I Signed My Death Warrant

Although I grew up in Ireland from the age of four, my first real introduction to modern Irish history was at University of North Texas in 1965, when I wrote a term paper on the the causes of the Irish civil war. I was staggered to learn that the partition question had essentially nothing to do with that conflict. Ever since I have had a deep and abiding interest in the subject, so this book is the product of an interest stretching over forty years. Some of those involved with the negotiations were still alive when I first became interested and I corresponded with Robert Barton, the last surviving signatory and Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare, an aide and confidant of the British prime minister.

I wrote a master's thesis on the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1968 and the first article I published was a revision of that thesis under the title of ‘The Anglo-Irish Treaty and Why they Signed',
Capuchin Annual
, 1971. Many of the Irish documents relating to the negotiations were not released until the mid 1970s. In 1981, Mercier Press published my third book,
Michael Collins and the Treaty
in conjunction with the sixtieth anniversary of the Treaty.

In the quarter of a century since then a wealth of material has been released, including the papers of Eamon de Valera and Robert Barton. Much of the early material written on the Anglo-Irish negotiations came from a particular perspective. Frank Pakenham's book
Peace by Ordeal
was a brilliant study that threw a phenomenal amount of new light on the subject in 1935, because he had access to the papers of Robert Barton and Erskine Childers and also personal access to Eamon de Valera. But the book did not show as keen an understanding of the role of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, because he did not have access to the papers of Collins, especially those that subsequently appeared in the biography by Rex Taylor, which threw considerable new light on the part played by Michael Collins.

My aim is to make an honest appraisal of the part Collins played in the making of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. People on all sides made mistakes, but all too often the history of these troubled time is marred by partisanship. Too many tried to depict Collins as always right and de Valera as almost always wrong, or the other way around. In reality there were rights and wrongs on all sides.

Ultimately the Treaty provided the stepping-stones to an Irish Republic for twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, as Collins had confidently predicted. His views in relation to the partition issue were not justified, but this was not an issue of contention between himself and his republican critics during his lifetime. After his death some of his strongest supporters insisted that they had an obligation to complete the Big Fellow's unfinished work. This kind of thinking led to the Army Mutiny of 1924, but thereafter those of his supporters, who retained power, behaved as if Collins had died trying to ensure that the Treaty was the ultimate settlement rather than a means to an end. Ironically it was Eamon de Valera who ultimately proved that Collins was right in relation to the Treaty controversy when he said the Treaty ‘gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it.'

TRD

Tralee, 2006

‘At this moment,' Michael Collins wrote after the Truce came into effect on 11 July, 1921, ‘there is more ill-will within a victorious assembly than ever could be anywhere else except in the devil's assembly. It cannot be fought against. The issues and persons are mixed to such an extent as to make discernability an utter impossibility except for a few.'

He and President Eamon de Valera would later pretend that they had trusted each other implicitly at this stage, but that is clearly contradicted by any examination of the true state of relations between them. Michael Collins had come to prominence as a result of his involvement in the Irish Repub­lican Brotherhood (IRB) as a trusted confidant of Thomas Ashe, who took over as the IRB leader following the Easter Rebellion. Ashe was the most successful commandant and the last to surrender during the Easter Rebellion. After his death on hunger strike in September 1917, Collins formed a close relation­ship with Ashe's Kerry colleague Austin Stack. This relationship developed largely through correspondence while Stack was in prison.

Collins – who was nicknamed the Big Fellow, because he was so full of self-importance – came very much to the fore with­­in the movement following the so-called German Plot of May 1918 when most of the Sinn Féin leadership were arrested. He and his friend Harry Boland played a major role in organising the party's successful performance in the 1918 general election, in which Sinn Féin won almost all the seats outside the north-east. In January 1919, Collins was appointed director of intelligence of the Irish Volunteer Force, which was shortly to become known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

From the outset, he had a distinct plan. He believed the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were the eyes and ears of the British administration, and he advocated that the most effective detectives should be killed. Once they were silenced he believed the British would retaliate, but without proper intelligence, they would react blindly and hit out at totally innocent Irish people. In the process they would drive the Irish people into the arms of the IRA.

In developing his intelligence organisation, Collins enlisted the help of a number of policemen, the most important of which were three detectives. Ned Broy was a confidential typist at the Detective Division Headquarters of the DMP. He would insert an extra carbon and make a copy of any reports that Collins desired. One night he invited Collins into the headquarters to go through the police records with a colleague for some hours. Liam McNamara and Seán Kavanagh, two detectives based in Dublin Castle, also provided invaluable information,

Collins hoped that de Valera would lead that struggle and he therefore helped to arrange his escape from Lincoln Gaol in February 1919, but de Valera had other ideas when he got out. He believed the movement's best chance of success was to exploit President Woodrow Wilson's promise to make the world safe for democracy when he led the United States into the First World War. He thought that the influence of Irish-Americans would be Ireland's most potent force in persuading the British to make concessions, especially after they had supposedly fought for the rights of small nations in the recent war. De Valera therefore decided to go to the United States, but not before he had frustrated the designs of Collins.

