I Signed My Death Warrant (7 page)

Brugha's real grievance was that Mulcahy had not been ‘con­trolling' Collins. He was, therefore, anxious to insert Stack in order to control the Big Fellow.

The IRA headquarters staff had reservations not only about Stack's bungling in relation to the arrest of Casement, but also his poor performance in relation to republican courts, and his failure to attend any staff meetings while he was officially the deputy chief of staff during the Black and Tan conflict. As a result the staff backed Mulcahy, who also got the support of influential divisional commanders for his replacement of Stack. Even people like Liam Lynch, Frank Aiken and Seán Russell, who would all later break with Mulcahy and Collins, strongly supported the chief of staff in the Stack controversy.

De Valera therefore overruled Mulcahy's suspension. But

talk of reorganising the IRA roused serious suspicions that sending Collins to London was part of a wider scheme to undermine his influence within the IRA. In the midst of what was going on many people urged Collins to stay in Dublin.

‘I had warned Collins not to go unless de Valera also went,' Tim Healy wrote, ‘but he was too unselfish and unsuspecting to refuse.' Whatever about being unselfish, he was far from un­suspecting, though he did try to give a contrary impression afterwards. ‘Before the negotiations began,' he later contended, ‘no doubt of de Valera's sincerity had a place in my mind.' That was patently untrue, but he did give the president the benefit of his doubts.

The proposed conference at Inverness hit a snag over de Valera's reply accepting the invitation. ‘In this final note,' he wrote, ‘we deem it our duty to reaffirm that our position is and can only be as we have defined it throughout this correspondence. Our nation has formally declared its independence and recognises itself as a sovereign State. It is only as the representatives of that State and as it chosen guardians that we have any authority or power to act on behalf of our people.'

‘Lloyd George was aiming to treat with us as if we were simply another “Irish Parliamentary Party”,' de Valera later explained to Joe McGarrity. ‘It was necessary for us to make quite explicit that we regarded ourselves in no such light. We were the Government of a nation that had declared its independence and we were prepared to face a renewal of the war rather than abandon that position. If there were members of the cabinet who felt otherwise they certainly did not express it. They approved the reply as I sent it, and a day or two after, in secret session, despite the threats which Lloyd George conveyed to us, Dáil Éireann endorsed it unanimously, and this after I had gone out of my way to make certain that every Member of the Assembly should realise to the full what the consequence of our standing firmly by that paragraph might involve.'

Maybe Collins openly supported it in cabinet and in the Dáil, but he certainly had reservations. Harry Boland and Joe McGrath were to deliver de Valera's reply to Lloyd George at Gairloch, Scotland. Collins realised the letter accepting the invitation would scupper the talks.

‘You might as well stay where you are,' he told McGrath.

Lloyd George cancelled the conference, insisting that there could be no question of recognising Irish independence. De Valera replied that he did not necessarily expect the British to recognise that independence but merely to realise that the Irish recognised it themselves. There followed a protracted exchange of letters and telegrams as Lloyd George and de Valera sought an agreeable basis for the conference.

‘De Valera always drafted these letters,' according to Barton. ‘We sometimes suggested amendments.' There were essentially two points at issue in their correspondence. Initially de Valera stated that the conference should consider Ireland's right to self-determination, while Lloyd George insisted that it could only consider the detailed application of his July offer.

De Valera promptly modified his demand to a request for unconditional discussions, but Lloyd George held his ground. In six of his seven communications he stressed that only the July proposals could be considered, but in his final telegram he backed down and agreed that the conference could ‘explore every possibility' of settlement ‘with a view to ascertaining how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations.' This formula was essentially a compromise on their original positions, but de Valera seemed to get the better of the argument because he had taken the more flexible stand.

The second point at issue involved recognition of Irish sovereignty. Although de Valera contended he was only stating that the Irish representatives recognised their own government, Lloyd George wanted no confusion on the point. There would be no question of his government affording recognition to the Dáil regime or even acknowledging that the Irish recognised their own regime. He stressed this point in his telegram on 29 September when he extended another invitation for the Irish side to send representatives to a conference, this time in London.

De Valera's acceptance of this invitation involved dropping the self-recognition stand, though he did try to confuse the issue by stating that ‘our respective positions have been stated and are understood.' This was an attempt to give the impression he was still holding to his earlier position, but his remarks were not a condition. They were a statement, which could only be logically interpreted as an admission that he understood and accepted Britain's insistence that there could be no conference, if he persisted with his claim of self-recognition.

