The Treaty Debates Explained: December 1921 – January 1922
By Mark Duncan
Where were the debates held and for how long did they
run?
The Dáil Éireann debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty
were staged at the Earlsfort Terrace home of University College
Dublin, the site of what is today the National Concert Hall. It
was neither the obvious location for the debates nor the most
suitable. With the Round Room of the Mansion House occupied for a
Christmas Fair, the debates transferred to UCD’s Council
Chamber, a room that was long and narrow and with a low ceiling
that made it difficult for those at one end of the room to follow
what was being said at the other end.
The debates began on 14 December 1921 and effectively concluded with Arthur Griffith being elected to replace Éamon de Valera as President of Dáil Éireann on 10 January 1922. The critical vote on whether to ratify or reject the Treaty was taken on 7 January.
The document debated had been signed on 6 December 1921 following three months of negotiations between a British delegation led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George and an Irish delegation led by Dáil Éireann’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Griffith. The Treaty was not the product of negotiations between two equally-weighted nation states, nor had it been concluded without a threat of violence being deployed. On the evening of 5 December Lloyd George declared to the Irish Plenipotentiaries that the consequence of a no-deal would not be a continuation of the existing truce – in place since July 1921 – but the onset of an “immediate and terrible war” and “war within three days”.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty only ran to a length of 1,800 words and did not deliver the republic desired (and previously proclaimed). What it did guarantee was the establishment of an Irish Free State with dominion status within the British Empire – similar to that of Canada, the specific example of which was cited in Article 2 of the Treaty text. While it contained a contentious provision for an ‘oath of fidelity’ to the Crown, the Treaty granted the Irish Free State control over much of its domestic affairs, including significant fiscal autonomy and control over its own defence, albeit the British would retain naval facilities in three key ports. This was, as historian Michael Kennedy has observed, a ‘considerable’ advance on what had been envisaged in the 1912 Home Rule Act. Edward Carson, who had rallied Ulster unionist defiance of the Westminster Parliament’s will on Home Rule, clearly thought the same. Now Lord Carson, he would declare to the House of Lords on 14 December that the British government had abandoned Ireland “at the very heart of the Empire to independence, with an Army, with a Navy, with separate Customs, with Ministers at foreign Courts, and delegates to the League of Nations” where they could vote against the British interests. The six counties of Northern Ireland, whose parliament and government had been established the previous year, was given the right to opt out of the Irish Free State (which it promptly did), but at a price: opting out would lead to the establishment of a Boundary Commission to be entrusted with the determining the border in Ireland in ‘accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions’.
Across those 15 days of debates at Earlsfort Terrace, over 440,000 words were spoken and contributions were made by almost every member of the Dáil. In all, there were almost 2,300 individual contributions. Some contributed more than others and spoke for longer than others. Predominant among the 121 TDs who would ultimately vote on the Treaty was Éamon de Valera, who made 334 individual contributions and spoke over 40,000 words. For perspective, the median across all TDs was 3,600 words. The distinction of delivering the longest speech went to Mary MacSwiney, sister of Terence, the former Lord Mayor of Cork who had died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison the year before. MacSwiney’s speech ran to two hours and 40 minutes; in contrast, Thomas Hunter, an opponent of the Treaty like MacSwiney, said all he needed in four sentences.
The Dáil Éireann Treaty debates commenced just over a week after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty document in London, which had brought to an end a period of negotiation that had begun proper in early October 1921, the truce in the Anglo-Irish war having opened the way for exploratory talks to commence the previous July. The debates also commenced exactly three years to the day from the staging of the 1918 election that had redrawn the Irish political map and confirmed both the rise of Sinn Féin as a political force and the resilience of the Ulster unionist position in the north-east of the country.
The divisions that the Dáil debates would soon expose had already been manifest at Cabinet level. At a lengthy meeting on 8 December, which ran from noon to 9.30 pm with only two adjournments, Treaty signatories Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and Robert Barton, along with William Cosgrave and the non-voting Kevin O’Higgins, indicated that they would recommend acceptance of the document by the Dáil. Declaring against the recommendation of the Treaty was the then President of Dáil Éireann, Éamon de Valera, the Minister for Defence, Cathal Brugha, and the Minister for Home Affairs, Austin Stack. According to one account of that meeting, de Valera informed his colleagues that had he been in the room with British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and offered the Treaty, he would have told him to ‘go to the devil; I will not sign.’
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View the handwritten minutes of the Cabinet meeting of 8 Dec. 1921
Subsequent to that 8 December Cabinet meeting, de Valera issued a public statement (it appeared in the press the following day) that the terms of the Treaty were in ‘violent conflict with the wishes of the majority of this nation as expressed freely in the successive elections during the last three years....I cannot recommend the acceptance of this Treaty, either to Dáil Éireann or the country.’ Not only did de Valera have difficulties with substance of what had been agreed in London, he took umbrage that the plenipotentiaries had signed the Treaty without first reverting back to Dublin. Before the press and prior to the Dáil going into private session on the opening day of the debates, de Valera made a point of reading out the instructions that had been given to the plenipotentiaries back in October 1921. Collins and Griffith denied that they had exceeded their mandate, with the former emphasising that the plenipotentiaries had not signed a Treaty in London but a document that they would “recommend...to the Dáil for acceptance.”
What were the main issued debated?
A keyword phrase analysis of the text of the Treaty debates by
academics Míchael Ó Fathartaigh and Liam Weeks gives
an indication of the principal issues of concern to those who
contributed to the Dáil debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
The word ‘Republic’ was mentioned over 1,200 times,
with ‘oath’ and ‘war’ referenced 698 and
991 times respectively. Ulster was mentioned on only 113
occasions, Northern Ireland on 25 and Six Counties 11. As these
results indicate it was the parameters of Irish sovereignty and
the relations between Ireland and the empire which dominated the
discussion rather than a contemplation of partition and
north-south arrangements.
