The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (126 page)

None of this reconciled De Valera, who immediately repudiated the pact, or die-hard Tories, particularly the Orangemen, to whom the Free State was anathema. Ulster’s Unionists were furious at the government for even holding conversations with the men from Eire. Carson charged that Northern Ireland had been used as a “puppet” in a “political game.” He denounced each of the ministers in turn, coming down particularly hard on Curzon, who, he felt, had betrayed him. Churchill rose the following day to defend the treaty. He pointed to “a remarkable phenomenon.” Yesterday Curzon, who had signed it, had been damned by Carson “with brilliant and corrosive invective” as a traitor to Britain. In Dublin, at that hour, De Valera had been excoriating Collins “for a similar offence.” Churchill asked: “Are we not getting a little tired of all this? These absolutely sincere, consistent, unswerving gentlemen, faithful in all circumstances to their implacable quarrels, seek to mount their respective national war horses, in person or by proxy, and to drive at full tilt at one another, shattering and splintering down the lists, to the indescribable misery of the common people and to the utter confusion of our Imperial affairs.” The rest of the United Kingdom was ready, if they were not, to close the door on the “grim, grave, and in many cases, shocking realities” of the past. “Ireland,” he said, “is not a daughter State. She is a parent nation. The Irish are an ancient race. Intermingled with the whole life of the Empire,” they were needed to sustain it, particularly in its new acquisitions. The time had come, indeed it was past time, to resolve the island’s internal quarrel: “If we can free ourselves from it, if we can to some extent reconcile the spirit of the Irish nation to the British Empire in the same way that Scotland and Wales have been reconciled, then indeed we shall have secured advantages which may well repay the trouble and the uncertainties of the present time.”
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The House, convinced, swiftly ratified the agreement. Across St. George’s Channel, however, De Valera remained intractable. Dominion status and, particularly, taking the hated oath were unacceptable to him. He would settle for nothing less than a republic. The Sinn Féin split on the issue—a schism mirrored today in Eire’s two major parties, the Fianna Fáil and the Fine Gael—but the men elected to the Dáil took their seats. Griffith and Collins persuaded a majority that these were the best terms they could get, and on January 9, 1922, they approved the Free State treaty by a slim margin, 64 to 57. De Valera resigned, sought reelection, and lost by an even thinner margin, 60 to 58. Griffith replaced him, with Collins elected chairman of a provisional government which would serve until the next general election, to be held as soon as possible. “So Ireland has decided!” a friend in Cairo wrote Churchill. “Now I hope we shall not leave a soldier or penny there & we shall see some pretty doings!” Winston could not be so gay. At Lloyd George’s request, he now moved to stage center, guiding legislation transferring powers to Dublin through the House, and becoming “a principal,” in his words, “in British-Irish affairs.” During the interim he would be responsible to three constituencies, in Parliament Square, O’Connell Street, and Ulster Hall. He assured the House: “We have not given complete Dominion Home Rule. There are special reservations in this Treaty.” The situation across St. George’s Channel was even more delicate. At Christmas he had said: “Should the Dáil ratify, the first step should be to get an Irish delegation… over here at the earliest moment.” But priorities had shifted. The overriding question now was the survival of the Griffith-Collins government. De Valera had gone underground again and plunged the Free State into civil war. Homes were again being burned, trucks hijacked, warehouses emptied, trains destroyed, and bridges and viaducts blown up. “Traitors to the republic” were being “executed” by IRA veterans whom De Valera had christened his “Irregulars.” On the last day of March, when the Free State bill became law, a column of Irregulars swept through Dublin, killing a Protestant policeman and four Catholics and wounding three Catholic children. De Valera declared that both the Dublin and Belfast governments were illegitimate. Thugs prevented Collins from addressing a crowd in county Mayo. Sir Henry Wilson wrote on April 3: “Valera is daily strengthening, & Collins daily weakening. Collins at Castlebar was ordered to stop speaking and obeyed! We are coming near the Republic.”
