Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 20 January 2022

Journeys to a Free State: Mary MacSwiney Speaks

Last week’s column highlighted the Treaty vote that was taken and the intervention of Cork TD Mary MacSwiney expressing her disappointment and full support for the ideals of Éamon de Valera. Mary MacSwiney was one of the earliest speakers to take the floor on the Treaty debate. She intervened just after the vote on 7 January and remained vocally against the Treaty for years to come. She first took the floor on Wednesday 21 December 1921. A transcript of her passionate, very detailed, well thought out, articulate and highly frank intervention comes to over 15,500 words. She spoke at length for two hours and forty minutes. The full speech can be viewed under Treaty debates at Oireachtas.ie.

Mary’s speech expressing her opinions varied across a range of topics, from noting the Treaty was just like creating a renewed Act of Union to not trusting the Westminster administration, to the Treaty being a betrayal of the principles of Irish Republicanism, to being highly critical of the oath and the role of the Governor General. A case can be made that her speech galvanised the more die-hard Republican side of Dáil Éireann in voting against the Treaty. Certainly, the points she makes are almost like a manifesto for the Republican cause. Her points were raised by others against the Treaty – not in the same level of detail – as the Treaty debate evolved and concluded in early January 1921.

Mary opened her speech by commenting on the idea that the ratification of the Treaty document would create a quasi-Grattan’s Parliament or a Home Rule situation, something that would not represent everyone from north to south and was not total freedom. She argued that such a parliament was not a parliament of the people. She noted: “Grattan’s Parliament was a Parliament representing, or supposed to be representing, only one-fifth of the people of Ireland, and even then, by means of undemocratic elections. It did not faithfully represent even 20 per cent of the Irish people”.

A second core point made by Mary was that in her opinion those in the Dáil chamber were there on the will of the people expressed in a vote in December 1918 – that the assembly was elected on a Republican cause. She noted: “Therefore, this assembly is not, as has been already pointed out, competent to deal with the matter at all. We are not the Members elected to sit in the Parliament of Southern Ireland. We are the Members elected to sit in the assembly of the Irish Republic”.

At times in Mary’s speech, it could be argued that she crossed the line in calling Deputies and the Westminster government out. On Prime Minster Lloyd George, she articulates that he cannot be trusted. She notes: “As far as we in Ireland are concerned, the office which he holds never has been an honourable office, but in his own country it is supposed to be so. And never has a more unscrupulous scoundrel sat in the seats of the mighty than Lloyd George. There is no Government in Europe that trusts his word”.

On the First World War, she regretted that Irish citizens took a part in it and noted that Ireland was led to approve the war. She notes: “The country was stampeded into approval of the war. I was in England when the war broke out. I could not tell you the anguish of souls I experienced when I came home and walked down the streets of Dublin and of Cork and saw the friends of my lifetime sporting the Union Jack…we were not British by the act of our own people. Even then we had not declared common citizenship, with fidelity to the King of England”.

Following her thoughts on the First World War, she noted that the 1916 Easter Rising stood out in the annals of the world. She noted: “A small minority of the people of Ireland realised that they had to strike, and strike at once, that if they waited for the war to be over England would have her countless legions turned against us. They decided on rising; that rising was largely rendered futile by the acts of people at the last moment who tried to stop it. Yet the battle was fought, and Easter Week, 1916, stands out in the annals of the world”.

On the Articles of Agreement/ Treay, Mary argues that the document will not create peace and that unity alone can bring peace. She notes: “The men with the stake in the country know perfectly well that as long as we Republicans stand out and say this is not peace, and it will not make peace, there will be no peace, and the men with the stake in the country will know perfectly well that unity alone can defeat this awful breach now”.

Mary was also critical of the idea that the Irish delegation to the Treaty negotiations were unable to put in amendments – that the threat of war hung over the proceedings; She expressed the viewpoint: “It is the sympathy of the world and the judgment and conscience of the world that brought England to her knees in these negotiations. She has the military. I know that, but she cannot win this battle, for if she exterminates the men, the women will take their places, and, if she exterminates the women, the children are rising fast…Therefore our fight to-day has a chance of victory. You have told us it is between the acceptance of that document and war. If it were, with every sense of deep responsibility, I say then let us take war”.

Mary touched upon a range of other topics also but ultimately concluded her speech with an appeal for the Treaty to be rejected: “I pray that we will stand together, and the country will stand behind us. I have no doubt of that. I know the women of Ireland, and I know what they will say to the men that want to surrender, and therefore I beg of you to take the decision to throw out that Treaty. Register your votes against it, and do not commit the one unforgivable crime that has ever been committed by the representatives of the people of Ireland”.

Cork TD Mary MacSwiney’s full speech can be read at www.oireachtas.ie/en/debate/dail/1921-12-21/2/

Missed one of the 51 columns in 2021, check out the indices at Kieran’s heritage website, www.corkheritage.ie

Caption:

1134a. Mary MacSwiney (centre) entering the Treaty debate buildings at Dublin’s University Buildings, Earlsfort Terrace, late December 1921 (picture: Hogan collection, National Library of Ireland).

Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 9 December 2021

Journeys to a Truce: A Provisional Treaty is Signed

The first memo to the public was a short one on the outcome of the talks of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. It was hurriedly penned by Arthur Griffith, and issued to the world press directly after signing the Treaty on 6 December. It reads: “I have signed a Treaty of peace between Ireland and Great Britain. I believe that treaty will lay foundations of peace and friendship between the two Nations. What I have signed I shall stand by in the belief that the end of the conflict of centuries is at hand”.

It was a long and highly pressurised journey to an agreement for both sides. The threat of renewed violence hung over the signatories. The Treaty negotiations began in London on 11 October 1921. The British team was led by seasoned politicians Lloyd George and included Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.

The Irish team was chaired by Minister for Foreign Affairs Arthur Griffith, after de Valera decided to stay in Ireland for strategic reasons. Arthur had established Sinn Féin in 1905 and nationally brought the party to the pinnacle of success in elections in 1920. Arthur was substitute president of Dáil Éireann for most of the War of Independence while de Valera was in America. With Arthur in London were Minister for Economic Affairs, Robert Barton and Minister for Finance Michael Collins. The other two Irish negotiators were solicitor Éamonn Duggan TD and Charles Gavan Duffy TD, a barrister and Dáil Éireann’s representative in Rome. The Dáil and de Valera described these representatives as ‘plenipotentiaries’, from the Latin for someone invested with full authority.

Over the seven weeks of negotiations, regional newspapers across the country reported on the tense negotiations and what was at stake between the two sides. The challenge of North Ireland and its historic loyalist base echoed throughout the myriad of news stories.

The discussions concluded in the early morning of 6 December 1921 with the signatures, by British and Irish negotiators, of ‘Articles of Agreement’ – better known as the Anglo-Irish Treaty (or the Treaty). The deal, as signed, was provisional, on consent in London’s Westminster and in Dublin’s Dáil Éireann.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty is a short document. It commences by declaring that the Irish Free State shall have the same constitutional status as the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa. This was a higher status than the previously sought ‘Home Rule’ for Ireland, and an achievement that was unimaginable when Sinn Féin was founded sixteen years earlier. The representative of the king in Ireland would be appointed in the same way as the governor-general of Canada.

Under the Treaty, Ireland also remained in the British Empire. For the first time in an official UK document the term ‘Commonwealth’ was used as an alternative to ‘Empire’. The final agreement did not require Dáil deputies to swear an ‘oath of allegiance’ to the king. The oath of allegiance was to the Constitution of the Irish Free State, with an oath of faithfulness to the monarch. Nevertheless, any oath to the king in any shape or form offended many Dáil deputies in their initial thoughts to the press.

The Treaty also gave the new state financial freedom, although the Irish agreed to pay a fair share of existing UK public debt.

Until the Irish Free State could undertake its own coastal defence, article six ensured that British forces were responsible for the defence by sea of Britain and Ireland. The Free State was also to let Britain use certain named harbours and other facilities. Initial thoughts by some Dáil deputies resented that Britain would retain ‘the Treaty ports’ of Cobh (then ‘Queenstown’), Berehaven and Lough Swilly. The issue of the Treaty ports was important because it made Irish neutrality quite impractical if not impossible in the event of war.

The Irish Free State agreed to pay fair compensation to public servants who were discharged or who retired because the change of government was not to their liking. This ‘article’ did not apply to the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans.

The Treaty gave Northern Ireland the right to opt out of the new Irish state; if it did so, however, a boundary commission was to be set up to “determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants […] the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland”. Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins believed that this would transfer counties Tyrone and Fermanagh to the Free State. But the procedure was a major sticking point for many Dáil deputies in their initial thoughts to the press. Even after 1922, however, the Boundary Commission never worked as they had hoped, and the border remained unchanged.

Overall, though in the days that followed the signing on 6 December, the Irish negotiators though not happy with the terms, were told by Lloyd George that non-acceptance would lead to a resumption of the war, which, at the point the Truce was called, was being lost by the IRA. The delegation recommended the Treaty to Dáil Éireann.

In those early days post the signing, a minority of Dáil deputies, including its president, Éamon de Valera, maintained that the Treaty did not go far enough and that the new state must be a republic outside the Empire (although perhaps associated with the Commonwealth externally). Some thought that fighting should resume, in an effort to force Northern Ireland into an all-island state. For others, an Irish Republic already existed and acceptance of the Treaty would substitute this with something less and accepting the Treaty meant voluntarily going ‘into the Empire’ for the first time.

The majority of deputies argued that the Treaty was a stepping-stone to greater independence. Between the signing of the agreement in December 1921 and its ratification in early January 1922 a series of progressively bitter debates occurred in Dáil Éireann.

Caption:

1129a. An artist at the Illustrated London News captured the British and Irish Treaty negotiation teams at work (source: Illustrated London News, December 1921).