‘In these preliminaries the English refused to recognise us as acting on behalf of the Irish Republic and the fact that we agreed to negotiate at all on any other basis was possibly the primary cause of our downfall,' Barton later argued. ‘Certainly it was the first milestone on the road to disaster. It is important that you must remember that every member of the Cabinet was party to and equally responsible for this decision. Many and long were the Cabinet meetings we held. The final decision to meet the English was a unanimous one.'

‘The communication of September 29th from Lloyd George made it clear that they were going into a conference not on the recognition of the Irish Republic, and I say if we all stood on the recognition of the Irish Republic as a prelude to any conference we could very easily have said so, and there would be no conference,' Collins noted. ‘What I want to make clear is that it was the acceptance of the invitation that formed the compromise. I was sent there to form that adaptation, to bear the brunt of it.'

De Valera had indicated in the Dáil that he intended to appoint Harry Boland as one of the secretaries to the delegation, along with Erskine Childers and somebody with a good command of the Irish language. But then he decided to send Boland to the United States instead, to prepare people there for a settlement incorporating less than the desired Republic. ‘I have a nice job now to prepare Irish-America for a compromise,' Boland said. He told Joe McGrath that he ‘was going back to America on the President's instructions to prepare the American people for something short of a Republic.'

Collins and Boland, who had been the best of friends for years, were involved in a classic love triangle, as both were in love with Kitty Kiernan. Before leaving for America Harry told Collins that he had proposed to Kitty and she had accepted. ‘Of course, he was upset and assured me that it did not follow if you did not marry me that you would marry him,” Harry wrote to Kitty.

Next day Harry sent Kitty a further letter. ‘Mick and I spent the last night together. He saw me home at 2 am, as I had to catch the 7.35 am. I bade him goodbye – only to find him at Kingsbridge as fresh as a daisy to see me off. I need not say to you how much I love him, and I know he has a warm spot in his heart for me, and I feel sure in no matter what manner our Triangle may work out, he and I shall always be friends.'

Before the plenipotentiaries left for London they were furnished with credentials on 7 October 1921. President de Valera signed those credentials authorising each of the plenipotentiaries ‘to negotiate and conclude on behalf of Ireland with the representatives of his Britannic Majesty, George V, a Treaty or Treaties of settlement, Association between Ireland and the community of nations known as the British commonwealth.' The cabinet also issued them with the fol­lowing secret instructions:

(1) The Plenipotentiaries have full powers as defined in their credentials.

(2) It is understood however that before decisions are finally reached on the main questions that a dispatch notifying the intention of making these decisions will be sent to the Members of the Cabinet in Dublin and that a reply will be awaited by the Plenipotentiaries before the final decision is made.

(3) It is also understood that the complete text of the draft treaty about to be signed will be similarly submitted to Dub­­lin and reply awaited.

(4) In case of break the text of final proposals from our side will be similarly submitted.

(5) It is understood that the Cabinet in Dublin will be kept regularly informed of the progress of the negotiations.

Since the Dáil had already conferred full plenipotentiary powers, the instructions from the cabinet, an inferior body, were not legally binding in any instance in which they limited the powers of the delegation. Indeed, from the instructions themselves, it would seem that they were not intended to limit those powers, because the first of the instructions basically reaffirmed that the delegation had the full authority ‘to negotiate and conclude' a treaty. The word ‘understood,' which was used in each of the three clauses that seemed to limit the delegation's authority, indicated that the instructions were really an informal understanding that the plenipotentiaries were morally obliged to try to uphold.

The instructions were designed by de Valera to ensure that he would ultimately have a kind of control over the delegation. ‘I expected to be in the closest touch with it,' he wrote. ‘In fact, it was my intention to be as close almost as if I were in London.' In short, de Valera wanted ultimate control of the negotiations, while he was putting all of the responsibility for whatever happened on the members of the delegation.

Erskine Childers was named principal secretary to the delegation, and there were three other secretaries – John Chartres, Diarmuid O'Hegarty and Fionán Lynch. Chartres had included as a kind of constitutional adviser, while O'Hegarty took charge of the typing staff, and Lynch was included to fulfil de Valera's desire for a fluent Irish speaker on the staff. “We never saw anything of Lynch and I do not know what became of him,' Barton noted.

