Michael Collins (Irish Leader) - Anglo-Irish Treaty

Anglo-Irish Treaty

The majority of the Irish Treaty delegates including Arthur Griffith (leader), Robert Barton and Eamonn Duggan (with Robert Erskine Childers as Secretary General to the delegation) set up headquarters at 22 Hans Place in Knightsbridge on 11 October 1921 and resided there until conclusion of the negotiations in December. Collins took up separate quarters at 15 Cadogan Gardens. His personal staff included Liam Tobin, Ned Broy and Joe McGrath. Collins himself protested his appointment as envoy plenipotentiary, as he was not a statesman and his revelation to the British (he had previously kept his public presence to a minimum) would reduce his effectiveness as a guerilla leader should hostilities resume.

The negotiations ultimately resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty which was signed on 6 December 1921, which envisaged a new Irish state, to be named the "Irish Free State" (a literal translation from the Irish language term Saorstát Éireann), which appeared on the letterhead de Valera used, though de Valera had translated it less literally as the Irish Republic. "Saorstat Eireann" was, in fact, the title used for the Irish Republic in the proclamation of the provisional government in 1916.

The treaty provided for a possible all-Ireland state, subject to the right of a six-county region in the northeast to opt out of the Free State. If this happened, an Irish Boundary Commission was to be established to redraw the Irish border, which Collins expected would so reduce the size of Northern Ireland as to make it economically unviable, thus enabling unity, as most of the unionist population was concentrated in a relatively small area in eastern Ulster. The Irish Free State was established in December 1922, and as expected, Northern Ireland exercised its option to remain part of the United Kingdom proper.

The new state was to be a Dominion, with a bicameral parliament, executive authority vested in the king but exercised by an Irish government elected by a lower house called Dáil Éireann (translated this time as "Chamber of Deputies"), an independent courts system, and a level of internal independence that far exceeded anything sought by Charles Stewart Parnell or his Irish Parliamentary Party.

While it fell short of the republic that he'd originally fought to create, Collins concluded that the Treaty offered Ireland "the freedom to achieve freedom." Nonetheless, he knew that the treaty, and in particular the issue of partition, would not be well received in Ireland. Upon signing the treaty, F. E. Smith, 1st Viscount Birkenhead remarked "I may have signed my political death warrant tonight", to which Collins replied "I may have signed my actual death warrant".

Republican purists saw it as a sell-out, with the replacement of the republic by dominion status within the British Empire, and an Oath of Allegiance made (it was then claimed) directly to the King. The actual wording shows that the oath was made to the Irish Free State, with a subsidiary oath of fidelity to the King as part of the Treaty settlement, not to the king unilaterally.

Sinn Féin split over the treaty, and the Dáil debated the matter bitterly for ten days until it was approved by a vote of 64 to 57. The Supreme Council of the IRB, which had been kept informed in detail about every facet of the Treaty negotiations and which had approved many of its provisions, voted unanimously to accept the Treaty, with the single notable exception of later COS of the IRA Liam Lynch. De Valera joined the anti-treaty faction opposing the concessions. His opponents charged that he had prior knowledge that the crown would have to feature in whatever form of settlement was agreed.