I Signed My Death Warrant (16 page)

While Griffith could not hide his contempt for Childers, Collins was quietly critical of him. ‘He is sharp to realise how things will have due effect in Dublin – and acts accordingly,' Collins wrote. ‘To go for a drink is one thing. To be driven to it is another.'

The suggestion that Childers should be included as an expert in the Irish team for the constitutional discussions on 24 November had been left hanging overnight and Gavan Duffy called for a meeting of the delegation next morning. Griffith ‘lost his temper', according to Childers. He said he had had enough of Gavan Duffy's intrigues and he accused him of letting him down on neutrality at an early conference. Barton and Gavan Duffy insisted that Childers should go to the meeting. Griffith got ‘very angry', and Collins remarked with a smile that he did not know Childers knew anything about constitutional matters. Charters made a perfunctory offer to withdraw himself. ‘I of course jumped on the idea of JC[Charters] not going and effaced myself,' Childers wrote.

Gavan Duffy and Chartres accompanied Griffith and Collins to meet with Birkenhead and Hewart at the House of Lords. Childers also accompanied them but Griffith ‘went in first and needless to say arranged that I would be left out!' Childers observed somewhat bitterly.

‘We had Duffy with us today,' Collins wrote to a friend. ‘It went fair, no more than that. If Duffy spent less time admiring his own voice we'd do better. Proof of it is when G[riffith] and I are together. You would appreciate the difference.'

The meeting achieved very little but it did have an extra­ordinary sequel when Hewart forwarded to the Irish delegation a synopsis contradicting an earlier account stating that the Irish should not suppose that war was the alternative. ‘What the Attorney General stated was “the Irish delegates must not suppose that the British Government was contemplating with equanimity the alternative was war”.' This was, in effect, a threat to resume the war.

‘There was war in the air,' Barton noted. ‘I thought the nego­tiations had ended but there was to be one more conference before we returned to discuss the situation at home.'

While the British were able to function as a united delegation, the Irish were divided. Collins no longer trusted Childers, but, unlike Griffith, he hid his feelings. For instance, Collins offered to present a document that reflected his thinking on the crown and empire. There was no problem about submitting this mem­orandum, unlike at the start of the month when Griffith furnished Lloyd George with the letter of 3 November, but the lack of opposition this time was possibly because Childers was the main author of the memorandum, as it had his figu­rative fingerprints all over it. Collins essentially accepted the arguments of Childers who had studied in detail and written about the constitutional aspects of the dominions in his book
The Framework of Home Rule.

Like Childers, Collins was now arguing for External Asso­ciation as simply a means of ensuring that Ireland would have the same
de facto
status as Canada. ‘The only association which it will be satisfactory to Ireland to Great Britain and the Dominions for Ireland to enter will be one based, not on the present technical legal status of the Dominions, but on the real position which they claim, and have in fact secured,' Collins contended. ‘In the interest of all the associated states, in the interest above all of England herself, it is essential that the present
de facto
position should be recognised
de jure
, and that all its implications as regards sovereignty, allegiance, [and] constitutional independence of the governments, should be acknowledged.'

He went on to argue that such an association ‘might form the nucleus of a real League of Nations of the world', which would be ‘the best and only way' for England to ensure her permanent security. ‘Into such a League might not America be willing to enter?' Collins asked. ‘Without real and permanent co-operation between Britain and America world-peace is an idle dream,' he continued. ‘With such co-operation war would become impossible.

‘The possibility of such a League, and the need for it, would be more clearly understood if it were more fully recognised how far the claim of the Dominions to independent statehood has matured, and the progress which has been made in finding ways in which independent nations may act in concert.'

Chamberlain described the memorandum as ‘extraordinarily interesting though sometimes perverse and sometimes Utopian. Who (outside our six) would guess the name of the writer?' Chamberlain wrote to Birkenhead.

