The Treaty

Debating and Establishing the Irish State

Liam Weeks, Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh, Liam Weeks, Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788550437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

What exactly did the split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 actually mean? We know it both established the independent Irish state and that Ireland would not be a fully sovereign republic and provided for the partition of Northern Ireland.

The Treaty was ratified 64 votes to 57 by the Sinn Fein members of the Revolutionary Dail Eireann, splitting Sinn Fein irrevocably and leading to the Irish Civil War, a rupture that still defines the Irish political landscape a century on.

Drawing together the work of a diverse range of scholars, who each re-examine this critical period in Irish political history from a variety of perspectives, The Anglo-Irish Treaty Debates addresses this vexed historical and political question for a new generation of readers in the ongoing Decade of Commemorations, to determine what caused the split and its consequences that are still felt today.

CHAPTER 1

‘Stepping Stones to Freedom’:
Pro-Treaty Rhetoric and
Strategy During the Dáil
Treaty Debates

Mel Farrell

In the early hours of 6 December 1921, realpolitik collided with the aspirations of revolutionary Sinn Féin. For four years, the party had stood for Ireland’s full independence as a 32-county republic. Since its breakthrough in the December 1918 general election, the party defied British authority by abstaining from Westminster, issuing a declaration of independence, and establishing an underground counter-state. Sinn Féin had also ignored the British government’s first attempt at a peace settlement, the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which partitioned the island into ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ Ireland with limited ‘home rule’ parliaments established in Belfast and Dublin. However, at the negotiating table in 1921, a Sinn Féin delegation felt compelled to conclude a peace treaty that gave those twenty-six counties of ‘Southern Ireland’ self-government as an Irish free state with dominion status and that recognised the right of ‘Northern Ireland’ to ‘opt out’, with a boundary commission to determine the border between the two jurisdictions. Moreover, the Treaty stipulated that members of the Free State parliament would have to swear an oath of fidelity to the British monarch. While these terms were repugnant to most Sinn Féiners, the leaders of the Irish delegation, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, emphasised the document’s potential. For Collins, in particular, the Treaty offered Ireland its first real step on the road to full independence. By mid-December, he and Griffith had to go before the Dáil to convince Sinn Féin’s elected representatives that they had made the correct decision.

While the broader pro-Treaty case has been examined by numerous scholars of the Irish Revolution, this chapter will examine the rhetoric and strategies deployed by pro-Treaty Sinn Féiners during the acrimonious Dáil debates on the settlement.1 While attitudes to the Treaty remained in flux in the aftermath of 6 December, two distinct factions began to crystallise around leading members of the Dáil. Griffith and Collins each had their loyalists and this chapter will focus on pro-Treaty contributors representing both moderate (Kevin O’Higgins, Patrick Hogan and W.T. Cosgrave) and more hard-line, militarist-republican opinion (Seán Mac Eoin, Eoin O’Duffy and Seán Hales) within the Dáil. As John Regan observed, these moderates and hard-liners joined together to support Collins and Griffith ‘on the promise that one day they would advance together toward the republic’.2

When the debate commenced, a pro-Treaty majority was by no means a foregone conclusion. Sitting in judgement were the elected representatives of one party – Sinn Féin. The party was a broad church representing a wide range of Irish nationalist opinion. Launched by Griffith in 1905 as a ‘dual-monarchist’ party, Sinn Féin was reconstituted in October 1917 in order to accommodate republicans. Some of the more militant newcomers bore a deep distrust of the moderate tendencies of the party’s founders.3 Leading up to the debates, the party’s leader, and symbolic head of the Irish Republic, Éamon de Valera, had already landed a heavy blow by denouncing the Treaty out of hand and voting against it in cabinet. However, de Valera’s opposition to the Treaty was somewhat compromised by his own refusal to join the delegation in London.4 Moreover, much of the Dáil’s new intake of TDs, elected to the Second Dáil in May 1921, were intimately acquainted with the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War, either as participants or as relatives of prominent republican figures. Therefore, the Second Dáil was representative of a more hard-line, republican position than the First Dáil. December 1918 had coincided with the ‘Wilsonian Moment’ and there were hopes that Ireland’s case would be heard at the Paris Peace Conference. By May 1921, however, the context had changed. The principle of ‘self-determination’ was applied in central and eastern Europe, not Ireland, while close to thirty months of guerrilla warfare and British reprisals had hardened attitudes on both sides. With 128 seats available in the May 1921 elections to the proposed ‘Southern’ Ireland parliament, Sinn Féin needed candidates and turned to individuals who were prominent in the revolutionary war. As such, the new Dáil was strongly representative of the militarist-republican wing of the movement with a number of TDs representing brigades and divisions as much as their constituents.5 Therefore, in order to win the Dáil vote, Collins, Griffith and their lieutenants effectively had to challenge de Valera’s authority, counter republican accusations that their bargain was a betrayal of those who had fought and died for full independence, and demonstrate that beneath the Treaty’s repugnant trappings of British imperialism, lay a document of some potential. In succeeding, they built a pro-Treaty coalition – including moderate Sinn Féiners and militarist republicans – held together by Collins’s ‘stepping stones to freedom’ interpretation of the settlement. During the Free State’s formative years, Cumann na nGaedheal would struggle to hold that coalition together.