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In the House, Wilson, who was retiring as chief of the general staff to become Northern Ireland’s chief defense adviser, had become the new spokesman of Ulster’s MPs. He and Churchill dueled hotly. Wilson ridiculed the very idea of self-government in southern Ireland. Winston said: “It is, I think, too soon to mock or jeer. Two months ago it was too soon to rejoice. It is still too soon to lament.” Macready wrote from Dublin Castle: “The optimistic imagination of Mr Winston Churchill, that the acceptance of the treaty would result in cessation of disturbance and a loyal interpretation of its terms, is by no means shared by the Crown forces in Ireland.” Actually, Winston’s private thoughts were far from optimistic. He told Clementine: “The Irish position seems very dark and troubled.” He wrote Collins and Griffith, complimenting them on “the spirit and personal courage which you have constantly shown in confronting the enemies of free speech and fair play,” and he began shipping guns and ammunition to Free State forces in Clare, Sligo, Athlone, and Dublin. Collins, crossing to London, submitted grievances about troublemakers entering the Free State from Ulster. Churchill was already negotiating countless questions of border demarcation with Belfast, trying, as he told the House, to free England “from the terrible curse of this long internal Irish quarrel.” In a confidential note to Alfred Cope, the assistant under secretary for Ireland, he asked: “Do you think there is any fighting quality in the Free State Government? Will anybody die for it or kill for it?” In dealing with Irish politicians, he had learned, tact was a prerequisite. His customary broadsword would not do. The cabinet instructed him to send Collins a formal note expressing its concern over the confusion in Eire. “Instead of this,” he wrote Collins, knowing that formality would strike the wrong note, “I write to you man to man.” Again and again Wilson and his followers tried to shake his confidence in the Irish signers of the treaty. In the House one of them asked him “whether the British authorities in Ireland have evidence of some forty-one orders for assassination which were signed by Mr Michael Collins.” Winston snapped: “No sir, and I regret that the hon[orable] Gentleman should have placed such a question.” Trust in Collins and Griffith was an absolute necessity; it was that or land a British army, which at the moment did not exist, on Free State soil. Winston knew his political situation was shaky. The Conservatives, out of power for sixteen years, had become reckless and irresponsible. Liberals and Labour MPs, as he wrote in
The Aftermath,
“watched with tender solicitude” while he fought for implementing legislation, trying to “nurse into being” a strong Belfast government.
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He pushed Collins as hard as he could. Learning that IRA men of all convictions were planning to meet, and that they would consider renunciation of the treaty, he put him on notice: “An adverse decision by the convention of the Irish Republican Army (so-called) would… be a very grave event at the present juncture. I presume that you are quite sure there is no danger of this.” In reality Collins could be quite sure of very little. A band of Irregulars had occupied Dublin’s Four Courts—its law buildings—and he hadn’t ordered them evicted because he wasn’t certain he would be obeyed. On May 20 startling news reached the Colonial Office from one of Winston’s friends in Dublin. Collins and De Valera had met on neutral ground and signed a pact, agreeing that Free State men would have sixty-four seats in the new Dáil and the Irregulars fifty-seven, thus preserving the existing ratio, and that after the election Eire would be governed by a coalition of five Free Staters and four Irregulars. “The Irish masses,” Churchill tartly wrote afterward, “just like the Russians two or three years before, were not to be allowed a voice in their fate.” Churchill’s informant had told him that Collins was beginning to have doubts about the agreement, however, and a confrontation might “make him break down.” Winston wrote Collins: “I had better let you know at once… that as far as we are concerned in this country, we should certainly not be able to regard any such arrangement as a basis on which we could build.”
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Half abashed and half mutinous, Collins arrived in London with Griffith and William Cosgrave, another Free State leader, and tried to explain the inexplicable: that in Ireland’s present chaos, any measure, however makeshift, was preferable to ravagement and slaughter. But Churchill had no time for them just then. He was rushing to the House to battle their real English adversaries. At No. 10 the three Irishmen were given tickets to the Strangers’ Gallery, and they watched his fight from there.

