Explainer: Negotiating the Treaty, October-December 1921

by John Gibney

The ‘Treaty negotiations’ began in London on 11 October 1921 and culminated in the signature, by British and Irish negotiators of ‘Articles of Agreement’ – better known as the Treaty – in the early morning of 6 December 1921. This led directly to the creation of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1922, governing 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties.

What was the context?
There had been tentative contacts between the British government and Sinn Féin since the end of 1920, usually through third parties, and following the truce of July 1921 exploratory talks were held in London between Éamon de Valera, as President of Dáil Éireann, and David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister. On 20 July 1921 the British had sent de Valera proposals for a settlement, in which Ireland would become a self-governing ‘Dominion’ within the British Empire, and various issues relating to naval defence, finance and trade would also be addressed. Contact was maintained between the two sides, and in late September 1921 Lloyd George sent de Valera ‘a fresh invitation to a conference in London on October 11th, where we can meet your delegates as spokesmen of the people whom you represent with a view to ascertaining how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’. The invitation was accepted and the negotiations commenced.

Where did they take place and who was directly involved?
The formal negotiations and attendant discussions took place in a variety of locations in London: 10 Downing St, the London premises of the Irish delegation at Hans Place in Knightsbridge, the Grosvenor Hotel, and even the private residences of figures like Winston Churchill. The Irish negotiators were Arthur Griffith (Dáil Éireann’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the leader of the delegation), Robert Barton (Minister for Economic Affairs), Michael Collins (Minister for Finance and IRA Director of Intelligence), Éamonn Duggan and George Gavan Duffy. The British negotiators were David Lloyd George (Prime Minister), Austen Chamberlain (Lord Privy Seal), Winston Churchill (Secretary of State for the Colonies), Laming Worthington-Evans (Secretary of State for War), Hamar Greenwood (Chief Secretary for Ireland), Gordon Hewart (Attorney General), F.E. Smith and Lord Birkenhead (Lord High Chancellor).

Each delegation contained a mix of individuals who could be said to represent certain strands of opinion: on the British side the delegation was balanced between the Liberals and Conservatives who made up the postwar coalition government. Birkenhead and Chamberlain had been staunch opponents of Home Rule, while on the Irish side Collins was seen to represent the views of the military wing of the independence movement.

Beginning on 11 October, the two sides met in plenary sessions until 24 October, after which the talks continued within sub-committees dealing with defense, finance and the maintenance of the truce itself (ongoing IRA activity was a bone of contention for the British).

The two sides established a rapport, though tensions existed within both delegations. The British viewed Collins and Griffith as capable but were dismissive of other members of the Irish negotiating team. Erskine Childers, who was one of the secretaries to the Irish delegation, was also deemed by the British to be an especially unwelcome influence. After 24 October Collins and Griffith did the bulk of the negotiating on the main issues. The Irish negotiators were, however, vastly inexperienced when compared to their opposite numbers; a reality that was not lost on the British.

Left: A letter dated 11 October 1921 from Arthur Griffith to Éamon de Valera giving his impressions of events after the first meeting of the Irish and British delegations that day (Image: National Archives of Ireland, DE_02_304_01_10_010). Right: A letter from Arthur Griffith to Éamon de Valera, dated 29 November 1921, reporting on a meeting at Chequers that he and Éamonn Duggan had been invited to by Lloyd George (Image: National Archives of Ireland, DE_02_304_01_54_002).

Who wasn’t there?
Ironically, the person who often attracts the greatest attention in discussions of the negotiations was not actually there. De Valera remained in Dublin; his absence from the talks has always been controversial and is intertwined with the question of the instructions given to the Irish delegation. The plenipotentiaries (as they were designated) had been authorised by the Dáil to ‘negotiate and conclude’ a treaty, but their instructions from the Dáil cabinet specified that ‘before decisions are finally reached on the main questions a dispatch notifying the intention of making these decisions will be sent to the members of the cabinet in Dublin and that a reply will be awaited by the plenipotentiaries before the final decision was made’. This contradiction between the two sets of instructions became a source of tension as time went on, and the necessity to travel back and forth between London and Dublin became a grueling obligation.

