.  When the delegates got a majority in the Dail for their actions in signing the deal with Britain, the meaning could only be that the Dail approved of the setting up of a Crown Provisional Government in opposition to itself.

De Valera resigned as President when that motion was passed, and his Government fell with him.  He took it to be a vote of No Confidence in his Government, and it is hard to see it as anything else.  But the Treatyites protested that there was no need for him to resign.  They had not intended that he should resign when they defeated him.  It was hinted that his resignation was a hostile act.

He explained that they had defeated his policy.  They had got a majority against him.

The game was now in their hands.  But they were not eager to play it.  They had come to depend on De Valera to hold things together.  Nobody denied that it was his pedigree—as the surviving Commandant of 1916, and his political skills—that had held things together so well for three years. Without his influence Collins and Brugha could never have worked together.  Somebody commented on this in the Dail debate, but was told sharply by Collins that those times when they depended on De Valera’s moderating influence were over.

Collins’s idea of what to do next, after De Valera was defeated, was to set up a Committee of Public Safety to handle affairs from then on.  That would involve treating the Constitutional development, based on the 1918 Election, as a mirage, and dealing with the British as a body of rebels which the British now wanted of make an arrangement with.

Collins was clearly bewildered by the Constitutionalist influence exerted by De Valera.  It came uneasily close to him in the person of Harry Boland.  He and Boland had remade the IRB conspiracy after 1916.  Their activity had much to do with the re-making of Sinn Fein in 1917/18, and the appointment of candidates for the election.  But, for Collins, the resulting Dail did not become a Constitutional sovereign body, while for Boland—along with a huge swathe of the new IRB—it did.  And so we find Collins soon threatening Boland that he would have to destroy him if he did not shake off the baneful influence under which he had fallen.

It was known that De Valera had read Machiavelli, and for many Treatyites his Constitutionalism was dismissed as Machiavellianism, with it being understood what Machiavellianism was, other than trickery with words.

There was something about the Treatyite view of Dev which put me in mind of the Rev. Kingsley’s view of Cardinal Newman as an advocate of telling lies because he could not see that truth was always expressed in the popular slogans of the moment.  And also of Ed Maloney’s view of Gerry Adams, or of Lord Bew’s view of him.

Dev took the Dail to be a sovereign body, though self-recognised, which established its own Constitutional practices.  It could only be self-recognised because, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Britain’s position in the world was such that no Government within the British sphere of influence—which seems to have been everywhere but Russia in 1919—would dare to recognise it.  

But Britain had used the slogan about the right of self-determination of nations when making war, and when raising cannon-fodder in Ireland, and the Dail availed of the right to recognise itself.

It was not until 1921 that the British Prime Minister claimed that Ireland had been excluded from the Wartime declaration of the Rights of Nations to Self-determination, which applied only to peoples in the Empires the British Empire intended to destroy.

The Dail asserted its independence on the basis that the Sinn Fein Party had gone to the electorate with an independence policy and won three-quarters of the seats.  It had a democratic mandate but no Imperial mandate.  The electorate did not see the lack of an Imperial mandate as invalidating the democratic mandate, as was shown by the voting in the 1920 Local Elections—which transferred the allegiance of Local Authorities from Dublin Castle to the Dail.

Collins’ major biographer, Tim Pat Coogan, ridicules the Dail’s self-recognition.  If self-recognition is nonsense, only Imperial recognition counts.  By signing the document called the Treaty, Collins got an Imperial mandate for the setting up of a Provisional Government in place of the Dail Republic.  He got a majority in the Dail for that project, even though much of the Dail did not seem to know what it was voting for.  He then suggested the setting up of a Committee of Public Safety, which would carry through the project by setting aside the Dail.

That would have been the practical thing to do, if the Dail constitutionalism was widely understood to have been a piece of showmanship, or a bargaining counter.  But, when De Valera said that things should be done constitutionally, and voices were raised in support, Collins dropped his Committee of Public Safety proposal.

De Valera’s Government had fallen, so had the Committee of Public Safety proposal, and the situation was that there was a Dail that still seemed to regard itself as sovereign, despite having voted for the ‘Treaty’, but it had no Government.

When the Treatyite majority failed to nominate a President, De Valera was re-nominated by Mary MacSwiney.  He replied that he only accepted nomination because the Collins group wouldn’t nominate a candidate, and there must be a Government.  There was a long debate on this issue.  The vote would have been tied if Dev had voted for himself.

It was only then that Griffith accepted nomination.  During the debate he had protested that, if a President was elected, there would be two Governments.  It seemed to be only then that he realised that this was what he had signed up for in London.

(The only alternative would have been to carry through a series of legislative measures in the Dail to repeal its Declaration of Independence, abolish its Ministries, Courts and Army, remake itself into the Parliament of Southern Ireland, ask the Trinity Unionists to come and join it, and appeal to the Viceroy for recognition.

The Treatyites, with their small majority gained by dubious means, which all but disappeared when De Valera was proposed for re-election, chose not to risk their project proposing to the Dail that it should undertake the measures necessary to bring itself under the Crown as the Parliament of Southern Ireland.

The alternative was the course of action involving confusion, deception, self-deception, and general chicanery that led to war.)

*

De Valera had envisaged the possibility of a split over whatever accommodation was arrived at with the British.  He had spoken about it at the meetings of the Dail, and he had been making preparations designed to minimise it.  He had brought the two Cabinet Ministers who might be taken as representing the Army—Austin Stack and Cathal Brugha—into reluctant agreement with his proposal to accept the Crown as head of an association of states.

It was from the Army side that serious opposition to any engagement with the Crown was to be expected.  That was what the President had been preparing against.  But it was the other side that pulled the house down:  the Dual Monarchist, Griffith, unexpectedly supported by Collins, the master of the Republican conspiracy.

FitzGerald says nothing about all of this.  For him, everything begins with the bringing home of the ‘Treaty’.  But it is odd that Kissane, in a book on the Civil War, does not begin with a chapter about the state in which a civil war was brought about—the Republic of 1919-21.

FitzGerald explains that Kissane—

“seeks the causes of the Irish Civil War in antecedent historical forces, rather than… in personality factors, and he seeks to place this event in a wider international literature on civil wars…“

What were the “antecedent historical forces”?  Leaving aside the formation of the Dail Government (as both Kissane and FitzGerald do), the ones that spring to mind are the Parliamentary Party, the All-For-Ireland League, and the replacement, after the passing of the 1903 Land Act, of the Colonial landlord system with the system of small scale land ownership by working farmers.

I cannot see that Kissane tries to show that any of these “antecedent” forces had influence within the political circles in which decisions leading to actions were made.

The relevant “antecedent historical force” was the Dail system of government, which had been in operation for almost three years before the delegates it sent to Britain to negotiate took it on themselves to make a deal with the British Government to set up a Provisional Government on Imperial authority in place of the Republican Government.

Implementation of the ‘Treaty’ required the destruction of all that the Dail had done. The work of destruction began in mid-January 1922. The setting up of the Provisional Government made the Republic an antecedent force in the minds of the zealots who committed themselves to the ‘Treaty’ project. They imagined that the carrying of a confused motion in the Dail could revoke the allegiances which had made the Dail a force that the British had to reckon with. They found that they were mistaken.

Brendan Clifford