Understandably, pro and anti-Treaty proponents preferred to emphasise different aspects of the agreement in presenting their arguments. For the signatories and their supporters, the case for acceptance of the Treaty was rooted in the practical gains it delivered, in the freedoms won, the control secured and the opportunities it presented. Arthur Griffith, who in addition to feeling obliged to honour a deal he’d signed, was firm in his belief that Ireland had got a good settlement and one that amounted to full self-government. Michael Collins saw it as something else. Famously, and to applause in the Dáil at the time, he said he saw it as a stepping stone, as giving ‘not the ultimate freedom that all nations aspire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it’.
For opponents of the Treaty, the focus of the debate was shifted to what had been conceded and how far from the ideal of the republic the Treaty fell. Nothing crystallised this more than the provisions in relation to what was termed an oath of allegiance and the position of the Governor-General, which was considered a betrayal of the republic that had been proclaimed at Easter 1916 and reaffirmed by the establishment of Dáil Éireann in 1919. Notwithstanding a popular belief to the contrary, the final agreement did not require Dail deputies to swear allegiance to the Crown. Rather, the primary focus of the an oath was to the Constitution of the Irish Free State – it was to this that ‘true faith and allegiance’ was to be given – with the added requirement for fidelity to the Crown ‘in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations.’ For Eoin O’Duffy, it was not just the wording but the sequencing that mattered. “I do not want to take an oath to any English king but I do say the first part neutralises the second.”
The Treaty’s detractors were having none of this. As was reiterated by many speakers, the pre-existing oath to the republic was binding and no alternative could be honourably entertained. “I took an Oath to the Irish Republic, solemnly, reverently, meaning every word”, Kathleen Clarke remarked. “I shall never go back from that.” Such unbending principle sat alongside an understanding that once a truce has been reached and Sinn Fein representatives had agreed to enter negotiations with the British side, compromise was inevitable. ‘When we agreed to a truce with the British Government,’ Seán Hayes, the Cork Sinn Féin TD, remarked, ‘we created in the minds of the people an idea that we were going to make a bargain with the British Government, and we cannot get away from it.’ Echoing this point was the Drogheda-based Councillor and TD for Louth-Meath, James Murphy, who would subsequently represent Cumann na nGaedheal until the late 1930s. “If the Republic—as the plain man in the street understands it—was not given away when the Truce was signed”, Murphy remarked, “in my opinion the Republic was certainly given away when we sent plenipotentiaries to London to negotiate a Treaty in which the Republic was explicitly and implicitly ruled out by the British Prime Minister in practically every communication he sent us on the subject.”
Why didn’t the North feature more heavily in the debates?
Although almost one third of the text of the Anglo-Irish Treaty
concerned the north in some shape or form – Articles 11
to 16 concerned the position of the recently established Northern
Ireland in relation to the Irish Free State – this
weighting was not reflected in the Treaty debates. Only 9 of the
338 pages in the official Dáil record of the Treaty debates
addressed the issue of partition and the north. Furthermore, only
20 TDs mentioned Northern Ireland in their contributions.
But this was not indicative of a dismissive or carefree attitude towards the issue on the part of pro- and anti-Treaty advocates. Rather it reflected a broad sense, perhaps naively and certainly mistakenly, that partition would not be permanent and that the Boundary Commission would so reduce Northern Ireland as to render it economically unviable. Seán MacEntee, the Belfast-born TD for Monaghan, did not subscribe to this analysis and it was on the issue partition, and not the oath, that he voted against the Treaty. As MacEntee saw it, even if it worked as envisaged, the Treaty proposal to establish a Boundary Commission threatened to entrench the division of the island by rendering the newly created Northern Ireland more politically and religiously homogenous.
On 22 December 1921, MacEntee pointed to a closing clause in Article 12 of the Treaty and claimed that its “real purpose” was to “ensure that Ulster – secessionist Ulster – should remain a separate unit”. This was to be done, MacEntee explained, “by transferring from the jurisdiction of the Government of Northern Ireland certain people and certain districts which that Government cannot govern; and by giving instead to Northern Ireland, certain other districts – unionist districts of Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal, so that not only under this Treaty are we going to partition Ireland, not only are we going to partition Ulster, but we are going to partition even the counties of Ulster; and then I am told that these are not partition provisions.”
There were also objections to the proposed Boundary Commission in Westminster, where Ulster Unionist representatives and their ‘Die-hard’ Conservative Party supporters made known their objections. Speaking in the House of Commons on 16 December 1921, the Ulster Unionist MP, Hugh O’Neill accused Lloyd George of being in “flagrant violation of his written pledge, making a Treaty with a third party, without a word of consultation with the Ulster people, the effect of which may be radically to alter the boundaries within which they now have jurisdiction”.
Two days previously, in the House of Lords, the former leader of unionism in Ulster, Lord Edward Carson, denounced the Treaty and accused the British government of betrayal, of bowing to republican violence and conceding that Britain would “scuttle out of Ireland”. As for the north, Carson did not mention the Boundary Commission but still argued that it had been betrayed by a British government that had agreed to provisions relating to Northern Ireland without a “single communication to the Prime Minister or Government of Ulster”. The main focus of Carson’s attack on the Treaty was on its financial provisions which threatened the north with a more punitive arrangement should it choose, as it predictably did, to exclude itself from the terms of the 6 December agreement. “Ulster is not for sale” Carson declared to the House of Lords the following week. “Her loyalty does not depend upon taxes. Ulster values her heritage as citizens of the United Kingdom, and neither you nor the Press, nor your friends in the south of Ireland, need try to terrorise her by the bogey of her having to pay more.”