Griffith, Collins and Barton returned to Dublin for a cabinet meeting on 25 November. While they were gone Jones had a thirty-minute conversation with Chartres when he delivered a memorandum offering to contribute to the King's Civil List.

I pleaded with him on the subject of allegiance but found him utterly irreconcilable on allegiance to the King in Ireland. He had seen such things done in the King's name by the King's servants in the last two years that he would rather, as he put it, go underground tomorrow than consent to any intervention ever again by this country in domestic affairs of Ireland. He spoke with great earnestness and there was no misunderstanding the dept of his conviction.

But Chartres was more moderate than some of the cabinet in Dublin. When Collins gave the cabinet the memorandum by Chartres proposing a voluntary contribution to the king, Brugha dissented. ‘It is not going to settle the matter,' he complained. ‘I don't believe we are going to settle on that.'

Collins said that the memorandum was already presented to the British.

‘I pointed out that I had not agreed to that,' Brugha noted afterwards. He had refused to go to London as part of the delegation, yet he seemed to think that he should be consulted not just on Defence matters, but on other matters, such as the crown, as well.

‘Well,' de Valera asked, ‘can we have unity or can we not?'

Brugha replied that it could be recorded as ‘agreed to, with one dissenting.'

‘This means now that we have not unanimity in the cabinet and the object all along in these negotiations was to have un­animity,' de Valera said.

‘Very well,' Brugha responded, ‘if it has been handed in I am agreed in order to preserve unity to the finish.'

They were far from united, however. Mulcahy attended the cabinet meeting as the controversy over the attempt to impose Austin Stack as deputy chief of staff was coming to a head. The headquarters' staff was balking, and Mulcahy asked that the cabinet clarify the situation for the staff. With Mulcahy objecting to Stack's appointment, de Valera tried to mollify him by suggesting that Eoin O'Duffy could remain as deputy chief of staff but Stack would be ‘Cathal's ghost on the Staff'. Mulcahy refused to accept this and the others were invited into meeting.

They sat around the perimeter of the drawing-room of the Mansion House, where the cabinet had been meeting. De Valera, who was sitting at one end of a small table at which his ministers were still seated, said that he wished to reform the headquarters staff. Having spoken briefly about the changes that he wished to make, he asked the men for their opinions. One after another they spoke against the changes, taking turns in the order in which they were sitting from the left-hand side of the room. J. J. O'Connell expressed the general tone when he said ‘the General Headquarters Staff had been a band of brothers'. All spoke in the same vane until it came to O'Duffy who was sitting in the second-last position on the right-hand side. His voice became shrill and he became a touch hysterical as he characterised the effort to appoint Stack as a criticism of himself.

De Valera then became somewhat hysterical. He pushed the table in front of him as he rose and declared in a half-scream, ‘Ye may mutiny, if ye like, but Ireland will give me another Army.'

Then, Mulcahy recalled, ‘he dismissed the whole lot of us from his sight.'

As they were leaving Mulcahy walked down the steps of the Mansion House with Seán Russell, who was also a rather highly-strung individual. He was very pale and incensed at the way de Valera had addressed Mulcahy. ‘I didn't think that there was a man in Ireland that would speak like that to my Chief,' he said in a tense kind of whisper.

In his biography of Collins, Rex Taylor quoted from the record of undated exchanges between Griffith and Collins dur
­­
ing the latter stages of the negotiations.

‘I will not agree,' Collins declared, ‘to anything which threatens to plunge the people of Ireland into a war – not with­­out their authority. Still less do I agree to being dictated to by those not embroiled in these negotiations.' It was significant that he actually placed more emphasis on his objection to being ‘dictated to', than to plunging the country into war. After all he, more than anybody else, was responsible for provoking the Black and Tan war. Now his ego had become involved.

‘If they are not in agreement with the steps which we are taking, and hope to take, why then did they themselves not consider their own presence here in London?' asked Griffith. ‘Brugha refused to be a member of this delegation.'

