Media Library

Settlements, Schisms and Civil Strife - Professor Diarmaid Ferriter

25th November, 2021

In August 1921, Jan Smuts, prime minister of the South African Union, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, was in London on imperial business. Part of his mission was to try and persuade Eamon de Valera, President of Sinn Féin, to accept dominion status for Ireland within the British Empire rather than insist on an Irish Republic. De Valera claimed such a question was for the Irish people to decide, and Smuts tellingly responded: ‘The British people will never give you this choice. You are next door to them.’ Writing from the Savoy Hotel, Smuts also noted, ‘To you, the Republic is the true expression of national self-determination. But it is not the only expression.’[1]

The issues raised by Smuts returned to haunt de Valera and his colleagues in subsequent months, underlining one of the great divisions of 1921 and 1922; the gulf between those who could find flexibility in defining national self-determination and those who struggled to, or resolutely refused to, abandon unqualified republicanism. The settlement represented by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 forced a degree of introspection many were unused to; a requirement to reflect on what the label ‘Irish Republic’ meant. For all its robustness as a rallying call, it was not deeply interrogated during the war of independence; as historian Charles Townshend noted, those who propelled the war were more focused on the idea of separation from Britain ‘rather than implementing any concrete political programme’. Ideology does not feature strongly in most accounts of the war and ‘the new nationalist leaders did not see it as necessary to analyse the ‘self’ that was to exercise self-determination’.[2]

When he was interviewed in 1920 by the US journalist and British spy Carl Ackerman, Michael Collins admitted ‘no one has ever defined a republic’.[3] By the summer of 1921, in view of the possibility of dialogue, deliberate vagueness was also tactical; prior to the Treaty negotiations, on 16 August, Eamon de Valera told the second Dáil that the inauguration of the first Dáil in 1919 had been a vote for freedom and independence rather than for a particular form of government ‘because we are not republican doctrinaires.’[4]

So what precisely were they?  De Valera was afforded the title President of the Irish Republic in late August by the Dáil, which was partly a defensive reaction to the assertion of British prime minister David Lloyd George that an Irish republic would not be countenanced by his government. Was de Valera, as he characterised Erskine Childers, ‘an intellectual republican’? Or as he put it in September when defending his decision not to be part of the delegation to negotiate the Treaty, ‘the symbol of the Republic’ (desiring to be left apart from the negotiators to be ‘the symbol untouched’?[5]). When de Valera corresponded with Frank Pakenham about this period in 1963 and referred to his ‘external association’ proposals, by which Ireland would be an independent country within the Commonwealth, associating with it for defence purposes, and recognising the crown as ‘external’ head, he observed that he knew such proposals would probably be ‘unacceptable to those whose political upbringing had been based on ‘separatism’. Was this de Valera distinguishing between himself and ‘separatists’?[6]

De Valera’s decision to stay in Dublin led to another of the most significant divides of 100 years ago - that between the Sinn Féin negotiators in London and those who remained behind. While Robert Barton, one of the negotiating team, accepted de Valera’s argument  that he needed to be in a position, uncontaminated by negotiations, to reopen dialogue in case of a breakdown in talks; or to rally the people in the event of resistance; or to act as a kind of ‘final court of appeal to avert whatever Britain might attempt to pull over’[7]- Barton thought his decision ‘should have been reversed by the time we reached the final stage.’ [8]

Reaching that final stage was of course tortuous. Conferences, subconferences, prime ministerial skulduggery, exhaustion, theatrics, bluff, the scaring and soothing of Ulster unionists and genuine effort at compromise all played their part. The stakes were high, as was the likelihood of failure. The chairman of the Irish delegation, Arthur Griffith, was under exceptional strain due to the oppressiveness of what de Valera referred to as the ‘London atmosphere’. Griffith was ultimately to become impaled on the Ulster cross, and perhaps hammered more nails into it than were necessary, but given the danger of offering hostages to fortune, the fault for the absence of a vigilant enough wordsmith surely lies with de Valera, and the archive of his excuses for not attending does not vindicate his assertion that the reasons for him staying away were ‘overwhelming’.[9] He maintained ‘my intention was to be as close almost as If I were in London’, but consider also his parallel observation: ‘There was to my mind, always the danger that those involved in the discussions would give to the words and phrases used in any document arising out of them, such special and limited meaning as might not have occurred or been attached to those words and phrases in the discussions themselves.’[10]