The sensitivities of Ulster unionists were acknowledged even by those who had negotiated the Treaty on the British side. On 16 December 1921, just prior to the vote in Westminster, one of the British signatories, Austen Chamberlain, made reference to the Boundary Commission and the “great deal of alarm” it had occasioned in Ulster and his words were carefully calculated to ease that sense of alarm and soothe those concerns. “We recognised”, he told the House of Commons, “that it was impossible to settle this question by county option, impossible to settle it by constituencies, and what we have proposed, and what the Commission is required to do, is to revise the boundary between the North and the South, so as to include where possible, having regard to economic and geographical considerations, men now excluded from the Government of Northern Ireland, who would wish to come under it, and to exclude from Northern Ireland men now included in it, who would wish to come out of it. We will do our best, as far as we are concerned, in the appointment of a chairman, to secure a man whose sagacity and impartiality will meet with the acceptance of both sides in this matter.”
In many ways, the conflicting responses to the Boundary Commission underscored the value of the idea to the negotiations leading to the Treaty. It allowed the British government and the Irish delegation to push the Ulster question into the future in a way that allowed the negotiations progress to the point of signing a Treaty. Post-Treaty, however, a problem that had proved intractable during the home rule debates of the previous 40 years remained just that, and, Boundary Commission or not, there was no reconciling the aspirations of Irish republicans with those of an Ulster Unionist leadership determined to sit on the new Northern Ireland “like a rock”.
So, the Treaty was also debated and voted on in
Westminster?
Yes. The debate in the House of Commons began on 14 December and
was done by 16 December. The Commons voted by a ratio of seven to
one, 401 to 58, to present an Address to the King approving the
Treaty. An identical Address sent by the House of Lords was
carried by 166 votes to 47 on 19 December 1921. These were not
surprise results. After all, when opening the discussion in the
House of Commons, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George,
who led his side’s negotiating team, had confidently
declared that “No agreement ever arrived at between two
peoples has been received with so enthusiastic and so universal a
welcome.’
Universal the welcome wasn’t, of course. As historian Charles Townsend has observed and as indicated by contributions referenced above, the Treaty and the potential implications of the proposed Boundary Commission had ‘sent a shiver of dismay through the north’. Ulster Unionist MPs and peers and their supporters in the Conservative Party may have been in a Westminster minority but they were unsparing in their criticism of an agreement they characterised as both a humiliation and surrender. “This is a surrender to murder which you would not give to argument a short time ago”, Sir Frederick Banbury remarked on 16 December in the House of Commons, while worrying about the impact it might have on an already troubled India. For the MP for Belfast Ormeau, Thomas Moles, the capitulation to Sinn Féin was evident in what he described as the Treaty’s “imbecile caricature of an oath of allegiance”, one that differed from that required of members of the Westminster parliament. “Why”, Moles asked, “do not they give the Sinn Feiners the Oath in the same form? If they mean allegiance to the King, why do not they put in the word "allegiance" before the word "King"? They cut it out deliberately, in deference to the Sinn Fein delegates with whom they have been conferring, and they cut it out because the Sinn Fein delegates refuse to be bound by that Oath of Allegiance.” For the MP for Cambridge University, John Frederick Rawlinson, it was the Sinn Féiners’ lack of conspicuous gratitude for what the British government had conceded that riled. That, and the belief that the Treaty would not bring the peace it promised. “I fear greatly that this Treaty will be looked upon as a surrender of Ireland, and that it may mean that our troubles are only just beginning”.
Britain’s so-called ‘troubles’ with Ireland were not ending, but nor did the Treaty signal their new beginning. From a British perspective, the Treaty succeeded in extricating the Irish question from British domestic politics for almost half a century, only for it to return in a very different guise. In doing so it pushed to the margins an issue that had intermittently dominated party politics since the mid 1880s. The reasons why this was possible owed as much to the First World War and the changing dynamics of British political life as they did to Irish developments. ‘There was now’, historian Ivan Gibbons has observed, ‘a new political spirit in post-war Britain as all parties began to become more involved with social and economic concerns and began to move away from fixation with the rights and wrongs of the competing nationalisms in Ireland. As a result of changing circumstances, first the Ulster unionists in 1920 and then the Irish republicans in 1921 were manoeuvred into positions where compromise was deemed to be more acceptable than outright victory. This was made possible by a combination of coalition politics in immediate post-war Britain plus a major shift in British public opinion that demanded that Ireland finally be placed outside the realm of British party politics.’
What was Document No. 2?
Document No. 2 was Eamon de Valera’s alternative to the
Treaty.
A hurriedly drafted outline of this proposed document was introduced at the private session that followed the opening public session on the first day of the Dáil’s debate – 14 December 1921. Document No. 2 made mention neither of a republic nor of the Crown but clearly stated in its opening line that all power in Ireland derived ‘solely from the people of Ireland’. This was important for De Valera as it impressed that ultimate source of legitimacy for the new state was the Irish people.
As de Valera saw it the difference between the Treaty and his alternative was sufficiently small for the British not to go to war over it (much of the Treaty was copied in it) and sufficiently significant to make “all the difference” in satisfying ”the aspirations of the country”. But what de Valera was proposing was nothing more than the idea of external association which had already been rejected by the British side during the negotiations – on three occasions. External association was a de Valera device which would see a fully independent Ireland become voluntarily linked to the British Commonwealth without being a member of it. It was conceived as a compromise between the dominion status offered by the British government and the fully separate Irish republic. The idea had been set out in the outline of a Treaty that had been drawn up by De Valera, George Gavan Duffy and Erskine Childers in October before the plenipotentiaries’ departure for the negotiations in London. This draft Treaty, flimsy on detail, was nevertheless striking for what it revealed about the compromises de Valera believed the Dáil cabinet would be willing to accept. Significantly, it made no reference to a republic but it did imagine Ireland as an ‘external associate of the British Commonwealth’, equal yet different in standing to sovereign dominions like Canada and Australia.