‘Supposing,' Collins added, ‘we were to go back to Dublin to­­morrow with a document which gave us a Republic. Would such a document find favour with everyone? I doubt it.'

‘So do I,' remarked Griffith. ‘But sooner or later a decision will have to be made and we shall have to make it.'

The negotiations on the association question were coming to ahead, when the delegation got together again in London. De Valera noted that the latest British proposals had no address and no signature. ‘You could in your reply, if you thought it desirable, follow the same course and send them an unsigned draft,' de Valera wrote on 27 November. ‘But there has been so much “beating around the bush” already that I think we should now get down to definite business and send them, as far as possible, our final word.'

Childers had been preparing a whole series of documents on dominion status. ‘The Dominion Status', contrasted the real status of the dominions with their legal, technical status. It noted that the British Government, or the Imperial Executive, could make treaties in the name of the dominions, but, in fact, the dominions had to be consulted. The British could commit the dominions to war and peace, but the dominions actually had to be consulted first. In it he contrasted the real status of the dominions with their inferior legal status. In theory the dominions were subject to the crown on all matters but in reality the king's representative acted on the advice of the dominion cabinets in all domestic matters. He summarised the situation by contrasting the technical
de jure
status of Canada with real,
de facto
status in separate columns.

Canada's legal status was that of ‘a subordinate dependent of Britain holding her self-governing rights under a British Act of Parliament'. It could therefore be legally repealed or amended at Westminster without Canada's consent. But Canada's constitutional position under Britain's unwritten constitution was something quite different. She was an independent country in total control of her own affairs. Although Canadians swore allegiance directly to the British crown and were technically subject to the royal veto, Childers argued that in fact the crown has no authority in Canada. ‘It signifies sentiment only,' because ‘the Canadian owes obedience to his own constitution only.' In short, he wrote, ‘Canada is by the full admission of Bri­tish statesmen equal in status to Great Britain and as free as Great Britain.'

In another memorandum – headed, ‘Notable Definitions of Dominion Status' – Childers quoted pronouncements by prominent people on the real status of the dominions. ‘We have received a position of absolute equality and freedom not only among the other States of the Empire but among the other nations of the world', Smuts had told the South African parliament on 10 September 1919. Bonar Law told the House of Commons on 30 March 1920 that the dominions ‘have control of their whole destiny'. Lloyd George had actually written to General James Hertzog, ‘The South African people control their own national destiny in the fullest sense.'

Childers contended that the British had no intention of giving Ireland the same status as Canada, seeing that they were demanding trade and defence concessions that were un­precedented in the case of Canada. Even if those demands were dropped, Ireland could not enjoy the same status, because the Canadians essentially enjoyed their freedom as a result of their distance from Britain. The British were simply too far away to enforce their legal edicts. If they tried to use force it would lead to complications with United States in view of the Monroe Doctrine. But Ireland was close enough that British laws ‘could be enforced against Ireland so as to override the fullest constitutional freedom nominally conferred.'

Although Childers had prepared a memorandum for the British, at this point he believed the negotiations had reached an impasse, but he noted in his diary that night that ‘it is pretty clear' that Griffith and Duggan ‘took steps, possibly through Cope (or C.[Cope] may have taken the initiative to re-open the matter.' Griffith insisted on presenting his own document to the British. It included the first two clauses of the proposals of 22 November (see p. 175) with the added specification of the offer to vote an annual contribution to the king's personal revenue as a token recognition of the crown.

‘Useless to criticise much,' Childers noted in his diary, ‘I object to the Defence par[agraph]. which gives away our case but only succeeded in getting it slightly altered. AG made the usual explosion about waste of time. Little help from anyone else.'

