How To Start A Country

Welcome to the History of Ireland. Two days after the vote on the treaty, on January 9th, the Dáil reconvened to discuss the little matter of its president and what to do about the split in the party. They resolved things nicely and quietly and peacefully and the new Irish Free State moved on with two parties and that was the end of the story. No wishful thinking? No instead, of course, things got tricky. First Dev did resign as president but that didn’t mean he wanted to step down from his position as leader of the movement just yet.

And as one biographer described it, he tried to cling to power. You see Collins had suggested a committee of members from both the pro and anti-treaty sides to keep the peace and to avoid a split. And Dev saw this as an opportunity to run again as president and to keep his power. If he was in charge of the committee then things wouldn’t be so bad. But the pro-treaty side were not too pleased with this and William T Cosgrave argued that it would see the minority of this house take over the governing of the country and that Dev desired to establish here an autocracy.

When it became clear that this wasn’t going to work, well Dev stormed out of the Dáil with the anti-treaty TDs. Remember that’s nearly half the government. Gone was the idea of a majority and minority party. It’s said that Collins was furious, roaring, deserters all, we will now call on the Irish people to rally to us, deserters all, foreigners, Americans, English. The Irish nationalist movement was well and truly split.

It was clear that the Irish war of independence was over and now begun as Diarmuid Ferryder describes a slow drift into civil war. And with that I’ve ended our first season and arbitrarily decided to make a break and move into season two, the civil war. But it was a slow drift into civil war and at this point it wouldn’t have been clear that that’s where things were going to go. At this point there was a country to run, a country to create and as you can imagine that is no small feat even when dealing with little old Ireland.

So first let me take a second to explain who was actually in power in Ireland at this point, January 1922, because it’s kind of more complicated than you’d think. Once Dev stormed out, the Dáil elected Arthur Griffith as its new president. So he was running the country, right? Well no, not really, as historian Helen O’Keefe writes there were technically three governments in Ireland in January 1922, James Craig’s Northern Ireland government, the republican second Dáil under the presidency of Arthur Griffith and then the provisional government of the Irish Free State headed by Michael Collins.

We can ignore James Craig’s Northern Ireland for now, that ship had kinda sailed, and instead focus purely on the south. So what in God’s name was the provisional government and why was Collins in charge instead of Griffith? Let me explain. Remember the 1920 government of Ireland act, that old thing from way back? Even though everyone down south had ignored it at the time, the Bill had created a Parliament of Southern Ireland. With the treaty ratified it was this government that was in charge of the new Irish Free State.

So on January 14th this Parliament of Southern Ireland met for the first and last time. It consisted of 65 pro-treaty Sinn Féin MPs and 4 unionist MPs from Trinity College. And importantly it wasn’t Dáil Éireann. Their job was to put together a provisional government, one that would run things until a new Parliament elected by the Irish people came into official existence on December 6th, 1922.

But why was Collins in charge rather than Griffith? You see the anti-treaty Sinn Féin TDs and even some of the pro-treaty ones really didn’t like the idea of Griffith being president of both the Dáil, which they saw as a legitimate arm of the Irish Republic, and the provisional government, which they disliked for fairly well documented reasons. So instead a new executive committee was set up, consisting of 8 people. Michael Collins, William T Cosgrave, Eamon Duggan, Patrick Hogan, Fionnuala Lynch, Joseph McGrath, Owen McNeill and Kevin O’Higgins.

O’Higgins described this new provisional government as follows. The provisional government was simply 8 young men in the city hall, standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole. No police force was functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.

This is him being a little dramatic though and they did have the pro-treaty members of the Dáil on their side and the lines between the provisional government and the Dáil were quote purposely blurred. For example, the provisional government was meant to only deal with domestic affairs and had no minister for defence. That didn’t stop the new Dáil minister for defence, Richard Mulcahy, from attending provisional government meetings from as early as February. The anti-treaty side hated this and as O’Keefe writes, there was a real moment of ambiguity in the first months of 1922 that contributed to the widening rift between the rival sides.

And more confusingly, even though the provisional government started from the get-go, it technically had no legal authority until March 31st, when the Irish Free State Bill was made law in Britain. Look, it just really isn’t that easy to start a country. Churchill even went as far as describing the situation as an anomaly quote unprecedented in the history of the British Empire. But hey, unprecedented in British politics is what Ireland does best.

Regardless, whether they were an anomaly or not, the provisional government’s first job was to get the keys to the new gaff. It was time to take Dublin Castle from the British. This occurred on January 16th, 1922 and it really is a big day in Irish history. And maybe if it wasn’t for the civil war, it very well might have become a public holiday we all celebrate. Some could argue it’s almost our independence day. The Irish Times at least described it as certainly the most significant event in Irish history for hundreds of years.

And in typical Irish fashion, the whole thing was meant to start at twelve but was delayed by the fact that the eight men of the Provisional Executive Committee were late. Yep, we were even late to the founding of our own country. But that probably just made the crowds cheer all the more as their three taxis drove up the hill into Upper Castle Yard. From there, they were brought to a room known as the Privy Council Chamber.