As already mentioned Document No. 2 was introduced at the first private session of the Dáil Treaty debates. However, at the public session of 19 December, de Valera requested – to the dissatisfaction of Treaty proponents – that it be treated as a confidential matter until such time as he proposed it formally. The Cavan TD Seán Milroy responded that the Dáil members had not been told it was intended as a private matter and that it went to the “root of the whole issue” being discussed. Collins, too, accused de Valera of withholding from the Irish people a sense of what an alternative to the Treaty might be. The alternative that de Valera had set out in his document was, Arthur Griffith raged, no more than a “quibble of words”. And Griffith made clear that he could not countenance ditching the Treaty and returning to war over such a quibble.
But was de Valera’s alternative just a vain, needless nit-pick? The historian FSL Lyons is among those to think not. Writing in 1973, Lyons insisted the differences contained in Document No. 2 amounted to more than mere semantics. For sure, there were similarities with the Treaty on the north-east and on defence, but De Valera’s version was principally concerned with the idea of sovereignty and how it might be exercised. ‘The fundamental purpose of Document No. 2’, Lyons wrote, ‘was to exclude Britain from interfering in the internal affairs of the new Irish state’. Another historian, J.J. Lee has described Document No. 2 as a ‘truly remarkable effort to reconcile what might not unreasonably be called the objective interests of Britain and Ireland. It sought to reconcile principle with pragmatism in a manner that would have done credit to statesmen of the utmost experience and intellectual and emotional maturity, much less a relative neophyte in the realm of international affairs. It is widely acknowledged now that de Valera anticipated the broad thrust of subsequent developments within the British Empire more accurately than any of the signatories of the Treaty or of his numerous other critics.’
Presenting the RTÉ Six-One News from Downing Street on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty, David McCullagh re-examines how the Treaty came about and issues it addressed
Document No, 2 resurfaced in the debates after the Christmas recess. It was made public after an exasperated Griffith released the text to the press once it became clear that de Valera was planning on revising his document before presenting before a public session of the Dáil. In doing what he did, Griffith denied that he had acted dishonourably or betrayed confidence. “I am content to let my countrymen judge”, he declared. Putting into the public domain de Valera’s document was intended to impress upon wider opinion that the alternative to the compromises of the Treaty was not a steadfast refusal to compromise; it was just a different kind of compromise. And the difference between these two compromises, as Griffith had pointed out on the opening day of the debates, was not the “vital difference between the Republic and the Crown. It was the difference of the degree of recognition of the Crown.”
Joseph O’Doherty, TD from Donegal, did not see it like this. Speaking on 7 January 1921, O’Doherty argued the any choice between the Treaty and Document No. 2 was “not a question of tweedledum and tweedledee”. The gap between them, he suggested, went to the heart of the “great question of Irish sovereignty” and he, O’Doherty, was not prepared to vote away that sovereignty. De Valera had already moved to counter the pro-Treaty characterisation of his document, which by then he had revised as a Document No. 3. He did so in the form of a direct appeal to the Irish people. In a proclamation dated 4 January 1922 and published in the following day’s newspapers, he told them that they were in danger and that the opportunity for a genuine reconciliation of Ireland and England was ‘being lost through the short-sighted expediency of politicians’. Furthermore, he urged the Irish people not to be misled by ‘innuendo and the talk of quibbles and of shadows. ‘Is it a shadow”, he asked, “that would safeguard your declared independence instead of subverting it?’ He continued: ‘The very things that were represented to the people as just shadows are the same things upon they have been told Mr Lloyd George will wage “immediate and terrible war” if the people’s right to them is acknowledged. You do not need a very close analysis to show it cannot be both ways.’
Ultimately, the principal problem with Document No. 2 is that it was not what had been negotiated during the nearly three months of talks in London. The only document agreed was the Treaty itself. And, as Sligo TD Alexander McCabe noted on 4 January 1922, the Treaty, as opposed to the external association of Document No. 2, represented “goods delivered and not promised to us – goods that we know were never offered or, indeed, seriously asked for before.” It was better, McCabe concluded, to take these goods rather than “run the risk of war or chaos and all that it means to our people and the prosperity of the country.”
How were the debates covered in the press?
In contrast to the divisions exposed in Dáil
Éireann, the popular mainstream press were almost as one in
supporting the agreement that had been reached in London. The
outliers in December 1921 and January 1922 were a small number of
anti-Treaty regional titles: the Connachtman in Sligo,
the Donegal Vindicator and the
Waterford News.
All the main national dailies backed the agreement. Indeed, even before the negotiations had concluded the Freeman’s Journal was expressing its confidence in the plenipotentiaries to deliver a just outcome for Ireland and indicating their willingness to back them. ‘Let the plenipotentiaries know that the nation’s trust in them is complete, and that they will not merely be honoured with a nation’s acceptance, but backed by its full strength.’ When the Treaty was eventually signed, the Irish Times, then an organ of southern unionist opinion, expressed a wariness of indulging in ‘premature felicitations’, yet it indicated that if the agreement were to be ratified, and if the gap between north and south were to be bridged, and if Ireland were to be reconciled to the empire, then it would constitute ‘one of the most fruitful and most glorious achievements of modern statesmanship.’
