579. The Irish War of Independence: Showdown in London (Part 4)

25:33I think none of them want to be a dominion when they all go. So Griffith has left the dual monarchy option behind now. Yeah. That's history. Exactly. And the final person, somebody we've heard a lot about, the head of IRA intelligence, the revolutionary finance minister, Michael Collins. People sometimes say, oh, what a weird thing to send Collins when Collins is a fighting man. But actually, Collins hasn't done a lot of fighting. He's a strategist. He's a planner. He is a good person to choose, I think. And as we'll see, the British end up really respecting him and thinking that he's a serious player, a serious negotiator.

26:07But at the heart of all this, there is a massive ambiguity. De Valera says, these people, he describes them explicitly as plenipotentiaries. So a plenipotentiary, for people who don't know, you send them to negotiate a deal and they can negotiate whatever they want. They do the best job they can and they don't have to come back to you to clear it with you. but in the next breath de valera says you're plenty pretentious however any really big questions you must refer home before signing up to them so any deal that you do is subject to approval but it's not really clear whether that approval will be by him and his cabinet or by the whole of the doyle the whole of the kind of shin fein dominated parliament so they leave with very very unclear instructions.

26:58Do they have a free hand to negotiate whatever they want or not? Are they just doing de Valera's bidding? Do they have to keep going to him for his approval? They don't really know themselves. And what makes this so toxic is that the Republican movement in Ireland is already fracturing a bit. So previously they've been united by their opposition to Britain and their fidelity to this misty ideal of the Republic. But nobody's ever really spelled out precisely what this means And so they are basically sending a very inexperienced team, people who have never really done any international negotiating at all, with no clear plan about really what they want.

27:38and actually I mean if you think I'm being harsh Ronan Fanning professor of history at University College Dublin wrote a brilliant book on all this called Fatal Path he's unbelievably scathing about the team he says this was a result of and I quote the primitive and one dimensional politics of Doyle Aaron which was little more than a forum where the representatives of Sinn Féin could talk to themselves in other words they haven't had the kind of political training the preparation that would enable them to have a really good team and to know what they want. But isn't it profounder than that, that the notion of revolutionary violence has been sanctified over the course of the revolution and therefore the very notion of negotiating is seen as demeaning for people who, you know, are the embodiments of the historic will of the Irish people?

28:26I can tell what books you've been reading, Tom, because I think that's exactly right. Raymond Fanning makes that argument, doesn't he? I couldn't remember, Dominic. Who knows? Right. That basically, if you've been fighting a revolutionary war for a sort of, dare I say, a sacral ideal, the idea of sitting down around the table with your opponents and doing a deal where you do a lot of fudging and mudging kind of thing, of course, the two things are in conflict with each other. So I absolutely agree with you. Yes, I think it's very hard for them to even contemplate the idea of a deal, I would say.

29:00Well, they have turned their back on the kind of parliamentary democratic politics that Westminster represented. And of course, they are now going into the heart of Westminster to re-engage. But it's like they're off to play a sport that they haven't been in training for for 10 years or something. Yeah, I think that's a fair comparison. Now, by contrast, of course, the British have been doing loads of negotiating recently, the Treaty of Versailles and all the associated treaties. And their team are like a massive big hitters. Galacticos. So Lloyd George, Churchill, the conservative leader austin chamberlain the son of joseph chamberlain who'd been a great foe of irish home rule and somebody you mentioned lord birkenhead i mean he's one of the biggest beasts of all he's forgotten now i think by and large formerly f.e smith but at the time he is seen as the most brilliant man in london yeah arrogant hard drinking a wit yeah a great wit my favorite one is when he's a young barrister and he's speaking to a judge he's given this huge thing and the judge says mr smith i am none the wiser and effie smith says uh no my lord but you're much better informed now anyway lloyd george has picked this team the thing is the teams are divided among themselves lloyd george really needs his team to stay loyal and he needs birkenhead in particular because birkenhead is the sort of he's the keeper of the tory flame the unionist flame if he deserts lloyd george lloyd george's coalition falls apart so he's essential to shield Lloyd George from criticism from what are called the Tory diehards.