All of those arrested for supposed involvement in the Ger­man Plot were released in March and so de Valera was able to return to Dublin before setting out for the United States On 25 March a notice was placed in the newspaper:

President de Valera will arrive in Ireland on Wednesday evening next, the 26th inst., and the Executive of Dáil Éireann will offer him a national welcome. It is expected that the homecoming of de Valera will be an occasion of national rejoicing, and full arrangement will be made for marshalling the procession. The Lord Major of Dublin will receive him at the gates of the city, and will escort him to the Mansion House, where he will deliver a message to the Irish people. All organisations and bands wishing to participate in the demonstration should apply to 6 Harcourt Street, on Monday the 24th inst., up to 6 p.m.

H. Boland

T. Kelly, Honorary Secretaries.

Such arrangements were usually reserved for royalty, so Dublin Castle banned the reception, and the Sinn Féin Executive held an emergency meeting. Arthur Griffith presided at what was for him and Darrel Figgis, the first meeting since their arrest the previous May. Cathal Brugha had complained privately to Figgis some days earlier that Collins and his IRB colleagues had essentially taken over the movement from within while the others were in jail.

‘He told me that he had seen what had been passing, but that he had been powerless to change events,' Figgis wrote. ‘It was at this meeting I saw for the first time the personal hostility between him and Michael Collins.'

When the executive met to discuss what to do about Dublin Castle's ban on the planned reception, members witnessed the Big Fellow at his most arrogant. Figgis asked to see the record of the Executive meeting authorising the honorary secretaries to announce the plans to welcome de Valera, but he was told that the issue had never come up. ‘I therefore asked Alderman Tom Kelly on what authority he, as one of the signatories, had attached his name as secretary, and he answered with characteristic bluntness that, in point of fact, he had never seen the announcement, and had not known of it, till he read it in the press.'

There followed a ‘tangled discussion' before Collins rose. ‘Characteristically, he swept aside all pretences, and said that the announcement has been written by him, and that the decision to make it had been made, not by Sinn Féin, though declared in its name, but by “the proper body, the Irish Volunteers”,' Figgis wrote. ‘He spoke with much vehemence and emphasis, saying that the sooner fighting was forced and a general state of disorder created through the country (his words in this connection are too well printed on my memory ever to be forgotten), the better it would be for the country. Ireland was likely to get more out of a state of general disorder than from a continuance of the situation as it then stood. The proper people to take decisions of that kind were ready to face the British military, and were resolved to force the issue. And they were not to be deterred by weaklings and cowards. For himself he accepted full responsibility for the announcement, and he told the meeting with forceful candour that he held them in no opinion at all, that, in fact, they were only summoned to confirm what the proper people had decided.

‘He had always a truculent manner, but in such situations he was certainly candour itself,' Figgis continued. ‘As I looked on him while he spoke, for all the hostility between us, I found something refreshing and admirable in his contempt of us all. His brow was gathered in a thunderous frown, and his chin trust forward, while he emphasised his points on the back of a chair with heavy strokes of his hand.'

Arthur Griffith certainly was not impressed. Tapping the table in front of him with a pencil, Griffith emphasised that the decision was one to be taken by the meeting, and by no other body.

‘For two hours the debate raged fiercely,' according to Figgis. Going ahead with the announced plans would undoubtedly lead to trouble, while abandoning them could have disastrous implications for the morale of the whole movement. Parallels were drawn with the disastrous consequences of Daniel O'Con­nell's decision to accede to the British decision to ban the monster meeting at Clontarf some seventy years earlier.

De Valera was contacted and he requested the welcoming demonstrations be cancelled. ‘I write to request that you will not now persist in your idea,' he wrote. ‘I think you must all agree with me that the present occasion is scarcely one on which we would be justified in risking the lives of the citizens. I am certain it would not.'

In the following days de Valera ensured that the Standing Committee of Sinn Féin would have a veto over some of the plans the Big Fellow had been developing. Collins wrote to Austin Stack in frustration, but once de Valera went to the United States Collins soon got his way. At the end of July 1919, five specially selected IRA men shot and mortally wounded Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth. The British retaliated by banning Sinn Féin, Dáil Éireann and other organisations, thereby undermining the measures that de Valera had put in place to control Collins.

