The Treaty signature

Treaties that close seven hundred years are seldom signed by the men who began the fight. They are signed, in the small hours, by a younger man who has carried a pistol in his coat pocket through the wet streets of a capital and who knows, better than the orators in the room he has just left, what another month of war will cost the country he came out of.

THE WEST CORK BOY IN THE LONDON ROOM

Michael Collins was born at Woodfield, Sam's Cross, west Cork, on the sixteenth of October 1890, the youngest of eight, son of a farmer who was seventy-five at his birth and who set the boy to read Davis and Mitchel before he could plough. He went to London at fifteen as a Post Office clerk, kept the books of a stockbroker in the City, drilled with the Irish Volunteers in Chelsea, and came back to Dublin in January 1916 in time for Easter Week. He fought in the General Post Office under Pearse and Connolly, was interned at Frongoch, came out the following Christmas with the names of every useful man he had met in the camp written in his head. By 1921 he was thirty-one years old and he was Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army, President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Minister for Finance of the Dáil government, and the man for whose head the British Cabinet had set a price of ten thousand pounds. The Squad, the twelve men he had picked himself, had shot fourteen British intelligence officers in their beds on the morning of the twenty-first of November 1920. The Truce of July 1921 had been called by a British government that could no longer find him. Now, in October, that same government had asked him to come to London and put his name to a piece of paper.

THE EIGHT WEEKS

The negotiations opened at 10 Downing Street on the eleventh of October 1921 and ran for eight weeks. Five plenipotentiaries went over: Arthur Griffith of Sinn Féin, drawn and white at fifty; Robert Barton of Wicklow, the reluctant republican; Eamonn Duggan, the solicitor; George Gavan Duffy, the lawyer's son; and Collins. de Valera, the President of the Dáil, stayed in Dublin. Across the table sat Lloyd George the Welshman, F. E. Smith now Lord Birkenhead, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and behind them Tom Jones taking the notes and Maurice Hankey keeping the cabinet's memory. The Irish put up the case for an external association with the Crown, a republic in everything but the formal link. The British put up the case for dominion status, an oath of allegiance, and the retention of three naval ports. Ulster, the six north-east counties already constituted under their own parliament by the Act of 1920, sat between them like a stone in a shoe. By the first week of December the table had narrowed to a boundary commission and an oath of fidelity, and the men on both sides had been awake too long.

THE ULTIMATUM

On the afternoon of the fifth of December, in the Cabinet Room, Lloyd George took two envelopes from the table. In one, he said, was a letter to Sir James Craig at Belfast saying that agreement had been reached. In the other was a letter saying that the Sinn Féin delegates had refused the Crown and broken on Ulster. A special train was waiting at Euston for Holyhead and a destroyer at the pier; the answer would be in Craig's hand by morning. The choice you have, gentlemen, is between this document and immediate and terrible war, he said, and he meant it. The British had eighty thousand troops in Ireland, gunboats on the Shannon, and aircraft at Baldonnel. The Irish had perhaps three thousand active riflemen and ammunition for a week's fighting. Collins, who had run the intelligence war and who knew the exact state of his own ledgers down to the round in the breech, knew this better than any man in the room.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

It is twenty minutes past two on the morning of the sixth of December, and the fire in the Cabinet Room is low. Tom Jones, in his note, finds the air thick with cigar smoke. On the long oak table are twenty-four typed sheets, the alterations of the last twenty-four hours set in red ink in Jones's careful hand. Collins is in the grey tweed three-piece suit he has worn through the eight weeks, with a green tie; he is in his fifty-third hour without sleep. Across the table Lloyd George has taken off his coat and is in shirt-sleeves; Churchill is smoking; Birkenhead, who has spent the day in this room as he spent the morning of the Carson trial a decade ago, has the look of a man who has crossed a line in his own head and is now waiting for the others to catch up. On Collins's own side Griffith sits white and still, Barton has already said he will sign because Collins will sign, Duggan and Gavan Duffy are looking at the floor. Lloyd George has gone, three hours ago, the choice he gave. The pen is in front of Collins on the blotter. What the country has fought to is not the Republic, and he knows it; the country has fought to here, to dominion status on the model of Canada, an army and a treasury and a customs and a flag, and an oath of fidelity to a Crown the country has spent seven centuries trying to be out from under. Refuse the pen, and he is back in Dublin on the morning of the eighth explaining to the Dáil why the war is to be reopened on a Britain that has eighty thousand men and aircraft and that, in three months, will have the country back to where it stood in August 1920. Take the pen, and the Six Counties stay separate, the oath goes in, and the men he has run the IRB with these four years, Brugha and Stack and the harder heads in the Cork brigades, will read the document at breakfast and decide he has sold the Republic for a parliament in Dublin. He knows them. He knows what the chance is of a bullet in eighteen months; he puts it, by his own reckoning, at one in three. He picks up the pen. The dominion is a stepping-stone, he tells himself; the Republic, if it comes, will come on this ground in fifteen years. He signs his name in the careful Irish hand he keeps for official signatures, Mícheál Ó Coileáin, seventh of the seven on the Irish side. The clock on the mantel reads twenty-five past two. The British signatures follow. At twenty to three the hands are shaken across the table.

HANS PLACE, BEFORE DAWN

He went out into Whitehall in the cold of three in the morning and the taxi took him to 22 Hans Place in Knightsbridge, the house the delegation had kept through the eight weeks. He sat at the writing-desk in his bedroom from a quarter past three to half past four and wrote, in his own hand, a letter to Kitty Kiernan in Granard, whom he was to marry in the new year. Think, he wrote, 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. He sealed the letter, lay down on the bed in his clothes, and slept for an hour. The letter is in the National Library of Ireland.

THE DÁIL, AND AFTER

The Treaty was put to Dáil Éireann on the fourteenth of December and debated for sixteen days through Christmas and the new year. On the seventh of January 1922 it was ratified by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. de Valera, who had sent the five of them over and stayed in Dublin, repudiated the document and resigned the presidency. Griffith was elected in his place. On the sixteenth of January Collins went up to Dublin Castle and took over from the last Viceroy the administration of a country which, in the formal sense, had not been administered from Dublin by Irishmen since the Act of Union. By the end of June the Civil War had broken out between the Free State, with Collins as Commander-in-Chief, and the anti-Treaty IRA who held the Four Courts. Griffith died of a stroke at Dublin on the twelfth of August. Collins was shot in an ambush at Béal na mBláth in his own west Cork on the evening of the twenty-second of August, eight months and twenty-six days after the signature, by the bullet his own letter from Hans Place had foreseen. He was thirty-one years and ten months old.

RETURN

The great moment, when it is given to a young man, takes from him in payment whatever years he had left. He had said the dominion would be a stepping-stone, and within fifteen years of his signature the External Relations Act had stripped the oath out of the constitution and the harbours had come back to Irish hands; within twenty-five the Republic he had not been able to sign for had been declared from the steps of the GPO he had fought from at twenty-five. Collins did not live to see any of it. The original Articles of Agreement, twenty-four sheets in Tom Jones's red ink, are held today in the National Archives of Ireland on Bishop Street in Dublin, and on the last sheet of those twenty-four, in the seventh signature on the Irish side, in the careful schoolmasterly Gaelic hand of a young man in a grey tweed suit in his fifty-third hour without sleep, are the three words Mícheál Ó Coileáin.