30:34So this is true of the Irish as well, because they also have their own pressures and their own rivalries. Now, Collins is a really good example. Collins' base with the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Republican Army is a bit fragile. He has opponents. He has people who hate him. He has rivals. And so he's conscious about that. And also, Collins goes to London with his personal life in massive turmoil. he's just proposed to a woman called Kitty Keenan Julia Roberts Julia Roberts exactly so he's got Julia Roberts on the go the 8th of October the Irish team arrive at Euston Station they've gone by boat to Hollyhead and then by train huge crowds of supporters there of course a big Irish community in London people waving flags and cheering and stuff the one man who's not there very tellingly is Collins that is very exciting for the British press because they see him as the kind of scarlet pimpernel of Ireland the most wanted man in the world all of this kind of thing Now, he has insisted on travelling separately because he's a star.

31:31He's staying in separate lodgings from everybody else. He's got his own aides and he's got his own bodyguards. So all the others are staying in Knightsbridge behind Harrods at a place called 22 Hands Place. But he is staying in Chelsea at 15 Cadogan Gardens. So the stage is set. And on the morning of Tuesday, the 11th of October, the Irish cars come into Downing Street. Griffith leads the way and Collins is right behind him. and there's a huge crowd having to be held back by the police. Everyone's very excited. The black door number 10 opens and inside Lloyd George is waiting to shake their hands.

32:04You're a gentleman, nice to see you, blah, blah, blah. Just after 11 o 'clock, they take their places around the cabinet table. William Gladstone, the first British prime minister to try to solve, in inverted commas, the Irish question. That was his table, sitting around the table. Lloyd George, very smiley, all business. He says, gentlemen, the time has come to end the tragic story of misunderstanding and war. And with that, Tom, the real drama begins. Well, we will be back after a break to hear how things go. Hello, everyone. It's Gary Lineker here from The Rest Is Football. Just a quick message to tell you all about the Club World Cup tournament that's taking place in the US at the moment.

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33:37Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. We are in Downing Street on the morning of the 11th of October, 1921. and David Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard, his moustache bristling, his eyes twinkling, is holding court. Yes. Dominic, what is he saying? So he says, look, we can end the cycle of violence, he says, but we have to hurry. There are forces at work in this country which think the government has gone too far already. In other words, there's an element of a threat there right from the beginning. So these are the Tory diehards? These are the Tory diehards. Now, the next person to speak is Arthur Griffith, who's the sort of head of the Irish delegation.

34:15And he says, you know, you've treated us badly since the days of William Pitt. And I hope that we will now put that all behind us. But in a sort of nicely symbolic moment, Griffith speaks so quietly that many of the British can't actually hear what he's saying. And Gretchen Freeman, who's written an actually incredibly readable book on the treaty, wouldn't think that this is a very readable subject, as she does brilliantly, this sort of popular narrative. She says it was as though a lion had given way to a mouse when Griffith is speaking. And this sort of sets the tone because almost every historian, British or Irish, who's written about this, says, the Irish at the beginning, they seem very nervous and very unprepared.

34:57And the difference is the British are, you know, they're bulldozers. They know exactly what they want to get and how to get it. And anyone, Dominic, who has lived through the Brexit negotiations will find echoes of that process throughout this. Yeah, absolutely. And the Irish are playing the part of the British negotiators and the British are in the position of the EU. They hold the cards, they're familiar. Yeah, it's exactly that. When I was reading about this, I was thinking about it at every turn. You know, one side knows exactly what they want and what their red lines are and the others are divided among themselves and don't really know exactly what they want.

35:33So a good example is at this very first meeting, Griffith says, we're thinking that maybe Ireland will be neutral. And Lloyd George just says, I'm going to shut that down right now. You're never going to be neutral. We will never accept this. We want you to be like Canada, and Canada definitely isn't neutral. The next thing, in these first meetings, Griffith and Collins in particular spent a lot of time talking about a united Ireland. How are we going to get this six counties back? But almost every historian who's written about this says, this is a complete waste of time. Partition is irreversible.