It was in equally grandiose terms that its terms were received overseas. As the Irish Independent reported, the signing of the Treaty had been greeted with ‘world-wide rejoicing and enthusiasm’. The same newspaper, Ireland’s largest-selling daily, had carried the full text of the ‘Articles of Agreement’ along with photographs of the men who had negotiated it. A poem entitled ‘December 6th, 1921’, heralding the achievement of Treaty was also published, the opening lines of which read:
‘Hail Freedom! Hail the dawn of Liberty!
From seven long centuries of woe and war
Our land once more is ours to make or mar.
The flag of freedom floats in victory
Wrested with little might from tyranny
As mighty as the hosts of conquest are,
Won by a steadfast faith exceeding far
The splendour of all time old chivalry.’
Speaking in Limerick on the same day as this celebratory verse appeared in print, Éamon de Valera suggested that Ireland’s national press was out of touch with popular sentiment. It did not “truly reflect the feelings of the people”, in part, he argued, because unlike those newspapers that had been “suppressed by the enemy” for “remaining faithful to the aspirations of the people”,their editors and proprietors came from the “wrong background” and retained a “residue of the outlook of the past decade”. De Valera returned to this theme on 4 January 1922 in his proclamation to the people of Ireland in which he warned that ‘Influences, more deadly to a nation faced by an enemy than a plague in the ranks of its army, are at work amongst you.’ Here, De Valera acknowledged the widespread appetite for peace while cautioning that the mere repetition of cries for peace would not actually deliver it. The public, he argued, was being betrayed by newspapers determined to stampede them into acceptance of the Treaty. ‘If you had a National Press it would warn you’, de Valera wrote. ‘But your press is the Press that, when the enemy was actively making war upon you, obeyed his dictates and allowed itself to be used in the work of sapping morale from day to day; the Press that during the recent negotiations was quoted in London against the Delegates of the nation when they tried to represent your true aspirations – the Press that last July, when the British proposals were made, would have broken your discipline – the discipline that had brought you safe through every peril, and led a route even then had it dared...’
It was through the medium of this de Valera-derided press that the Irish public followed the drama of the Dáil debates.
At times, however, it didn’t appear that those debates were that dramatic at all. Historic and emotionally charged they may have been, yet reporters struggled to restrain their frustration at their protracted nature, at the repetition of arguments and the poor quality of some of the contributions. The ‘most wearisome debate in history’ was how the Irish Times’ special correspondent referred to them on 5 January. The Irish Independent felt the same. ‘The public used to scoff at the wearisome oratory of the Irish Parliamentary Party at their National Conventions’, the newspaper editorialised, ‘but signs are not wanting that the people are become tired of the numerous and elaborate speeches at the Dáil, especially as many of them have failed wholly to grapple with the realities of the situation. It is about time that the debate was wound up, and a division taken.’ At that point, between private and public sittings, the Dáil had sat for nine days with 53 speeches delivered in the public sittings. ‘Nearly half the members have already spoken. In no deliberative assembly in the world would half the members consider it necessary to speak on any issue.’
The impatience of the press stemmed, in part, from a belief that the will of the people was already evident and that the Dáil’s only job was to give effective voice to that. Why delay when, as the Irish Independent claimed on 4 January 1922, it was ‘an incontrovertible fact that the people are almost unanimously in favour of ratification.’ Press criticism of the seemingly interminable proceedings was in turn picked up in the Dáil and thrown back at the critics. The anti-Treaty TD from Wexford, Seán Etchingham, seized upon phrases used by the Freeman’s Journal – “How long?”, “When will An Dáil cease talking?”, “People are sick of speech-making” – and denounced them as both insulting and an “attack on the Dáil”. However when it came to the Freeman’s Journal, Etchingham’s real gripe – and that of other anti-Treaty TDs – was on the scathing and deeply personal nature of some of the newspaper’s criticisms of de Valera. The Freeman’s Journal was a paper with an “evil history”, Etchingham asserted, adding that he considered its editor guilty of “treason” and someone he would personally like to subject to a “dose of Backwoodsman’s laws”. Instead, though subsequently withdrawn, Etchingham proposed and Mary MacSwiney seconded a motion that the Freeman’s representative be thrown out of the Dáil. What prompted these extraordinary calls was a “series of personal venomous attacks” on de Valera and Erskine Childers. Of the former, the newspaper said that he had ‘not the instinct of an Irishman in his blood’ and of the latter it was claimed that he had ‘won his spurs as a fighter against the South African Republic.’ Pointedly, it was added that Irish people needed to stand up and entrust their fate ‘into the hands of their own countrymen.’ If de Valera and Childers bore the brunt of particularly harsh criticisms, the Freeman’s Journal made it known that they were not isolated figures and readers’ attention was drawn to a list of all TDs who, by their words in the Dáil, had shown their determination to ‘DEFY’ (the newspaper’s emphasis) the people’s will by preventing ratification.
What contribution did the women TDs make to the
debates?
None of the signatures on the Anglo-Irish Treaty document were
those of women and in the two chambers where the agreement was
debated – the House of Commons and Dáil
Éireann – women were very much a minority presence.
Only 5% of the members of the second Dáil were women, six
TDs in all. Every one of them voted against the Treaty. In doing
so, a number of them claimed to be representative of the majority
of Irish women. Speaking on 4 January 1922, Margaret Pearse, TD
for Dublin South and mother of the executed 1916 rebel leader,
declared that she had “been through Ireland for the past few
years and I know the hearts and sorrows of the wives of Ireland. I
have studied them; no one studied them more, and let no one here
say that these women from their hearts could say they accept that
Treaty.”