The contradictory instructions may explain why de Valera stayed in Dublin: that he wanted to keep himself in reserve for a last-ditch effort to get an agreement over the line. In his view, his presence in Dublin gave the Irish a ‘tactical advantage’. That said, he wrote to Griffith on 25 October to say that he would go to London if ‘the situation imperatively calls for it, and I am keeping an open mind’. The Irish delegation wanted to him to go to London but only if he could travel privately; otherwise, he should ‘not come publicly unless we send you a message that in our opinion it is essential’ (de Valera’s response was that ‘You may take it that going privately is impossible’). The fact remains, however, that while the British negotiations were led by the Prime Minister, the Irish team was not being led by his nominal opposite number.

An invoice for stationery and office equipment delivered to the Irish delegation’s office at Cadogan Gardens in London. (Image: National Archives of Ireland, DE_3_1_1_0055)

What was life for the delegation in London like?
The British could draw upon the machinery of their own bureaucracy and administration, not to mention the advantage that the negotiations were taking place on their home ground, so to speak. The Irish plenipotentiaries, on the other hand, had to establish their own base in London, divided between two townhouses in Knightsbridge: 22 Hans Place and 15 Cadogan Gardens. Most of the delegation stayed at the former; Michael Collins, who travelled to London separately soon after the other plenipotentiaries had embarked, stayed at Cadogan Gardens. Constraints of spaces in both buildings meant that some other members of the delegation had to stay in other lodgings nearby. The actual delegation was much larger than the five plenipotentiaries and included (amongst others) advisors, housekeepers, cooks, and secretarial staff to undertake the extensive drafting of documents and press releases.

The Irish delegation was in the public eye as soon as the first contingent of delegates alighted from the ferry at Holyhead. When they arrived at Downing St for the first time on 11 October they were met by crowds of well-wishers from London’s Irish community (though it should be said that the delegation faced hostility from some quarters). The Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain even organised a huge reception for the Irish delegation at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 October. The negotiations were covered extensively in the press (Collins was a particular source of fascination for journalists). Griffith’s personal secretary, Kathleen McKenna, left a vivid account of life in London and in the Irish offices, with journalists swarming around seeking the dispatches that she and her colleagues were producing, and threatening letters becoming a regular occurrence. The Irish offices were a magnet for a diverse range of visitors, up to and including literary luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound (an acquaintance of Dáil Minister for Publicity Desmond Fitzgerald, who was also part of the delegation). There was some time for leisure activities amidst a tight schedule, with theatrical performances becoming a favoured leisure pastime (on one visit to the ballet Griffith apparently found himself seated beside the former prime minister Herbert Asquith). Napoli-McKenna also recalled a party for the delegation in Hans Place that culminated in Collins and various members of the IRA and IRB having a food-fight and throwing lumps of coals at one another. Yet there was a serious purpose to the presence of the latter: members of Collins’ ‘Squad’ like Liam Tobin were in London to provide both physical security and a confidential means of communication with Ireland, due to an understandable wariness of the Royal Mail. Emmet Dalton even arranged to purchase an aircraft that Collins and some of the delegation could use for a quick getaway should negotiations break down. In the end, this was not needed.

What were the issues at stake?
The British were intent on securing a settlement and in July 1921 had set out the principal issues of concern to them. These did not change: membership of the empire and recognition of the crown were crucial, with naval defence, trade and finance being the other key issues for British. These proposals were circulated at the outset of the negotiations, effectively shaping the agenda. The British were better prepared than their Irish counterparts, with a clearer sense of what they wanted to achieve. For them, the fundamental issues were Ireland’s relationship to the crown and the British Empire, and they were willing to offer a degree of latitude on other points. As Ronan Fanning put it, ‘This determination to achieve agreement was the key to the British negotiating strategy: it hinged on identifying and massaging the offence out of any elements that would prevent the Irish plenipotentiaries from signing a draft treaty’.