36:04Well, it's arguably partition has been on the cards for about 12 years. Well, certainly since 1912, let's say. There's no way that Lloyd George is going to shut down the Parliament in Belfast because it would inflame the Tories and destroy his government. So they're wasting their time going on about this, unless they're using it in a cunning way as a bargaining chip to get something else, which as we'll see, they're not really. Anyway, the talks drag on and quite soon the British say, look, we've run out of patience. so on Friday the 21st of October Lloyd George says okay enough I want answers on three things allegiance to the crown you have to still acknowledge the king you have to still be members of the empire and we want naval defense guarantees i.e we will basically be in charge of your security and if you don't give us the answer by Monday the talks are over and we're back to the war so the following Monday at long last the Irish team come up with a counteroffer and this has been drafted by de Valera himself.

37:01And this is an idea called external association. So Ireland will be a neutral republic. They're still going with that, but it'll be associated with the British Empire. It won't be a member of the British Empire, but it'll be associated with it. You've put in your notes, all very reminiscent of Brexit negotiations, endless hair splitting about tiny constitutional details that matter enormously to quite small numbers of people. I mean, that's exactly what it's like, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Exactly. I don't think that the average person in Ireland is really excited about whether it's a dominion or external association or those things.

37:37But if you're a nationalist, and if you fought, and if you've lost people in the war, of course it matters. Just as if you were somebody who'd been in the Leave campaign in 2016, you really care about the outcome of the Brexit talks. Yeah, of course. Lloyd George treats the idea of external association with utter contempt. And actually, again, most historians think the British are never going to go for this. There's an Irish historian called Bill Kassane. The British didn't win the First World War to contemplate humiliation in their own backyard. Again, the First World War comparison. And what is more, what's really interesting and will surprise people, the other dominions will not accept it either.

38:17So Canada and Australia, for example, have made it very clear to London, they expect Ireland to remain within the empire. They will not be happy if the Irish go their own way as a neutral republic. So, you know, the empire is so fragile. It's at its largest ever extent in the early 1920s, but it seems so delicately poised. And Lloyd George is always thinking about this. Anyway, they have this meeting on the Monday. And afterwards, Lloyd George says to Collins and Griffiths, could you two stay behind, please, for a private chat? now if the Irish team had been more sensible they would never have had private chats with Lloyd George they would never have allowed themselves to be seduced into this because what it does is it splinters their team and Lloyd George is brilliant in small meetings he's a manipulator he can play on people and stuff and as time goes on he has more and more of these private chats he identifies Griffith and Collins as the people that you know he likes and he can do business with and they both start to warm to the British, the one thing that you would never have expected.

39:22So Griffith actually writes to de Valera at one point and he says, you know, I think if we show a little bit more goodwill to the British, they'll give us a great deal. Which you would think, that's mad. You've just drunk the British Kool-Aid. The really remarkable thing is that Collins, the IRA's head of intelligence, he also starts to warm to the British. And you know the person he really liked gets somewhere with? Lord Birkenhead. F.E. Smith. Yeah, exactly. He thinks, because they're men's men, they're alpha males, they like bullying people, they like drinking, they like eating oysters or whatever, they like bants.

39:57And actually, Collins starts getting to the meetings a little bit early so they can have a bit of banter with Lord Perkinhead. I love this. That's your dream dinner party, right? Michael Collins and F.E. Smith. Yeah. So the other person who's really important in this change in the mood, we mentioned him briefly, it's this guy, Tom Jones, this Welshman. Now, nobody knows about him today, but in the 1920s, he was the ultimate operator. One newspaper called him one of the six most powerful people in Europe, which is a big claim. I'd love to know who the other five were. Yeah. He's working class. He's also Welsh speaking.

40:33He's a former evangelical preacher, and he's now become the Deputy Cabinet Secretary and he is Lloyd George's right-hand man, basically. Doesn't Lloyd George chat to him in Welsh? They talk in Welsh in front of other people. Kind of very ostentatiously. Ostentatiously, to annoy. This is another thing that actually I secretly really admire about Lloyd George because if I could speak Welsh, I would do that all the time. So Tom Jones, everybody likes him. He's very like him. The Irish team really like him and Lloyd George uses him as a key go-between. and he sends Tom Jones to the Grosvenor Hotel for another of these little meetings with Collins and Griffith and Jones says look you going on about United Ireland is going to destroy these talks because the government will never abandon the Ulster Unionists but there is an answer he says there's an answer that could fix this now redrawing borders is all the rage in the 1920s there has been a big dispute which is totally forgotten today but has dominated the headlines all through 1921 on between Germany and Poland in upper Silesia.