Given de Valera’s fastidious care with words and phrases, it is clear this was the kind of experience needed in London, rather than just what de Valera referred to as ‘Griffith’s political experience and his republican aims’.[11] In any case, returning to an earlier question, to what extent did Griffith really have ‘republican aims’? Didn’t Valera also insist it was important to have Griffith there because ‘he would have the confidence of the moderates’?[12] Griffith was no republican ideologue and in the words of his biographer Owen McGee, ‘took umbrage at any attempt to place labels upon him’; he was largely driven by the need to challenge British economic manipulations and wanted Ireland to look outside the UK to understand its place and potential in the world.[13] In tandem, de Valera made the assertion that while the negotiations were held, at home waited ‘a determined people, ready to accept a renewal of the war.’[14] This was a dubious contention; of 2,344 people who died in Ireland due to political violence between January 1917 and December 1921, 919 or 39% were civilians.[15]

The arrogance of de Valera in wanting to stay at home yet fully participate in the negotiations led to growing frustration, as was apparent in correspondence in October and November, including in relation to the powers of the delegates. In late October, Griffith made it clear to the British side he had no authority to accept the Crown but that if they could reach accommodation on the “essential unity” of Ireland, he could recommend some form of association with the crown. De Valera responded, ‘we are all here at one that there can be no question’ of allegiance to Crown and that ‘If War is the alternative, we can only face it, and I think the sooner the other side is made to realise that the better’. That prompted a thunderous reply from the delegates: ‘Obviously any form of association necessitates discussion of recognition in some form or other of the head of the association’ The instructions to the delegates ‘conferred this power of discussion but required, before a decision was made, reference to the members of the Cabinet in Dublin. The powers were given by the Cabinet as a whole and can only be withdrawn or varied by the Cabinet as a whole…We strongly resent, in the position in which we are placed, the interference with our powers. The responsibility, if this interference breaks the very slight possibility there is of settlement, will not and must not rest on the plenipotentiaries.[16]

Ultimately, it was British rather than Irish draft papers that drove the negotiations. The determination to only break off the negotiations if the Ulster question was unresolved was not maintained, as instead the link with the Crown became the focus. Lloyd George’s secretary Tom Jones suggested the response of the Irish delegates to a draft Treaty, including proposed new wording about the link with the Crown was ‘so worded as to leave the position far too ambiguous and uncertain’[17] Lloyd George decided, ‘this is of no use’. The irony, however, was that when it came to the clauses relating to the proposed boundary commission to review the border, they too were deliberately vague. Jones had previously spoken to Griffith alone and suggested that if Sinn Féin co-operated with Lloyd George’s boundary commission strategy, ‘we might have Ulster in before many months had passed’.[18] The impression created of such a commission during the talks, as also recorded by Jones, was that it would involve ‘so cutting down Ulster that she would be forced in from economic necessity’.[19]

Craig, meanwhile, spoke of the betrayal of unionists because of the inclusion of the Boundary Commission clause and wrote to Lloyd George after the Treaty was signed reminding him that he had promised on 25 November that ‘the rights of Ulster will be in no way sacrificed or compromised’ and that ‘at our meeting on December 9 you complained that it was only intended to make a slight readjustment of our boundary line, so as to bring in to Northern Ireland loyalists who are now just outside our area and to transfer correspondingly an equivalent number of those having Sinn Féin sympathies to the area of the Irish Free State’. But since then, members of the British government had ‘given encouragement to those endeavouring to read into it a different interpretation’[20]. The contention of Griffith that the promised boundary commission amounted to a commitment to plebiscites was naïve and delusional, but it was deliberate ambiguity that allowed for settlement.

Lloyd George, as he remarked mid negotiations, was ‘after a settlement’ and he got one, but it was a wild exaggeration to maintain, as AJP Taylor later did, that ‘a terrible chapter in British history was closed…the Irish question had baffled and ruined the greatest statesmen. Lloyd George conjured it out of existence’. Taylor was correct that ‘of course times favoured him. Men were bored with the Irish question’[21] But Lloyd George had not conjured it out of existence; or as he put it himself ‘got rid of it.’[22] It had just been kicked down the road, or down a long, 300-mile border.