Margaret Pearse would contribute less to the Treaty debates than the other female TDs. Analysis by Míchael Ó Fathartaigh and Liam Weeks shows that Pearse made only two contributions as against Kathleen Clarke’s five, Dr Ava English’s six and Kate O’Callaghan’s seven. By far the most vocal of the female contributors to the debates were Constance Markievicz with 57 interventions and Mary MacSwiney with 74. The latter’s most memorable contribution came on 21 December 1921 when, as noted earlier, she spoke for two hours and forty minutes, the longest single speech of the entire Treaty debates. Rising to speak at 4.23 she only concluded at 7pm. During that time MacSwiney warned her fellow deputies against placing their blind faith in the judgement of charismatic characters like Michael Collins or in the word of British statesmen like David Lloyd George. She appealed at once to their intelligence and sense of history. “How any Irishman can stand up and say that if you accept that thing from Mr Lloyd George he is going to stick to it, and will tell you you are men of intelligence. Go and read the pages of the history of your country, and then you will go back to consider the Treaty sadder and wiser men.”
Historian Margaret Ward explains why Cumann na mBan rejected the Treaty
As the above remark underscored, MacSwiney was a woman speaking to an overwhelmingly male chamber. She was also, like Margaret Pearse and Kathleen Clarke, a woman with a direct familial link to one of the martyred leaders of the recent revolutionary struggle whose memories were invoked in emotional denunciations of the Treaty. Margaret Pearse expressed the fear that her two dead sons – Patrick and Willie – would haunt her if she lent her support to the Treaty, while Kathleen Clarke recalled for the Dáil the moment she was brought to see her husband, Tom, for the last time before his execution in Kilmainham Gaol. Kathleen Clarke was speaking on 22 December, two days after Finian Lynch, a pro-Treaty Kerry TD, had voiced his displeasure at all the “emotional speeches about the dead” – the charge that anti-Treaty TDs were guided by emotions rather than rational argument was a common complaint of Treaty advocates. As Lynch saw it, “the bones of the dead have been rattled indecently in the face of this assembly.” Of course not all the women TDs could boast close connections by blood or marriage to martyred rebels and not all of them were given to rooting their objections to the Treaty in the sanctification of their sacrifice. Kathleen O’Callaghan claimed that she had been elected by the people of Limerick because of her husband’s murder and she objected to Finian Lynch’s attempt to ‘deny’ her husband’s devotion to the republic. Yet O’Callaghan stated that her opposition to the Treaty was not motivated solely by personal loss and that her political convictions were not a mere extension of those of her dead husband. Women, she insisted, exercised political influence of their own.
“No woman in this Dáil is going to give her vote merely because she is warped by a deep personal loss. The women of Ireland so far have not appeared much on the political stage. That does not mean that they have no deep convictions about Ireland's status and freedom. It was the mother of the Pearses who made them what they were. The sister of Terence MacSwiney influenced her brother, and is now carrying on his life's work. Deputy Mrs Clarke, the widow of Tom Clarke, was bred in the Fenian household of her uncle, John Daly of Limerick. The women of An Dáil are women of character, and they will vote for principle, not for expediency. For myself, since girlhood I have been a Separatist. I wanted, and I want, an independent Ireland, an Ireland independent of the British Empire, and I can assure you that my life in Limerick during 1920, culminating in the murder of my husband last March – my life and that event have not converted me to Dominion status within the British Empire.”
If the women TDs who spoke and voted against the Treaty could not exactly claim to represent the women of Ireland, they could certainly speak and vote for the majority of the women of Cumann na mBan. Just under a month after the Dáil had voted on the issue, the female auxillary of the IRA held a special convention in Dublin. Of those in attendance, 86% – 419 to 63 – voted to reject the Treaty that Dáil Éireann had by then endorsed.
VIEW: Portraits and Pamphlets – A Cumann na mBan Photo essay
Did the Christmas break impact on the outcome of the
debates?
The Dáil debates on the Anglo-Irish treaty divided between
those held pre-Christmas in December 1921 and those held
post-Christmas in January 1922. In between, there was a recess
when many TDs who had secured their seats in uncontested elections
returned to their constituents. There, as historian J.J. Lee has
observed, quite a number of them ‘found themselves facing
their constituents for virtually the first time’.
Before breaking for the recess, de Valera had stressed the necessity for “common agreement that there will be no speech-making” over the Christmas period by members of the Dáil. Did all TDs adhere to this no-speech injunction? It is difficult to say for certain. What is nevertheless clear is that they met and talked with their constituents and gauged local responses to the Treaty. Indeed, on returning to the Dái in early January 1922, a number of TDs spoke of the conversations they had and the public mood they had detected. J.J. Walsh felt sufficiently confident to declare to the Dáil that nine-tenths of the people of his native Cork City were in favour of ratification of the Treaty. As if to reinforce his point, Walsh referred to a conversation with a prominent figure in Cork who remarked of meeting not a single human-being in Cork City who was opposed to the Treaty. Yet the four TDs for Cork City would end up splitting evenly on the Treaty vote, two for and two against. J.J. Walsh’s Christmas encounters in Cork stood in stark contrast to those of Dr James Ryan in Wexford. “I was five days in County Wexford [over the recess] and I never met a person who was in favour of the Treaty”, Ryan informed the Dáil on 7 January, though he had wherewithal to caution that his own personal experience “might not fully or fairly represent the feelings of the people.” When it came down the vote, three of four TDs for the Wexford constituency would oppose the Treaty.
In the cases of both Walsh and Ryan it is hard to escape the impression that both TDs were recounting for the Dáil partial recess experiences that conveniently accorded with their own their political positions on the Treaty. It was nevertheless significant that both attempted to summon the sense of a predominant popular mood that was at odds with the narrowness of the division in the Dáil.