41:34And Jones says, why don't we do what they did in Silesia? They had a boundary commission that drew a new border. You know, if we had a boundary commission, I reckon that boundary commission would give you loads of territory. You would get the bits of the six counties that are very Catholic and Tyrone and Fermanagh and stuff. Why don't you do that? And Griffith says, oh yeah, that's actually quite a good idea. I love that Who would be on this Boundary Commission? Who would run it? Well, this is the thing. It's not defined. Lloyd George is so cunning with all this. I mean, spoiler alert, the Boundary Commission idea flies but never really produces anything.

42:11And this is because Lloyd George has really thought this through. And this promise, oh, the Boundary Commission could give you loads of new territory. It's hanging there. But there is also another possibility. The Boundary Commission could take territory from you. and this is never really discussed now when Griffith says oh yeah we could do that this is a really important moment for the first time he's going against his instructions from De Valera in Dublin he's using his own initiative which I think De Valera never expected him to do and then the next day he has a meeting with Lloyd George and Lloyd George is at his most serpentine.

42:51He says, the Tory press are giving me such a hard time. The Tory diehards. I think my coalition might break up actually. And I really need your help. I need to persuade the Ulster unionists about this boundary commission idea. So please don't dismiss it publicly. Don't attack it. Just pretend that you like it and live with it for the time being. And Griffith says to him, okay, fine. I understand. I'm not agreeing to it now, but I won't slack it off. Lloyd George, he says, yeah, brilliant. And the next day he sends this guy Jones and Jones says, the prime minister has asked me to draw up a document describing yesterday's meeting about the Boundary Commission.

43:27Do you mind just agreeing to it? And Griffith glances at this document and he says, yeah, fine. Looks good. Looks good. Now this is a key moment. When Jones gets back and says, yes, he's fine with it. Lloyd George is delighted. And Francis Stevenson says, that night, I have never seen him so excited about anything before. And she must have seen him excited about quite a lot of things, I would think. She certainly has seen him excited, yes. Because this document has done two things. Number one, Lloyd George has shored up his flank against the Tory diehards. He can go to them and say, look, I've persuaded this bloke from Sinn Féin to agree to the Boundary Commission.

44:06So effectively to agree to partition. But also he plans to store this document away and to use it against Griffith later, as we shall see. So, the British produced a draft treaty. This is very much along the lines that they'd already discussed. Ireland becomes a dominion, Northern Ireland does its own thing, and there's this boundary commission. When the Irish team see this draft treaty, some of them go absolutely ballistic. What? Ireland still in the empire? Still under the crown? No way are we having this. But Collins has already begun to change his mind. he's been doing loads of reading on the dominions and one thing he realizes and i think he's quite right is that being a dominion like canada or like australia is not an end point it's a process so in other words he realizes that canada for example is going to become a completely independent country and then it's on a sort of conveyor belt that is leading it inexorably towards that status and he says look that's clearly going to happen to canada and australia so that would happen to us too if we get on this conveyor belt we won't get what we want straight away but we'll get it eventually delayed gratification delayed gratification now the irish team are arguing bitterly about this long into the night which of course means they're knackered the next day when they turn up for the full meetings and all the time lloyd george is piling on the pressure he said come on we need a decision quickly i don't want to restart the war but i will if i have to hurry up hurry up and he keeps saying to them you must accept the status of a dominion in the empire and you must accept the king.

45:38And that means the Irish MPs, or TDs as they've become, would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the constitution and to his majesty. And again, it's so Brexit, isn't it? It's so Brexit. It's exactly like the kind of ideological determination on the part of the hardline Brexit negotiators not to have anything to do with EU frameworks of justice or supervisory controls or anything like that. and more a point of principle than of politics. Of course, but principle matters. Of course, yeah. I mean, principle matters enormously to people. Now, the interesting thing is Lloyd George says, look, if you don't like this, we will smash you.