During the Treaty debates, over the course of 15 days between December 1921 and January 1922, TDs spoke of sovereignty, partition, social justice, legitimacy, betrayal, loyalty, honour, conscience, violence and Ireland’s international relations. They did not dwell too deeply on ideology.[23] There were few references to class issues and the TDs were ‘broadly representative of the upwardly mobile Catholic middle class’.[24]

The text of the Treaty debates runs to 440,000 words and these words matter in seeking to understand the political mindsets of a century ago, the depth of convictions, the nature of the schisms and the rationale behind settlements. Mary Mac Swiney pointedly stated, in contrast to de Valera’s assertion in August, that she was a ‘doctrinaire republican’, while Galway TD Frank Fahy asked ‘have we just been playing at republicanism?’[25] The divisions between MacSwiney and de Valera also played out in exasperated, sometimes fond and often emotive personal correspondence. De Valera could not, unlike MacSwiney ‘keep on the plane of Faith and Unreason and maintain that position consciously’.[26] He clearly struggled to make common cause with some of those on the same side of the Treaty divide as him, a reminder that the divisions of 1922 were not just between those who voted for and against the Treaty, but within those two blocs.

Writer George Russell (AE) was later to maintain both sides embraced ‘the one-dimensional mind . . . beaten by the hammer of Thor into some mould or shape when they cling to one idea’.[27] Likewise, Historians and political scientists in subsequent decades sought to make much of the chasm: at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty, Leland Lyons warned of ‘the perils that lie in wait when men fall under the sway of ideology’, in contrast to those who, he suggested, in the midst of exhaustion and having won relatively good terms, arguably ‘had a moral duty to sign’, his analysis clearly coloured by the outbreak of the Troubles, or the extent to which ‘the dire past’ was still overhanging ‘the dire present’.[28] Decades later, Tom Garvin’s reflections as the 75th anniversary of the Treaty approached were more strident. Pinpointing 1922 as the ‘Birth of Irish Democracy’, Garvin argued that ‘moderate and realistic’ nation-builders had triumphed over militant republicans contemptuous of ‘democratic principles of legitimacy’. The pro-Treaty leaders were ‘unconditional democrats and they killed people for the nascent Irish democracy that they saw menaced by the anti-Treatyites’ who saw the Republic as a ‘transcendental, moral entity.’[29]

Such a hero and villain school of interpretation is inadequate, a point forcefully underlined by David Fitzpatrick in 2011when he wisely advised those commemorating the revolutionary period to ‘avoid the use of simplistic and exclusive dichotomies or facile attributions of motive’.[30]  His stance, I suspect, was strongly influenced by his sustained engagement with the life of Harry Boland who he characterised as ‘at once a dictator, an elitist, a populist and a democrat . . . whether we consider that he was driven by a laudable conviction in the inalienable rights of nations or a grotesque delusion, the sincerity of his struggle cannot be impugned.’[31]

Are we too prone to characterising those on opposite sides of the Treaty debates as entrenched in their certainty and righteousness? And what of those who wavered in between or opted out of the subsequent civil war? In 2015 Jimmy Wren traced the political progression of some veterans of the 1916 Rising; of 572 people identified as active with the General Post Office garrison, the largest single portion, 41 per cent, were neutral during the civil war.[32]

Others grew tired of dogmatism and began to feel detached; writer Frank O’Connor, for example, initially resolute (saying of himself ‘I rarely thought, I felt’) came to decry those who insisted ‘the Irish Republic was still in existence and would remain so, despite what its citizens might think’. Out of the fray, he went into himself deeply and took advantage of enforced solitude to listen to his ‘interior voices’. He did not want martyrdom as too many mythical abstractions reduced life to ‘a tedious morality’.[33]