Other than the first three clauses, all the other points were covered in a note three paragraphs long. While the dominions considered the crown a symbol of external unity among the distant members states of the British commonwealth, Griffith argued, ‘Ireland, on the contrary lies beside the shores of Great Britain, which has been accustomed for generations to interfere, in the name of the crown, in every detail of Ireland life. The desire and temptation to continue interference will remain if the Crown remains, as it cannot be the symbolic Crown that the Dominions know, but will continue to possess the real power of repression and veto which Ireland knows.' The defence issue, to which Childers took exception, was not covered by a paragraph but a mere sentence: ‘We acknowledge a reasonableness in the desire of the British Government for certain naval facilities in Ireland differing from those which they receive from Canada or the other Dominions.'

There was one curious development when the delegation met that evening before the sub-conference meeting. Griffith ‘asked me, Charters, and GD [Gavan Duffy] to draft an alternative form of oath, saying I was an expert with words,' Childers noted in his diary. It was the ‘first time he has ever asked me for advice of any kind!'

‘We cannot make peace on these terms,' Chamberlain wrote to Lloyd George, ‘but we must not break on this document.'

As Collins had not yet returned from Dublin, Duggan joined Griffith to discuss the latest document with Lloyd George, Birkenhead and Sir Robert Horne at Chequers on the evening of 28 November. ‘We told them we had no authority to deal with them on any other basis than exclusion of the Crown from purely Irish affairs,' Griffith reported. ‘We then entered into a general discussion in which they knocked out my argument in the document we sent in – that the Crown in the Dominions was merely a symbol but in Ireland a reality – by offering to put in any phrase in the Treaty we liked to ensure that the functions of the Crown in Ireland should be no more in practice than it is in Canada or any Dominion.' In short, the British trumped the Irish argument for External Association by offering to ensure that Ireland would have the actual freedom enjoyed by Canada and the dominion by inserting in the proposed Treaty any phrase desired by the Irish delegation to ensure that Ireland would have the same
de facto
status as Canada. The British guaranteed, for instance, that the representative of the king in Ireland would be ‘be merely a symbol, and that no one would ever be appointed to whom the Irish Ministry offered any objection.'

Griffith might just as well have written that the British undermined de Valera's argument, which the Irish delegation had been pressing. It also undermined Childers who had been arguing that Canada was essentially independent. If the British were not going to honour the commitment to Ireland by not according the
de facto
status of Canada, they could just as easily violate External Association, because it was not going to move Ireland an inch further away from Britain. The negotiations were clearly coming to a conclusion. Indeed, Barton saw no point in remaining in London. He wished to return home next day, 30 November, but the others thought this would be seen as an affront to Griffith.

On the afternoon of 30 November Collins joined with Griffith and Duggan for a further meeting at 10 Downing Street with the prime minister, Birkenhead and Chamberlain. Lloyd George informed them that he would present the Irish delegation with Britain's final terms in the form of a draft treaty on Tuesday, 6 December.

‘They proposed to send their final proposals to Craig and ourselves on Tuesday,' Griffith reported. ‘We objected. We should see them beforehand. They agreed to send us them on Thursday evening, but formally to hand them to us Tuesday.'

Craig told Stormont that he had been authorised by the prime minister to issue a statement. ‘By Tuesday next,' he said, ‘either the negotiations will have broken down or the prime minister will send me new proposals for consideration by the Cabinet.'

The British draft treaty – delivered to the Irish delegation late on the night of Wednesday, 30 November – offered the Irish Free State, as Ireland would be known, the same status as the Dominions in ‘law and practice'. The exceptions, which really limited Irish freedom in relation to that of existing Dominions, were in matters of trade and defence. The British insisted on free trade and also stipulated that the coastal defence of Britain and Ireland would ‘be undertaken exclusively' by the British, who would retain control of four specified ports and such other facilities as might be desired ‘in times of war or of strained relations with a foreign Power'. The British and Irish armies were to be the same size in relation to each other as each was to its country's population. Another specific difference was the form of the oath to be taken by all members of the Free State parliament, who would swear ‘allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State; the Community of Nations known as the British Empire; and to the King as head of the State and of the Empire.'