46:16We will reintroduce troops and we will kill you all. Is he bluffing? I don't think he is bluffing, actually. Some historians think he was. But I think, I mean, Lloyd George is a man who was sat there quite happily in government as prime minister during the bloodiest days of the First World War. he's perfectly capable of sending thousands of troops to fight and die and to kill in Ireland I think and as we will see Griffith and Collins both completely believe that he would restart the war if he had to so let's move towards first week in December which is the deadline that Lloyd George has set so we're on the first Saturday of December the 3rd the Irish team are back in Dublin they've gone to meet de Valera and his cabinet.

46:57They get there very late. Their boat collided with a schooner in the Irish Sea. So they're knackered. That's very Riddle of the Sands, isn't it? Very Riddle of the Sands. They've been bickering all the way. Griffith says, look, this is the best we're going to get. Everybody wants peace. We just have to suck up the crown and the empire and the oath. Barton and Gavin Duffy say, no, that's rubbish. The British are bluffing. They'll never start the war again. Collins is a bit ambiguous. He says, I don't like the oath. I'm not happy about the deal. But, and I quote, England could arrange a war in Ireland within a week.

47:32De Valera, of course, has still not set foot in London during this process, says this, and I think you should go back to London. Why don't you try pushing my external association idea again? You can imagine like, oh God, come on. And he says, crucially, this is really important to explain what happens in the next couple of episodes that we'll do. De Valera says, please keep me and my cabinet in the loop. Do not sign anything without agreeing it with me. And Robert Barton at this point says to him, why will you not come with us? Come with us to London. And De Valera says, no, no, I'm actually fine here.

48:07I'm quite happy here. Because it seems to me that what De Valera doesn't want to compromise with more than anything is his own sense of his own virtue. And there's an amazing comment that Ronan Fanning quotes in his book. And he quotes Lionel Curtis, who is a British official, involved in the negotiations. And Curtis has said of the British, the greatest strength of the British people lies in their inveterate belief that whatever else happens, they and their leaders will blunder horribly. And then he says, the greatest weakness of the Sinn Féin government is that it is almost void of any admission to the world of themselves that they can either think what is wrong or do what is wrong.

48:43And that seems to me actually to map very well onto the kind of the governing principles in the negotiations. And actually, I mean, it also maps on quite well onto the Brexit negotiations as well. Isn't it the difference between one team that's motivated largely by pragmatism? Yeah. And they have no sense that this is a process in which morality plays any part at all. And another team who genuinely believe that they're on the side of rights and virtue and freedom and independence and all of those kinds of things. So any compromise is going to be very difficult. Yeah. I think that must be a huge part of it.

49:16Anyway, by the Sunday evening, they're back in London. That's the 4th of December. They go back to Downing Street yet again for about the 5 ,000th time. They have an argument about the partition of Ireland and the oath to the crown. And Lloyd George now is just in pure kind of performative, melodramatic mood. He kind of says, we're going to have to have a private meeting, me and my team. They go out and they have a private meeting. And then he comes back in. I mean, they're probably just going out for a smoke or something. And then they come back in and Lloyd George says to the Irish, listen if you won't enter the empire if you won't accept the common bond of the crown then i'm afraid this means war you know that's how it is and is he bluffing i don't think he is the next morning monday the 5th his team prepare a draft statement on the collapse of the talks they put all the blame on sinn fein and they send a coded message to the army in ireland saying prepare for hostilities within days later that morning lloyd george asks to see collins alone and they don't decide anything.

50:10But Lloyd George, by doing that, is clearly sending Collins, I think, a message. You are a serious person like me. Come on, we can fix this. Help me to fix it. Bring the others this afternoon and we'll have one last meeting and we'll have one last go. So that afternoon, three o 'clock, the Irish delegates returned to Downing Street for this last meeting. It's a very tense mood. This time there are no cheering crowds with flags or anything like that. They've run out of money. So the first time they ever arrived, they arrived in multiple cars. This time they all have to cram into one car. All sitting on each other's laps.