Patriotism was both an expensive currency and a contested, confused concept in Ireland in 1922, and no side of the Treaty divide or the civil war had a monopoly of it. But O’Connor’s reference to what the people ‘might think’ also raises the question of the extent to which many TDs were ‘unrepresentative of the country at large and some of the republicans came under intense pressure from angry constituents’. Seán MacEntee admitted ‘the unanimous wish of Monaghan was that I should vote for the Treaty’[34] But he did not. Likewise, Harry Boland referred to the ‘chorus of approval’ for the Treaty from his constituents in Roscommon, but this only heightened, as he saw it, the contrast between his own reliance on ‘conscience’ and the hypocrisy of his opponents who signed the Treaty ‘with a mental reservation that it is not a final settlement’. Mental reservation, however, was also employed by the anti-Treatyites a few years later when entering the Free State Dáil.[35]

Deep emotion was on display because friendships were fraying. Boland, according to Fitzpatrick, ‘never abandoned the dream of negotiating the growing political and military split through the restoration of fraternal unity’[36] Even for those who turned away in disgust, 1922 marked them. Liam Ó Briain, incarcerated for much of the second half of the war of independence, supported the Treaty and took no part in the civil war but 1922 left him, in his own words, ‘a permanently disappointed man’. We also, I think, need to consider quieter reflections alongside the grandiose rhetoric; Ó Briain was very much under the spell of Arthur Griffith, but as saw it, ‘the unremitting intensity of his patriotism had to be felt in quiet social intercourse to be believed rather than on big public occasions’.[37] Those caught up in the emotion of the Treaty divide did not necessarily do justice to their own complexity and one of the consequences of the propaganda that hardened was that the questions - and answers-  became  too conveniently short and polarised.

And what of the divisions between soldiers and politicians? Cathal Brugha pointedly referred during the Treaty debates to ‘the men who count’.[38] Calton Younger’s history of the civil war in 1968 argued ‘the Irish civil war ought to have been fought with words on the floor of the Dáil and it could have been’.[39] Perhaps it could have been in a fantasy post-Treaty Ireland, where the Dáil was the prime national and final arbiter, but that regard did not exist in 1922. As Liam Lynch, soon to be chief of staff of the anti-Treaty IRA characterised it, up to 75 per cent of IRA members opposed the Treaty, though not all of them would take up arms against it. They had not been adequately prepared for compromise. In any case, some IRA members regarded politics as moribund or irrelevant and saw themselves as ‘in charge’. In Peter Hart’s words, ‘the guerrillas thought of themselves as sovereign . . . they had brought the republic into being . . . nobody else had the right to give it away.’[40] If the Dáil was going to jettison that declared republic, the IRA was not required to be answerable to it and, as Lynch stated emphatically, ‘the army had to hew the way to freedom for politics to follow’.[41]

Let us understand rather than dismiss that contention; it was violence that had got the British to negotiate, and the 1916 rebels had not waited for endorsement from the public.[42] And let us return to the Smuts letter in July and his words about ‘choice’. Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for the Colonies, told the provisional government seeking to implement the Treaty in April 1922 that it ‘must assert itself or perish and be replaced by some other form of control’[43]. It was a typical Churchillian bullying flourish and a reminder of the British shadow and threat that hung over Ireland in 1922; that the civil war was not just an internal Irish matter. With the British-assisted attack on anti-Treaty IRA members in Dublin in June 1922 that began the civil war, was it Churchill’s policy rather than an Irish policy that ‘had effectively triumphed’?[44] And could the Irish general election that same month, during which pro-Treaty candidates prevailed, be seen as fully free, given the lingering British pressure?

Many northern nationalists felt abandoned, and the division between south and north was a heavy burden for them to carry as was the scale of the violence that caused 557 deaths there between July 1920 and July 1922. Arguably, the mental partition predated the physical one; indeed, Charles Townshend’s recent history of partition contends ‘the Dáil’s attitude to Ulster oddly resembled the baffled indifference to Ireland so long evident at Westminster’.[45] As de valera put it in a private session on 15 December in the Dáil, in offering his alternative to the Treaty, ‘the difficulty is not the Ulster question…as far as we are concerned this is a fight between Ireland and England…I want to eliminate the Ulster question out of it…we will take the same things as agreed on there’.[46]