For the Irish, sovereignty and Irish unity were the critical issues (though the former came to overshadow the latter after the Treaty was signed). According to Robert Barton, even before the negotiations began the Dáil cabinet had agreed to seek an outcome suggested by de Valera, in which Ireland would ‘become an external associate of the states of the British Commonwealth’, rather than a full member. It was a strategy that implicitly conceded that the Irish negotiators were not going to return from London with a fully independent republic with no formal links to the British Empire. ‘Our difficulty,’ as Gavan Duffy put it in an unguarded moment that nearly led to the collapse of the talks, ‘is coming within the empire’. Instead, as Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary to the British cabinet, had earlier noted, ‘they seemed to think of a republic within the Empire’ (a concept that de Valera successfully revived as Taoiseach in the 1930s but which proved unacceptable to the British in 1921). The willingness to accept any formal relationship with the crown was, however, predicated on the Irish securing British commitments on the ‘essential unity’ of Ireland.
The British offered concessions at a late stage, such as the clause in the treaty confirming that the Irish Free State would be a ‘Dominion’ with the same status as Canada, which was intended to offer reassurance on the role of the crown in Irish affairs. They also dropped demands for free trade between Britain and Ireland at the eleventh hour. On the Irish side, the validity of British strategic concerns and the question of financial liabilities were accepted in principle, as was the prospect of ‘safeguards’ for unionists in Ulster should some form of Irish unity emerge. But the British were intent on avoiding a situation where partition could become a final sticking point. They recognised that this was the issue on which the Irish were likely to try to break off the negotiations and did not want to be blamed for a breakdown in the talks.

What about Irish unity?
Despite the common assumption that the Treaty gave away Northern Ireland, the negotiations were predicated on partition; there had been no meaningful move towards negotiations until after a government in Northern Ireland was firmly established in May 1921. The Ulster Unionist leader James Craig, now Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, had sufficient political support in London to ignore any suggestions that he make concessions towards Irish unity. Lloyd George was acutely aware that attempts to pressurise or undercut unionism on that front was a step too far for much Tory opinion. He was a Liberal Prime Minister at the head of a coalition dominated by the Conservative Party and was not shy of pointing out that if the coalition he led fell, who and what was likely to replace it? During the negotiations Lloyd George secured a commitment from Arthur Griffith not to officially reject a proposal that Northern Ireland would have a right to vote itself out of a prospective all-Ireland parliament, and that a ‘boundary commission’ could then adjudicate on the border. This was originally extracted to protect Lloyd George from a potentially hostile Conservative Party conference. The Irish recognised that the British were under real pressure from within their own ranks, though they felt that they were deliberately overstating this in negotiations; de Valera, for his part, reminded Griffith that ‘there are people in this country who are just as determined’.

But on the question of partition, Lloyd George and Churchill had long been of the view that it was inevitable and were opposed to the use of coercion to end it. The proposals that Griffith agreed not to reject made their way into the Treaty, as Lloyd George ultimately used Griffith’s commitment against him to remove any prospect of the Irish plenipotentiaries breaking off the negotiations on those grounds.

Sinn Féin had representatives in numerous countries and had a presence in Berlin from April 1921 onwards, being represented there by John Chartres and Nancy Wyse-Power. This German edition of Dáil Éireann’s propaganda organ The Irish Bulletin reports on the Irish negotiators’ arrival in London. (Image: National Archives of Ireland, DFA_ES_1_9_64)

Winners and losers?
The question of sovereignty was the central issue for both sides, who had very different desired outcomes. This, more than partition, was the issue that ultimately split the independence movement after the eventual Treaty was signed. Lloyd George skilfully manipulated Griffith while concluding that Collins would not break off talks over the proposed links to the empire. The British were more experienced negotiators and knew what they wanted. Their central objective was to maintain the integrity of the crown and an empire that, unlike many of its counterparts, had emerged victorious from the cataclysm of the First World War. The complete ‘secession’ of a substantial portion of the United Kingdom was never going to be acceptable to the British in these circumstances, and nor was the idea that Ireland become semi-detached from the empire by what was termed an ‘external association’. The Irish plenipotentiaries were in no position to bridge the gap between their position and that of the British. At the end, the British successfully forced the Irish to agree to the Treaty on the grounds, as Lloyd George put it, ‘that those who were not for peace must take full responsibility for the war that would immediately follow refusal by any Delegate to sign the Articles of Agreement’.

With the signing of the Treaty on 6 December 1921 the Irish were given something to work with, albeit at what proved to be a terrible cost. As for the British, Jones remarked that ‘In essentials we have given nothing that was not in the July proposals’. Ultimately, in the circumstances of December 1921, one side in the Treaty negotiations got more of what it wanted than the other.

John Gibney is Assistant Editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series. Document images reproduced by permission of the Director of the National Archives of Ireland. The National Archives’ centenary exhibition, The Treaty 1921: records from the archives, will open in Dublin Castle in December 2021.