50:42It's a very indecorous arrival. And the British have slimmed down their team, so there's just four people facing them at the table. There's Lloyd George, there's Churchill, there's Lord Birkenhead, and there's Austin Chamberlain, the Conservative leader. Churchill said afterwards, Death stood at our elbow. Yeah, because they do think the war could be on tomorrow. And what happens now is the supreme exhibition of Lloyd George's cunning. he starts off by talking about this business of partition of northern ireland the irish say we hate it if you scrapped it if you scrapped the belfast parliament and gave us ulster maybe we'd accept your dominion status and of that lloyd george pretends to have a massive temper tantrum as barton says lloyd george got excited he shook his papers in the air declared that we were deliberately trying to bring about a break on ulster because our people in Ireland had refused to come within the empire.

51:37And now Lord George plays his card. He points at Griffith and he says, you have lied to me. You've let me down. You promised me that you would accept my boundary commission. And he pulls out this piece of paper and it's the document that Griffith had approved without properly reading it a month earlier. And the other Irishmen are shocked. What's this what's all this and nobody is more shocked than griffith himself the blood drains from his features he's completely thrown by it there's this dreadful silence and then he says well i said i wouldn't let you down and i won't i will sign the treaty he crumbles he's like the guy who who ticks the box on something on the internet discovers that he's given away all his money to somebody in russia or something he hasn't read the small print yeah now as soon as he says that lord george is sort of great right well let's move on to these other little minor things the seas the coast will do a compromise by the way you can have your own tariffs we'll let you have that and he says why don't you have a new version of the oath that we all like which michael collins has drafted so now it's very complicated this is pure brexit negotiation kind of arcane hair spitting irish mps will swear allegiance to the king and i quote in virtue of the common citizenship of ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations.

53:03So they're kind of still swearing the oath. Yeah. After this, they have a break and Lloyd George says, all right, you need to make up your minds now. He says, this is now a matter of peace or war. And by the way, I require that all of you sign. It has to be unanimous. And now the supreme bit of Lloyd George melodrama. He gets that two envelopes and he puts them on the table and he says this first envelope is a statement that you've accepted the terms and he says the other one is their announcement that the talks have failed and that means and i quote war within three days he says i have standing ready a special train and a destroyer to take one of these letters to northern ireland's prime minister sir james craig in Belfast.

53:50Which of the two letters am I to send? I want your answer by 10 o 'clock tonight. He really is a wizard, isn't he? That's great stuff. It's brilliant performative politics. You know, it's very Hollywood. George is great at it. It's like kind of pulling two rabbits out of a hat. Exactly. So the Irish go back to Knightsbridge and they are absolutely stunned. Gretchen Freeman describes them being in a state of profound anger, despair and panic. Griffith says, fine, I'll sign. Collins says, I'll sign. This guy Duggan says he'll sign. Barson says, there's no way I'm signing. Gavin Duffy says, there's no way.

54:23What about Childers? Childers is the secretary. He doesn't get a signature. He doesn't get a say, but he's fuming on the margins basically the whole time. He's not in favour. He's not in favour at all. Then what follows, there's a huge row, a massive row. Barson described it later. He said that Collins and Griffith called us murderers. They stated we'd be hanged from lampposts that we destroy all they fought for basically collins and griffith wear the other blokes down and they say fine we'll sign it so they go back to downing street they're told they had to be about by 10 but they'd been arguing so long they didn't get there till about 11 when they arrived the british actually expected that they wouldn't do it and so griffith says fine we're all agreed we'll sign it lloyd george and his team absolutely delighted there's a bit of faffing around over the small print and at 10 past two in the morning of the 6th of december they sign the treaty and the irish delegates go out into the fog it's a very foggy day of course it's the 1920s it's london there's bound to be loads of fog they are silent they're exhausted they don't speak to the press they just get straight into their car all of them piling into this one car one of them getting in the boot and they go home and a few minutes later lord Birkenhead and Churchill come out with these massive cigars, smoking them on the steps of Downing Street.

55:41Looking like huge, great capitalist imperialists. Exactly. And Churchill, it's Churchill, of course, inevitably, who announces the deal to the world. So effectively, what you have is you're going to have two entities on the island of Ireland, the two entities that are there to this day, Northern Ireland with its six counties and the other 26, which become what's then called the Irish Free State, which is a literal translation of the Irish term Seerstort Éireann, which is a term that de Valera had sometimes used himself to describe the Republic. So in other words, the British have got the deal they always wanted.