Childers was expected to have a strong influence over Barton, who was like a younger brother. They were double first cousins. Childer's father and Barton's mother were brother and sister, as were Barton's father and Childer's mother. Childer's parents died when he was quite young and the Bartons assumed responsibility for rearing him and he spent his holidays with them. As a result Barton and Childers were as close to brothers as any two cousins could be. They even shared two names each, as their full names were Robert Erskine Childers and Robert Childers Barton.

The president believed that Childers and Barton ‘would be strong and stubborn enough as a retarding force to any pre­cipitate giving away by the delegation.' If de Valera really suspected that Griffith and Collins were weak, why did he not include Childers in the delegation proper? It was naive to think that a secretary would be able to control the delegation through his influence with Barton, especially when de Valera had questions about Barton's ability to cope with pressure. In April 1921 he actually wrote to Collins that he thought that Barton was ‘on the verge of a breakdown'. Yet a few months later he was relying on him to restrain Griffith and Collins.

Childers was to keep de Valera informed on the activities of Griffith and Collins. Now in his early fifties, he was born and educated in Britain, but of course, he spend his holidays with the Bartons in Glendalough, County Wicklow. Having graduated from Cambridge University, he joined the staff at West­minster and served for fifteen years (1895–1910) as a clerk in the House of Commons. He was a distant relative to Hugh Childers, who had served over thirty years in parliament and had been a member of various Gladstone administrations and had served as chairman of the royal commission which famously found in 1895 that Ireland had been grossly overtaxed throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Erskine Childers took leave of absence to serve in the Boer War, and afterwards returned to work as a parliamentary clerk. In his spare time he wrote the bestseller
Riddle of the Sands.
Published in 1905, it has been generally considered the first of the modern spy novels. It was widely credited with alerting the British of their naval weakness to a possible German attack. Erskine became deeply committed to Home Rule and resigned as a parliamentary clerk in 1910. Two years later he published
The Framework of Home Rule
, which was a detailed, ex­haustively researched study of home rule and the involvement of Irish people in the various colonies. Childers landed the arms at the Howth from his yacht, the
Asgard
, in 1914, but he then joined up and served with distinction in the royal navy during the First World War, and he served in the secretariat of the Irish Convention of 1917–1918. He was therefore particularly well qualified to serve as chief secretary of the delegation sent to London in 1921. Indeed, one might even suggest over-qualified and should have been a member of the delegation proper, but there was always a strain between Griffith and him. Both had spent time in South Africa, where Griffith sided with the Boers. There was a deep unbridgeable gulf between them, for which Griffith was largely responsible.

Childers, whose recreational passion was sailing, was a dedi­­cated individual who tended to become fanatical about his interests. He was a tireless secretary who would work deep into the night without taking time off to relax.

De Valera assumed he could control the delegation himself, even though he had saddled the plenipotentiaries with the full responsibility of negotiating a settlement by insisting that the Dáil give them unfettered negotiating powers. He met Gavan Duffy, Childers and Chartres at 11 o'clock on the night of 7 Octo­ber and gave them partially completed copies of a couple of draft treaties.

Draft Treaty A was an incomplete document in which Ex­ter­­nal Association was outlined in treaty form. It envisaged Britain recognising Ireland as ‘a sovereign independent state' and renouncing ‘all claims to govern or to legislate' for the island. In return, Ireland would become externally associated with the British commonwealth, enjoying equal status with the dominions and being separately represented at imperial conferences. Instead of the common citizenship of the dominions, External Association would substitute reciprocal citizenship – the subtle difference being that Irish people would be Irish citizens rather than British subjects, but they would enjoy the same rights and privileges as British subjects while residing within the British commonwealth, and British subjects would enjoy reciprocal rights with Irish citizens while resident in Ireland.

The president had thought it necessary to seek reciprocal rights, because he was afraid of losing the sympathy of Irish people throughout the British empire, if the Dáil looked for a settlement that would make Irish immigrants aliens within the commonwealth. In many respects the distinction between reciprocal and common citizenship represented on a personal level the distinction between External Association and dominion status at the national level. External Association was designed to ensure that Ireland would legally have ‘a guarantee of the same constitutional rights that Canada and Australia claimed,' according to de Valera.