A newspaper at the time described how the simple stateliness of the chamber, with its two great brass chandeliers pendent over the red cloth-covered table which occupies the centre of the room, must have impressed the new ministers. In 1245, the last Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Fitzaland Howard, arrived from the Vice-Regal Lodge, better known today as Áras an Uachtaráin. No press were allowed in the room, but it didn’t stop reporters peeking in. They wrote that through the window Mr. Collins could be seen smiling and looking absolutely self-possessed as he met the Viceroy.

Inside, Collins handed over a copy of the treaty, and the Viceroy then congratulated him and the other members of the Executive Committee. The official report describes how Fitzaland wished them every success in the task that they had undertaken, and expressed the earnest hope that under their auspice the ideal of a happy, free and prosperous Ireland would be attained. This well-wishing was mirrored by King George, and the Viceroy released a telegram he received from the monarch later that day, stating, I am gratified to hear from your telegram of the successful establishment of the Provisional Government in Ireland. I am confident that you will do all in your power to help its members to accomplish the task that lies before them, George or I. I love that he started every sentence with just, I am.

Now you might have heard the story of how Fitzaland chided Collins for being seven minutes late, to which Collins replied, you people have been here for seven hundred years. That’s one of those great stories that unfortunately I don’t think any historian would consider true. It comes from Tim Pat Coogan, and considering it was actually an hour and forty minutes late and there’s no contemporary reports that he said it, it’s very unlikely to be true. But hey, it does have a good ring to it.

After meeting Fitzaland, Collins and the delegation were then introduced to those in charge of the Civil Service. What follows next with the Civil Service is actually pretty interesting. Later that day, Collins, quote, bounced out through the chief secretary’s doorway and pushed Mr. Duggan and Mr. Cosgrave into the leading car. They then proceeded to declare that all public servants and functionaries hitherto under the authority of the British government shall continue to carry out their function unless and until otherwise ordered by us.

Basically, don’t stop doing whatever you did for the British. There was no way in hell the provisional government wanted to start totally from scratch. But more importantly, they didn’t want the Northern Irish to get all of these experienced pencil pushers. Originally the plan had been to send the civil servants from Dublin Castle up to Belfast. Collins wanted none of this. Ever the organiser, he knew the importance of good men and wanted to keep those good civil servants in Dublin to make it all the more difficult for the new Northern Irish state to get off the ground.

And those that stayed in Dublin were, actually, as historian Matt McGuire writes, enthusiastic about serving a native government. They hoped for the Sinn Féin ideal of a one-grade administration, free of sectarian discrimination and the English caste system of hierarchical classes. They were excited for a new, more modern approach to running a country, which had been seen throughout Ireland by the very successful Dáil courts and local government departments. More than that, they were confident enough to quote deliver on radical policies.

But unfortunately, the chaos of the next few months and years would push civil servants far from anyone’s mind and as McGuire explains, plans to construct a completely new apparatus were abandoned and the civil service of the Dáil was assimilated into the old castle administration, the reverse of what was originally intended. McGuire goes on to argue that that’s one of the reasons we don’t celebrate January 16th all that much.

It’s because, quote, instead of seizing the opportunity to create a civil service more suited to the revolutionary conditions, one less hierarchical and more dynamic, the government attempted to create nothing more than a frugal version of the English model. An opportunity to build on revolutionary state-building, an administrative transformation, was lost. This new Irish civil service became just another casualty of the civil war.

When everything is said and done, the handing over of Dublin Castle on January 16th, for all its symbolic importance, was kind of a simple affair. The Irish army didn’t even move in until August 1922 and the British left in a slow and controlled manner. As the Irish Times reported, after its fluctuating history of seven centuries, Dublin Castle is no longer the fortress of British power in Ireland. Having withstood the attacks of successive generations of rebels, it was quietly handed over yesterday to eight gentlemen in three taxi cabs.

Later on the day of the 16th, the provisional government released an official statement, saying, The members of Realtas Seánadach na hÉireann, the Provisional Government of Ireland, received the surrender of Dublin Castle at 1.45pm today. It is now in the hands of the Irish nation.

Later Collins would write about how this momentous occasion felt. How could I ever have expected to see Dublin Castle itself, that dread Bastille of Ireland, formally surrendered into my hands by Lord Lieutenant in the brocade-hung council chamber on my producing a copy of the London Treaty? We had read carpets laid for us on that momentous morning, and I recalled my only previous visit to those grim precincts as the driver of a coal cart, sneaking in disguised, with a price upon my head.

As ever though, it is his notes to Kitty Kiernan that give you the clearest glimpse of the actual Collins, stripped of the myth-making. On January 16th he wrote to her, saying, I am as happy a man as there is in Ireland today. I have just taken over Dublin Castle. Unfortunately though, it is unlikely his happiness lasted that long.

The next few months would see Collins, Griffith and the other members of the new provisional government trying to keep the country together as they were building it. Next time we’ll explore those who denounced the new state, and how they started to mount their resistance. I’m Aoife Murphy.