When the DMP raided Sinn Féin headquarters, Collins retaliated by having another detective killed that night. He also went over to Manchester and visited Austin Stack in Strangeways Jail as part of an elaborate escape plan.

Collins helped to spring Stack in October 1919, but there­after Stack turned out to be a dreadful disappointment as far as the Big Fellow was concerned. In comparison with Collins, who was an administrative genius, Stack was a bungler, yet Collins initially admired Stack greatly. This was probably as result of the latter's friendship with his fellow Kerryman Thomas Ashe, while the latter was president of the IRB. But Stack and Collins could hardly have known each other very well, because Stack had been in jail since Ashe's death in September 1917.

If Collins had known Stack better, he might not have had such confidence in him. Stack had been caught by surprise when Roger Casement showed up near Tralee on Good Friday 1916, but Stack showed no leadership. He made no effort to rescue Casement even though Head Constable John A. Kearney of the local RIC went out of his way to facilitate his rescue. Stack ruled out a rescue attempt, saying that he was under orders to ensure that nothing happened that might impede the planned landing of guns that Sunday.

On the fateful Friday evening Stack decided to visit another prisoner in custody in the RIC barracks instead. Before going, he was advised to ensure he had nothing incriminating on him. He handed over a revolver but he then went to the barracks with what he wrote to his brother was, ‘a large number of letters, i.e. fully 20 or 30 letters I imagine.' Those included letters from Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Bulmer Hobson. He was duly arrested, which may have been what he desired in order to insure that he would be safely incarcerated when the rebellion began.

Part of Stack's local prowess rested on his reputation as a footballer, having captained the Kerry team to win the all-Ireland championship of 1904. In addition, he had a rebel pedigree, as his father was known locally as a Fenian patriot, having been arrested and jailed in December 1866. Moore Stack initially protested his innocence, but then pleaded guilty in the hope of a lighter sentence. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. The British released him after little over two years in March 1869. He returned home to a hero's welcome and it would not be for more than a century that documentary evidence would emerge casting a shadow over his patriotic credentials.

It was largely through the influence of Collins that Stack was appointed deputy chief of staff of the IRA, but he never even attended a meeting of the general headquarters staff. It was hardly because he was so busy as minister for home affairs, seeing that he never came to grips with the proper formation of the republican courts either.

The Squad, an assassination team set up by Collins, targeted a number of individuals, including some prominent detectives with the Dublin Metropolitan Police and people who were providing them with information. The British retaliated by killing Tomás MacCurtain the lord mayor of Cork, and Collins revenged this killing by having at least three other people, suspected of involvement, shot. Amid the tit-for-tat killings there was a mass of police resignations. Most of the police considered themselves Irishmen, and they had no stomach for a fight against their fellow countrymen. As a result, they were quite prepared to turn a blind eye, and many even provided republicans with information.

The British introduced recruits to bolster the police, and they became known as Black and Tans, after a pack of hounds. Minister for War Winston Churchill persuaded the government to recruit an elite force of former military officers as police Auxiliaries. Operating on poor intelligence the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans sacked towns around the country, often striking at innocent people. In the process they drove the bulk of the Irish people into the arms of the republicans, as Collins anticipated.

Meanwhile de Valera antagonised Irish-American elements by indicating that they would support Woodrow Wilson, if the president provided official recognition of the Irish Republic. The dispute really centred over who would speak for the Irish-Americans – de Valera or Daniel Cohalan. The whole thing came to ahead when de Valera stated in an interview with the
Westminster Gazette
that the Irish regime would be prepared to provide an assurance that Irish independence would never be used to undermine Britain's security.

Having fought alongside Britain in the Great War, he feared that Americans would be afraid to support Ireland as this would be seen as a betrayal of the recent ally, so he suggested that Bri­­tain should declare a kind of Monroe Doctrine in relation to the British Isles and Ireland would provide an assurance to Britain like Cuba gave to the United States in a 1901 treaty. The Cubans said that they would maintain their independence and not allow their territory to be used against the United States. The Americans were also afforded the base that they still hold at Guantanamo Bay. Irish-Americans denounced de Valera's interview on the somewhat spurious grounds that it would mean that Ireland would side with Britain in the event of a war between Britain and the United States.

‘The trouble is purely one of personalities,' de Valera ad­mit­­ted. ‘I cannot feel confidence enough in a certain man [Cohalan] to let him have implicit control of tactics here without consultation and agreement with me.' De Valera was insisting on having the final say on policy matters, though he was prepared to consult with Irish-American leaders, but they were insisting that he should have nothing to do with American politics. ‘On the ways and means they have to be consulted,' de Valera conceded, ‘but I reserve the right to use my judgment as to whether any means suggested is or is not in conformity with our purpose.'