Leading Ulster Sinn Féiner Cahir Healy came to share the belief that the proposed boundary commission would deliver, but he was also conscious that this rested on thin ice and complained of ‘no light or leading’ from Dublin and that none of the Sinn Féin leaders understood ‘the Northern situation or the Northern mind’[47]  Within six months he found himself interned on the prison ship Argenta in Belfast, feeling tormented and betrayed. Derry’s Joseph O’Doherty, active in the IRA there and in Donegal, and SF TD for North Donegal, had warned the Sinn Féin executive before the Treaty not to allow unionist control over ‘things affecting life, liberty and civil rights’ or ‘our grievance will be against Ireland generally for her desertion of her highlanders.’[48]

And yet James Craig, while determined to make the north impregnable, was perhaps less sure privately than his public rhetoric would suggest. Craig met Collins in January 1922 at his own initiative ‘to discover his future intentions towards Ulster. For three hours he was alone with Mr Collins and made it clear to him that for the present an all-Ireland Parliament was out of the question. Possibly in years to come – ten, twenty or fifty years, Ulster might be tempted to join with the South.’ Collins said ‘he had so many troubles in Southern Ireland that he was prepared to establish cordial relations with NI . . . hoping to coax her into a union later’.[49] From the inception of the Government of Ireland Act to its passage by parliament in late 1920, ‘the official line was always that its essential principle was not division but union’, but the Council of Ireland to aid that ‘never cast off its air of forlorn hope’.[50] Ulster unionism hardened and failed to adapt or mature, while British governments of different hues deliberately turned blind eyes to the reality of  sectarian discrimination in Northern Ireland. The British Labour party bogusly insisted in 1925 that the Irish question was one that was ‘practically settled.’[51]

The Civil war had further dissipated hope and enfeebled Ulster republicans; as one of them put it about the prioritisation of southern objectives in 1922: ‘we were sadly disappointed . . . we had started something which we could not hope to carry out successfully alone’. Antrim Volunteers during the civil war ‘filtered back to be arrested or allowed to resume their ordinary lives under stringent enemy conditions’[52] Some were ‘able to return to their homes later. But the majority were forced to find employment in other parts of Ireland or abroad’. Clearly, the civil war had compounded their isolation, captured in the stinging assertion ‘We never knew if our position was clearly understood in Dublin.’[53]

Leland Lyons was accurate in maintaining in 1972 that ‘most people, I suspect, do not live by the hard, clear light of abstract dogmas, explicitly stated’[54] But some who did were unfairly pilloried, none more so than the women who were militantly anti-Treaty. What was it that prompted Cork Sinn Fein TD Liam de Róiste to record in his diary in late 1922 of Mary MacSwiney: ‘I do not regard her or some of the other women engaged in public affairs as normal beings, with normal human mentality. They are monomaniacs…there is a moral sore in the soul of Ireland’[55] Sheila Humphreys, one of the civil war prisoners released after a thirty-one-day hunger strike, left us with this image: ‘we were flattened. We felt the Irish public had forgotten us. The tinted trappings of our fight were hanging like rags about us.’[56]

Lyons also approvingly quoted Kevin O’Higgins’s assertion during the Treaty debates that the welfare of the people ‘must take precedence of political creed and theories.’[57] But did it? For academic Liam Ó Briain there was some comfort to be found in ‘42 years of peaceful professorship’.[58] He was one of the fortunate ones, and here is where one of the great divisions occurs; for those without a stake and on the losers’ side, a bleakness calcified and for far too many the civil war’s afterlife was brutally disordered and fractured at a time when‘an insecure and inexperienced elite found itself presiding over a population that wanted unheroic things’.[59]

This is where the voluminous archive of the Military Service Pension archive becomes so illuminating about both a well-meaning effort to compensate those bereft but also the cruel lotteries in operation. A government memorandum in 1957 revealed that 82,000 people applied for pensions under the main 1924 and 1934 pensions acts; of these, 15,700 were successful and 66,300 were rejected. How to define active service remained contested and contentious. Consider, too, the fate of those bereaved and the gulf they felt existed between the cause that had been died for and the reality of their post 1922 existence.