Free State or Republic?

Given their role in determining revolutionary Sinn Féin’s position on the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921, the Dáil Treaty debates are of singular importance in the emergence of modern Irish democracy. Veteran Home Rule Party politician Tim Healy was rather captivated by the Treaty debates, remarking that it was ‘more interesting to me than thousands of debates I have heard in the House of Commons’ and declaring that the ‘ability displayed on both sides’ gave him ‘great hope and encouragement as to the future’.6 While an ex-constitutionalist like Healy could regard the Treaty settlement as a ‘happy solution’ to the Anglo-Irish conflict, it was clear in December 1921 that a large number of Dáil deputies – and quite possibly a majority – were of a different opinion.7 Although the Dáil vote on 7 January 1922 revealed a pro-Treaty majority of seven, it was widely believed that the Treaty would have been narrowly defeated had the vote been taken before Christmas.8 This serves to underline both the effectiveness of the pro-Treaty party’s strategy and the impact of public opinion.

As it set out to secure Dáil endorsement for the ‘Articles of Agreement’, the emerging pro-Treaty party faced a number of serious obstacles. In order to secure Dáil backing for the Treaty, these would have to be overcome. These difficulties centred on the make-up of the Dáil itself, the stark divisions that had emerged in the Sinn Féin leadership, and the reality that some elements of the Treaty settlement were objectionable to most Sinn Féiners, whether moderate or republican. Many advocates of the Treaty were themselves uncomfortable with its imperial trappings. Since the cabinet had split narrowly in favour of the Treaty (by four votes to three), it was widely acknowledged that the Dáil vote was in the balance.9 Collins and Griffith needed to demonstrate that the Treaty, despite its trappings of British imperialism, could in fact be congruent with the aspirations of the revolutionary period: full independence, Irish unity and the Republic. In that context, the Treaty’s insistence on a boundary commission and dominion status were undoubtedly vexed issues for Sinn Féin. However, the most divisive issue of all proved to be the stipulation that Free State parliamentarians swear an oath before taking their seats. The wording of the oath, which was finally agreed on the morning of 5 December, called for ‘faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State’, and that members of the Dáil be ‘faithful to His Majesty King George V, his Heirs and Successors’ as head of the British Commonwealth.10 In an irony that would not have been lost on its supporters in the Dáil, when the terms of the Anglo-Irish settlement were debated in the House of Commons on 14 December – a debate covered extensively in the Irish press – the ambiguous wording of the oath proved one of its more contentious issues.11 Tory die-hards preferred an unambiguous expression of allegiance to the Crown, while there were concerns that the formation of an Irish Free State would weaken Britain’s hold on the empire. Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson wondered why the new Irish state needed an army ‘unless it is to invade us?’ and went so far as to describe the Treaty as ‘an abject humiliation’ for Britain.12 Other Tory die-hards talked of the betrayal of southern unionists and ‘the surrender of the rights of the crown in Ireland’.13

For anti-Treatyites in Sinn Féin, the oath was both a recognition of the British Crown in Ireland and a contravention of their own oath to the Republic. They argued, therefore, that the Treaty was a surrender to Bri...