Hardly had he reached the Treasury Bench when Sir Henry Wilson challenged him. What, he asked angrily, were the British troops in Dublin doing? “They are not there to keep order,” he answered himself, “because they are not allowed to keep order.” Winston tried to speak, but Wilson overrode him, shouting another question: Were not the colonial secretary’s reports to the House “from end to end an admission that every single development of the Irish problem has been miscalculated?” In replying, Churchill reassumed a fighting stance. His militant moves to suppress the Curragh mutiny eight years earlier were, he knew, remembered by almost all the MPs present. Now he had to convince them that he could be as stern with Eire as he had been with Ulster then. He said: “We shall not under any circumstances agree to deviate from the Treaty either in the strict letter or the honest spirit.” Should an Irish coalition attempt to destroy it “by setting up a Republic, it would be the intention of the Government to hold Dublin as one of the preliminary and essential steps in military operations.” He was confident he could mobilize enough veterans of the trenches to hold the city. Shipments of munitions to the provisional government had been stopped, he said, to avoid the possibility that they might be used later against Englishmen. The outcome of the election, now scheduled for June 16, would go far toward clarifying the situation. Wilson, unreassured, lashed back: “The Colonial Secretary says we can wait. Can we? All this time murders are going on at the rate of… six or seven a day.” Winston demurred: “I think there were only three or four murders in southern Ireland in the last ten days. The number has been larger in Northern Ireland.” Wilson pressed him again: “My point is, can you wait while men are murdered like that?”
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I
t was not only men, of course. After the House rose Collins showed Winston a photograph of an entire family of Catholics, the McMahons, who had just been massacred in Ulster. According to Frank O’Connor, Collins’s biographer, “Churchill wept.” The Troubles were worsening. The Free State’s provisional government was losing control of the country. Collins acknowledged it, and said he understood Churchill’s threat to draw England’s sword. De Valera was defiant: “Mr. Churchill’s threats do not affect us. We deny the right of any English authority to prescribe what an Irishman shall or shall not do.” But Churchill wrote Clementine: “Our position is a vy strong one, so long as we adhere to the Treaty. And Ulster’s position is a vy strong one so long as she respects the law. I have made it clear I will defend or conceal no irregularities of any kind. I will expose them coldly to Parliament whoever is guilty. We must not get back into that hideous bog of reprisals, from which we have saved ourselves.”
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All through that spring the horrors of internecine strife clotted in suffering Eire. Hemorrhaging within as IRA Irregulars fought the Free State, its battered people faced the growing possibility of intervention by Britons and Orangemen. The frontier disputes loomed ever larger. Lloyd George wrote Churchill that he had conducted the negotiations with “skill and patience,” but he was “profoundly disquieted by the developments on the Ulster border. We are not merely being rushed into a conflict, but we are gradually being manoeuvered into giving battle on the very worst grounds which could possibly be chosen for the struggle. I cannot say whether Henry Wilson and de Valera are behind this but if they are their strategy is very skillful.” He suspected the Orangemen of planning to incite violence and warned against encouraging them to believe they might be reinforced by Englishmen: “We have surely done everything that Ulster can possibly expect to ensure its security.” Churchill agreed, but he pointed out that Belfast’s fears were not entirely unjustified. He could not discount the danger that the factions in southern Ireland might unite to invade the smaller state in the north. During one of Collins’s calls at the Colonial Office, Winston told him that “if any part of the Irish Republican Army, either pro-Treaty or anti-Treaty, invaded Northern soil, we would throw them out.” In point of fact he contemplated the use, not of troops, but of warships. In a memorandum he wrote: “The effect of a blockade would not starve the Irish people, but it would at a stroke ruin their prosperity. Out of 205 millions exported from Ireland last year, 203 were purchased by Great Britain. This fact alone is decisive.”
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