Women faced additional barriers. Nora Martin, a leading light in Cumann na mBan in Cork, castigated the all male overseers club of the pensions process for failing to do justice to the claims of Cumann na mBan veterans: ‘They risked their jobs, their homes and their lives . . .. in justice to them, one woman at least should be on that advisory board . . . lawyers and civil servants, no matter how sympathetic, can never visualise the feelings of these women during the period 1920 to 1924’[60]

Martin was writing on behalf of Ellen Carroll, active with Cumann na mBan in Cork during the civil war through intelligence and dispatch work which compromised her health due to regular soakings; she was diagnosed with TB in 1924 and spent three months in a sanatorium. She was described, by end of the war, as ‘a complete wreck’.[61] She was turned down for a disability pension and eventually after appeal received a paltry Grade E service pension in 1943. Working in a sorting office in Shepherd’s Bush as London endured the Blitz, her letters to Nora Martin, under whose direction she had served in Cumann na mBan, depicted her mental demise: ‘From hour to hour you are only waiting for death, it is just hell on earth. I must say I am very unlucky and think I am stuck over here for this, but I may thank the Irish government for that. I could be home now if they granted me that service pension’.[62]

In 1942, the list of the contemporary positions of John O’Neill’s fellow 1922 anti-Treaty IRA Cork column members made for stark reading:

‘Dead’

‘Dead’

‘Dead’

‘USA’

‘USA’

‘USA’

‘USA’

‘Dead.’[63]

O’Neill was awarded a Grade D military pension for almost eight years’ active service (£79.11s.8d. p.a.) after an appeal, and eventually a disability pension of £150 p.a. In 1935 he reminded fellow civil war veteran Tom Hales, elected a Fianna Fáil TD for West Cork in 1933, that ‘From 1916 on I was never able to sleep one night in my own home until 1923.’ Ten years after the end of the civil war and only seven years after his marriage, now a father of three children, John was suffering ‘breathlessness on exertion, weakness, spitting of blood and inability to do work of any kind’ and had ‘severe heart disease’. But he still had to engage in protracted correspondence with the minister for defence: ‘I am a complete wreck, living with 3 children in 10 acres of ground . . . I ask you in the name of honour, in fair play and as far as charity’s sake.’[64] Fourteen months after a medical examination that had established 100 per cent disability, a decision had still not been reached and he wondered ‘How in God’s name can I pay my doctor?’ John O’Neill died of ‘chronic endocarditis, cirrhosis of liver. Disease attributable to service in IRA’ at the age of forty-nine[65].

The shadow cast by the death of Edward Stapleton, a National Army soldier killed at Knocknagoshel in 1923 was also distressing. From Lower Gloucester Street in Dublin, he was a foreman at Eason’s bookseller. His mother, Julia, aged 66, in poor health and having lost two other children to illness, was trying to survive on her daughter-in-law Mary’s allowance and living with her and her two infant grandsons. In May 1924 Julia got a weekly allowance of £1 while Mary was awarded £90 per annum with a yearly allowance of £24 for each child until they reached eighteen. There was yet further tragedy in 1926 when Edward and Mary’s youngest son died aged five. The Army Finance Office made sure to recoup the overpayment of £1.17s.5d. that had been made for the month after the child’s death.[66]

As he faced death in the 1950s, IRA veteran Ernie O’Malley recorded that the British were no longer his enemies: ‘each man finds his enemy within himself’.[67] He was able to explore and write about that personal interior deeply, helped by an annual military service pension of £258 from 1934 and an annual disability pension of £120 which was hard earned. The National army soldier killed during O’Malley’s capture in Dublin in 1922 was Peter McCartney, the eldest of nine children aged from ten to twenty-three at the time of his death, from a farm comprising thirty acres of poor land in Leitrim. In 1923 his father Patrick was awarded a £40 gratuity for Peter’s death; as a ‘poor man’ he pleaded in 1925, 1926 and 1927 for more when he had ‘no employment . . . people having plenty of money seldom think of the poor . . . my son left his employment for the freedom of the state.[68] As an 86 year-old in 1955 Patrick was still corresponding with the pension authorities to be told the £40 from 1923 ‘was in full and final settlement of your claim’.[69]

We need to appreciate and understand the depth of conviction that drove people in Ireland in the early 1920s, but also how, for many, the idealism became so cruelly compromised.