His controversial
Westminster Gazette
interview was the inspiration for another aspect of Draft Treaty A, which called for the British commonwealth to guarantee ‘the perpetual neutrality of Ireland and the integrity and inviolability of Irish territory.' In return Ireland would commit ‘itself to enter into no pact, and take no action, nor permit any action to be taken, inconsistent with the obligation of preserving its own neutrality and inviolability and to repel with force any attempt to violate its territory or to use its territorial waters for warlike purposes.' Once ratified by the respective parliaments the Treaty would be registered with the League of Nations at Geneva and the dominions would try to get ‘the formal recognition of Ireland's neutrality, integrity and inviolability by the League of Nations in conformity with the similar guarantee in favour of Switzerland.'

In spite of its title, Draft Treaty A was not a serious effort to draw up a draft treaty, as has often been suggested. It was strictly a negotiating document, which the Irish delegation would present in response to the British proposals of 20 July. De Valera proposed a series of contingency documents be drafted. Draft Treaty B would be the document the delegation would publish as the Irish alternative in the event the negotiations collapsed, while Draft Treaty S would be the document the pleni­­potentiaries would sign as a treaty. The president made no effort to draw up Draft Treaty S. In fact, he actually suggested a series of ancillary treaties on the constitution, finance, trade and joint commission. His suggestion sounded liked some kind of complicated mathematical formula, as he proposed that these should be called Draft Treaty C, Draft Treaty F, Draft Treaty T, and Draft Treaty J respectively. As those were being updated from day to day they should be called, Draft Treaty Aa, Ab, Ac, or the Break Treaty should be Draft Treaty Ba, Bb, Bc, etc., consecutively and dated.

‘We must depend on your side for the initiative after this,' he wrote to Griffith. The choice of the term ‘your side' was pos­sibly an unconscious reflection of the division within the cabinet even at that early stage. As far as negotiating tactics went, de Valera's advice was that the most difficult issue, the question of the crown, should be left until last.

‘Supposing they refuse to do this?' Griffith asked.

‘Well, you can put it to them that we ought first of all discuss the things there will be no great dispute about.'

‘But supposing they insist on considering the question of the Crown first?'

‘You can only use your powers of persuasion. After all, they cannot want to have a break on the first day.'

Griffith pressed for further advice. ‘Well,' said de Valera, ‘there you have the situation. You'll have to make the best of it.'

‘Oh, wait now,' cried Griffith. ‘That won't do!'

‘Why?'

‘It's not enough to say, “make the best of it”.'

‘I'm not talking about a settlement,' de Valera explained. ‘I'm talking about the method of handling the negotiations. You see, if we get them to concede this and this and this and this, and then come to a stumbling-block, like the question of the Crown, which they say is a formula, then we can put the question before the world and point out that they want to renew the war on us for a formula.'

‘We all realised that to secure the position of an isolated Republic was now impossible unless we drove England's military forces out of the country,' Barton wrote. ‘In the Dáil members understood that our objective was External Association. The definition of that term was vague and even the delegates had but a hazy conception of what was to be its final form. This however was clear to us, External Association meant that no vestige of British authority was to remain within Ireland. The compromise was to be as regarded our foreign relations.'

Joe McGrath and Dan McCarthy were sent ahead to obtain two houses for the delegation and a fleet of Rolls Royce cars for their use. The headquarters were at 22 Hans Place and the other house was at 15 Cadogan Gardens about ten minutes' walk away. They employed a head cook, assistant cooks, cleaners and house maids, some from the Irish community in London, but Collins selected three waiters and six house maids as a kind of reward for their past services, and the delegation brought its own typists and clerks, as well some waiters.

Emmet Dalton was detailed to arrange for the purchase of an aeroplane to be on stand-by to whisk Collins back to Ireland if the negotiations collapsed precipitately. Contact was made with two Irishmen who had served as pilots in the royal air force. One of them, Charlie Russell, had spent some time in Canada, so he purchased the Martinsyde aircraft posing as a Canadian requiring it for a Canadian project. The aircraft was reportedly capable of carrying at least five passengers with a range of five hundred miles and at a speed of one hundred miles per hour. Both pilots had a number of practice flights to familiarise themselves with the plane, which was maintained in readiness at Croyden aerodrome.