Collins · 1921
The Treaty signature
On the morning of the sixth of December 1921, at twenty past two in the morning, in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, after eight weeks of formal Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations and a final twenty-four-hour stretch in which the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had presented Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and three other Irish plenipotentiaries with the now-celebrated ultimatum of *immediate and terrible war* if a settlement was not reached by midnight, the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland were signed by Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill on the British side and by Griffith, Collins, Robert Barton, Eamonn Duggan and George Gavan Duffy on the Irish side. Collins, by his own letter written from Hans Place to his fiancée Kitty Kiernan in the hours of the morning afterwards, *signed his own death warrant.* He was thirty-one years old. The settlement granted Ireland dominion status on the model of Canada, with the partition of the six north-east counties as Northern Ireland under a separate parliament, and required an oath of allegiance from Irish parliamentarians to the Crown. The Treaty was ratified by the Dáil on the seventh of January 1922 by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. The Civil War broke out in June. Collins was killed in eight months and twenty-six days.
It is twenty minutes past two on the morning of the sixth of December 1921, in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, in heavy December cold. The fire is low. The room is, by Tom Jones's note (he is Lloyd George's principal private secretary and is in the room), thick with cigar smoke. He is thirty-one years old. He is Michael Collins, plenipotentiary of the Irish Republic on the Treaty negotiations, Director of Intelligence of the IRA, born at Woodfield, Sam's Cross, west Cork, in 1890. He is in a tweed three-piece suit, grey, with a green tie, the uniform of the eight-week negotiation. He is in his fifty-third hour without sleep.
On the long oak table in front of him is the final form of the Articles of Agreement, twenty-four typed sheets, the changes from the negotiation set in red ink in the hand of Tom Jones. Across the table from him are Lloyd George (in shirt-sleeves, his coat over the back of the chair), Austen Chamberlain, Lord Birkenhead, Winston Churchill (smoking), Tom Jones, the cabinet secretary Sir Maurice Hankey. On Collins's side of the table are Arthur Griffith (drawn, white-haired, fifty), Robert Barton (the Wicklow Republican who has signed reluctantly), Eamonn Duggan, George Gavan Duffy.
He thinks: Lloyd George has, three hours ago, said in this room: "the choice you have, gentlemen, is between this document and immediate and terrible war." Lloyd George means it. The British have eighty thousand troops in Ireland and the Royal Air Force at Baldonnel. Within ten days they will be at the country.
He thinks: if I sign this, the Six Counties stay separate. Ulster goes by the boundary commission within five years. The boundary commission may be the way the partition is closed and may not.
He thinks: if I sign this, the country has dominion status with the same constitutional position as Canada. The country has its own army and its own treasury and its own customs and its own foreign affairs in everything except the formal oath.
He thinks: if I do not sign this, I am back in Ireland on the morning of the eighth of December explaining to the Dáil why I did not sign. The Dáil splits on it. The country splits on it. There is open war with Britain by Christmas Eve and we lose it inside three months. The British in three months put the country back to the position of August 1920.
He thinks: de Valera is in Dublin. de Valera will not come into this room. de Valera sent the five of us to do the impossible thing he did not want to be in a chair in. de Valera will, after the signature, repudiate the document.
He thinks: the country has fought to where the country can fight to. The country has not fought to where the country wanted to fight to. The country has fought to here. The terms here are not the terms of the Republic. The terms here are the terms of the dominion. The dominion is a stepping-stone. The Republic, if it comes, comes on this ground in fifteen years.
He thinks: I will sign.
He thinks: I am, in signing, signing my own death warrant. The men I have run the IRB and the IRA and the Squad with these past four years will, in the next twelve months, decide that I have signed away the Republic and they will come for me. The chance, by my own reckoning, of my being alive in eighteen months is about one in three.
He picks up the pen. He signs his name in the careful hand he uses for official signatures, Mícheál Ó Coileáin, on the last sheet of the document, in the seventh signature of the seven who signed it on the Irish side. The signing is over at twenty-five past two. The British signatures follow. The hands are shaken across the table at twenty to three.
He went out of 10 Downing Street into the cold of Whitehall at three in the morning. The taxi took him back to the Irish delegation's house at 22 Hans Place in Knightsbridge. He sat at the writing-desk in his bedroom from quarter past three to half past four and wrote a letter, in his own hand, to his fiancée Kitty Kiernan in Granard. The letter is in the National Library of Ireland. The quoted line of the letter, which has become the founding sentence of the modern Irish-republican memory of the Treaty, is the closing: think — what I have got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this, early this morning I signed my death warrant. I thought at the time, how ridiculous, how ridiculous, a bullet may just as well have done the job five years ago.
The Treaty was ratified by Dáil Éireann on the seventh of January 1922 by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. de Valera resigned the presidency of the Dáil in protest. The Provisional Government took over the Castle administration on the sixteenth of January. The Civil War broke out in June 1922 between the Free State Government (under Collins, Griffith and W. T. Cosgrave) and the anti-Treaty IRA. Collins was killed at Béal na mBláth eight months and twenty-six days after the signature, on the twenty-second of August 1922, by the bullet his own letter from Hans Place had foreseen. The Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street is, on a guided tour today, the room visitors are most often shown when they ask about the country's history with Ireland. The signature on the original Articles of Agreement, in Collins's hand, Mícheál Ó Coileáin, is in the National Archives of Ireland.