There were of course various ways to gauge that popular mood and the influences that bore upon them. While newspapers would have been one of those influences, so too would the Catholic Church and several bishops used their pulpit-delivered Christmas Day messages to beat the drum for acceptance of the Treaty. To do otherwise, Dr Michael Fogarty, Bishop of Killaloe, told worshippers at Ennis Cathedral, would be an “act of National madness”. At the same time in Cobh Cathedral, Dr Michael Browne, was telling Christmas day mass-goers that it was up to their representatives to give voice to the convictions of the majority of their constituents and that the choice facing those representatives was one of returning to the “tyranny, bondage, and slavery which our forefathers suffered” or becoming a “Free State with own Parliament invested with full power to rule Ireland for Ireland’s welfare”.
Outside of the churches and cathedrals an array of public bodies – local authorities, Sinn Féin clubs, labour bodies, county farmers’ associations, Boards of Guardians etc – were making choices of their own. They held meetings and passed resolutions on the Treaty that were dutifully reported in the newspapers that kept scorecards on how rival arguments were faring. Overwhelmingly, these resolutions sided in favour of Treaty ratification. So much so that on the morning of the decisive vote in the Dáil it was reported that of 361 elected and other bodies, all but 14 had declared in support of the Treaty.
On that very day, 7 January 1922, P.J. Ward, TD for Donegal, told the Dáil that there were 24 Sinn Féin clubs in his constituency and over the Christmas period everyone of them had met to debate the Treaty. Of these clubs, he noted that 17 voted for acceptance and three for rejection (no account was given of the other four). However, Ward explained that the vast majority of those clubs recommending ratification had done so “under protest” and because they “could see no alternative”. Still, Ward took this as the voice of his constituents and he was prepared to heed it. He confessed that he had been “opposed to the Treaty up to Christmas” and still had no liking for it, but he was he prepared to give it his reluctant backing on the basis that it would provide the “stepping stone” that Collins had earlier indicated it would be.
P.J. Ward was not alone in having his mind changed and his vote swayed over the Christmas break. Dan O’Rourke, a Roscommon-based TD and future President of the GAA, confessed that he too would have opposed the Treaty had a vote been called before the Christmas recess. So what happened to make him change tack?
“I returned to my constituency at Christmas and I went there to the people – not the resolution passers – to the people who had been with me in the fight, the people whose opinion I valued, the people who are, I believe, Die-Hards; and I consulted them about this question and I must say that unanimously they said to me that there was no alternative but to accept the Treaty. Everything that is personal in me is against this Treaty; I yield to no man in my hatred of British oppression, and in my opposition to any symbol of British rule in Ireland; but I say I would be acting an impertinent part by putting my own views and opinions against the views of my best friends, the men who are the best fighters with me.”
Every instinct that Dan O’Rourke possessed urged his rejection of the Treaty – its compromises, the fact that it had been signed and sealed by the plenipotentiaries before being sent back to Dublin, and the schisms it had created within the separatist movement. Nevertheless, he voted for its ratification on listening to those in his locality in whom he trusted and to avoid, he said, “driving the young men of the country, and all the country, into war” for he knew, he added with effect, what war meant.
So, was the outcome of the Treaty debates ever in
doubt?
Yes.
As well listing the views of public bodies on the Treaty, the national daily newspapers kept a running total on TD numbers that had spoken for and against the Treaty during the Dáil’s public sessions. Despite the appearance that Dáil opinion had been moving in favour of ratification of the Treaty, on the morning of the decisive vote, there was still uncertainty as to how that vote would ultimately play out. The Irish Independent’s political correspondent referred to an anti-Treaty TD from Cork who acknowledged that the general view for weeks had been that the Treaty would pass by a margin of about 68 to 54. However, that expectation had since changed. Now, the un-named Cork TD anticipated that the anti-Treaty side would poll only about half of all votes. The final result, he said, would be decided by to 4 to 5 “unknown quantities” – the few Dáil members that had by then not fully committed to either side.
Joseph McGrath, one of the whips of the pro-Treaty side, was convinced his side was set to lose. “There is no doubt at this moment, so far as I can ascertain, that the Treaty will be rejected.” McGrath also pointed to “doubtful voters”. There were, he estimated, about six of them, though he understood that the majority of them would be more inclined to vote against the Treaty. If they did, he continued, it would “mean rejection by a small majority of a couple of votes.”
The volatility of the situation can be seen in the contributions of P.J. Ward and Dan O’Rourke. In addition, as late 6 January, it was being reported that Dr Patrick McCartan, TD for Leix-Offaly, would not vote (he eventually gave the Treaty his reluctant backing) and that P.J. Moloney from Tipperary and Frank Fahy in Galway were ‘somewhat indefinite’ (both would vote against ratification). Then there was Frank Drohan, TD for Waterford and Tipperary East and Mayor of Clonmel, who resigned rather than cast a vote on the Treaty. Drohan refused to vote against ratification on the grounds it would have flouted the will of his constituents. There was also a last ditch effort to repair the rift between the two sides when an ‘unofficial backbench committee’ representing both sides of the argument agreed a document which would have allowed for the Treaty to pass without direct opposition while permitting Éamon de Valera remain in position as President of the Dáil, to which the provisional government would be responsible. According to his biographer, David McCullagh, these efforts ‘foundered on de Valera’s obduracy’. Indeed, for all the concerns about the preservation of unity, the final day of the debates saw some of the bitterest exchanges of all. Unable to let sit an Arthur Griffith reference to Michael Collins being “the man who won the war”, Cathal Brugha wished to correct the record and belittle Collins’s contribution – he was, Brugha insisted, no more than a “subordinate in the Department of Defence”. To cries of “Shame” in the chamber, Brugha jealously added that Collins alone had been “specially selected by the Press and the people to put him into a position which he never held; he was made a romantic figure, a mystical character such as this person certainly is not”. The Irish Times described Brugha’s performance as an ‘extraordinary object lesson in psychology’ as he ‘hardly showed a trace of feeling of any kind during his long speech.’ Rather than win crucial votes, it has been speculated that Brugha’s contribution may even have cost them to the anti-Treaty side.
It was left to Arthur Griffith, the chairman of the Irish delegation that had negotiated the Treaty, to wrap up the case for its acceptance. Griffith made clear that the plenipotentiaries had been sent to London to “make some compromise, bargain or arrangement” and not to demand a Republic. Had they attempted to do so the negotiations would have been over before they had even begun. The Treaty, Griffith confessed, could indeed have been better but look what it had done. It had “driven the British Army into the sea” and given Irish people the “chance to live their lives in their own country and take their place amongst the nations of the Europe.”
What was the result of the Treaty vote and what happened in its
aftermath?
The debate on the Treaty ended with a roll-call vote. Each TD was
entitled to one vote, which meant that some constituencies would
be effectively disenfranchised as Collins, de Valera, Griffith,
MacNeill and Milroy all represented more than one constituency.
There were also four TDs who didn’t vote at all. The chair of the debates had been the pro-Treaty Prof. Eoin MacNeill who had let it be known that he would only cast a vote in the event of a deadlock. Frank Drohan, as mentioned already, had opted to resign rather than vote against his constituents wishes, while Tom Kelly – pro-Treaty – was absent through illness and the anti-Treaty Laurence Ginnell was in South America where he was serving as an Irish representative.
That left 121 relatively young TDs – their average age was 38 – to decide the fate of the Treaty. When their votes were called and counted at 8pm on 7 January 1922, 64 gave their approval for ratification of the Treaty with 57 against, a slim margin of 7 votes.
There was little sign of, or reason for, jubilation at the result. Michael Collins stressed that the result did not represent “any kind of triumph over the other side” and impressed the need for unity and for the preservation of public safety. Mary MacSwiney, however, was in no mood for conciliation. The vote, MacSwiney asserted, was “the grossest act of betrayal that Ireland ever endured.” De Valera, whom Collins was careful to laud in his post-vote remarks (“he has exactly the same position in my heart now as he always had”), asked that those who had sided with the “established Republic” would come together the following day at the Mansion House. But the official record of the debates revealed the personal toll that the debates had taken on a personality so accustomed to unquestioned deference. “I would like my last word here to be this”, de Valera said. “We have had a glorious record for four years; it has been four years of magnificent discipline in our nation. The world is looking at us now – (The President here breaks down)."
According to Frank Gallagher’s account of the same scene, de Valera put his head in his hands as he broke down in tears. And he was not alone.
Century Ireland News headlines from the first fortnight of 1921. Produced with the assistance of RTÉ News
The Dáil adjourned at 8.50pm on 7 January 1922 and reconvened on 9 January 1922. When it did de Valera announced his resignation as President of Dáil Éireann only to put himself for re-election to the same position immediately after. But to elect de Valera now, just two days after the Dáil had given its imprimatur to the Treaty, would, Collins argued, turn the Dail into a “laughing stock”. How could the Dáil give its backing to the leading opponent of a document it had just ratified? Surely a vote for de Valera, notwithstanding his pledge not to “actively interfere” with its implementation, would have effectively undermined, if not nullified completely, the recently-approved Treaty? Collins had proposed a joint committee to ensure public safety on the grounds that nobody wished to oppose de Valera. However, once de Valera had pushed for a vote for a new executive, oppose him they would. The proposal to re-elect de Valera as “President of the Irish Republic” was defeated by margin of only two votes, 60 to 58. Among the TDs to vote for de Valera was Robert Barton, a reluctant signatory of the Treaty.
The following day, on 10 January 1922, Arthur Griffith was elected as de Valera’s successor. Before he was, de Valera led a walk-out of his supporters from the Dáil in protest “against the election as President of the Irish Republic of the Chairman of the Delegation, who is bound by the treaty conditions to set up a State which is to subvert the Republic, and who, in the interim period, instead of using the office as it should be used – to support the Republic – will, of necessity, have to be taking action which will lead to its destruction.” De Valera’s supporters did not exit quietly and insults were traded by the opposing sides. An angered Michael Collins labelled them “Deserters all” and “Deserters to the Irish nation in her hour of trial”. David Kent shrieked “Up the Republic” and the departing Constance Markievicz let fly with “Oath breakers and cowards” and “Lloyd Georgeites”. When calm was restored the shrunken gathering elected its new president and a core team ministers. Only three former ministers remained in the cabinet. Griffith was one. The others were Collins and William T. Cosgrave, who retained the portfolios of Finance and Local Government respectively. Gone with de Valera were Cathal Brugha, Austin Stack and Robert Barton and in their place came Richard Mulcahy, theretofore Chief of Staff of the IRA, as the new Minister for Defence; George Gavan Duffy as Minister for Foreign Affairs; Eamonn Duggan as Minister for Home Affairs; and Kevin O’Higins as Minister for Economic Affairs.
The appointment of a new cabinet formalised the divide the Treaty debates had already helped expose. It emphasised, too, the sundering of a unity that had marked the rise of Sinn Féin up to the signing of the Treaty in London in December 1921. This rupture in turn set in train a series of events that would lead ultimately, if not inevitably, to a bitter and destructive civil war that would leave a deep and defining impression on the political culture of the incipient Irish Free State. In time, at least for the 26 counties, the Treaty would act as the “stepping stone” to full independence its proponents hoped it would but the messy out-workings of the Boundary Commission meant the entrenching of the partition divide between north and south.
Mark Duncan is a Director of Century Ireland.