56:16And I think there are two obvious winners. One is Lloyd George. He's, in inverted commas, solved the Irish question, and he's kept his coalition in power with himself at the top. And the other big winners, of course, are the Ulster Unionists. They have their six-county, two-thirds Protestant majority state, which is what they wanted. And there were two obvious groups of losers. So one of them is Unionists and Protestants in the south of Ireland. So actually people like Sir Edward Carson, who was the original leader of the Unionists. So they find themselves now in a nationalist Catholic-dominated Southern Ireland, kind of the Irish Free State, which is the one thing they'd always dreaded.

56:57And then the really big losers, the half a million Catholics who live in a Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. And as we will see in a future series that we'll do on the Troubles, they find themselves treated as second-class citizens in everything from politics to housing. As David Trimble, the Unionist leader in the 1990s, said, it was a cold house for Catholics. Now in Britain, people are delighted by the treaty. Lloyd George, when he briefs his cabinet, he says, I mean, this will surprise, I think, a lot of listeners to this show. He says, this is one of the greatest days in the history of the British Empire.

57:36We have fixed this problem and Ireland is still part of our family. The king sends him a telegram of congratulations. The stock market booms all his sweetness and light. But in Dublin, it is a very, very different story. When de Valera was told the deal had been signed, he said, what? They haven't checked with me. They're meant to have checked with me. What's going on? And someone hands him the text and he can't bring himself to read it. He is so appalled. And the problem with the deal for him and for his fellow hardliners is not the partition, I think. I mean, I think all the Irish historians would agree with this.

58:13They don't like a partition, but they never really expected they would get the whole island. That ship had sailed. the real issue is this key issue of principle which is the oath of allegiance to the british monarch so michael collins says come on these are just words who cares doesn't matter but to a lot of republicans they say we're subordinate to the british monarch really and betraying everything that our comrades fought for the ideal of independence come on so two days later the delegates get back and the irish cabinet meets and the atmosphere is unbelievably toxic de valera rips into Griffith and Collins.

58:50You should never have signed this without consulting me. And Griffith snaps back at him. He says, you didn't go to London. You refused to come. And this is the consequence. Now, the thing is, Griffith had broken his promise. He had said he wouldn't sign and he did sign it. But on the other hand, I think for me, I think De Valera was deranged to think that he could control the negotiations from Dublin. Or was he just playing a very, very long game? So Tom, by a long game, you mean, does he think there will be a civil war? he will lose it and then he will somehow get back into politics eventually.

59:20I don't think he thinks he'll lose it. I think maybe he thinks that the negotiations will happen. He will stand on the right side of history. The negotiators will fail. The British will have signed the treaty and so they won't have any appetite for war and he can just step in and be the hero. Yeah, I think he does think that. I think he thinks he will ride in at the end as the hero of the hour and he has been denied that opportunity because they have signed this treaty. There'll be some listeners who are more sympathetic to De Valera who say, you know, he was betrayed by his negotiators or whatever.

59:49Ronan Fanning, who's his biographer, accuses him of a gross evasion of the responsibilities of leadership. And I think, I mean, all this difference between Lloyd George and de Valera is Lloyd George takes personal control of the negotiations. They are his baby from start to finish. He runs them masterfully. De Valera washes his hands of them and refuses to get involved. And if you're a leader, you have to get involved, I would say. But just to stick up for De Valera, I mean, had the negotiations been happening in Dublin, then he might have turned up. Maybe. There is no parallel universe, by the way, in which those negotiations happen in Dublin.

1:00:23I know. Anyway, by the end of that day, Irish politics is already irretrievably divided. The cabinet voted by four to three, the Irish cabinet, to back the deal. And de Valera was furious and he issued a statement straight away. He said the deal is in violent conflict with the wishes of the majority of this nation, which is not actually, as it turns out, true. There's then an incredibly bitter debate in the Doyle which dragged on into January. On the one hand, you have the anti-treaty people who say you've betrayed the ideal of the Republic, you've betrayed all our friends who died. And on the other hand, you have most famously Collins.

1:00:57Collins really puts himself on the line defending this. He says, this is the best deal we could get. We're never going to win a war against the British. We've made the biggest step towards independence in Ireland's history. And he says, it doesn't give us everything we want, but famous quotation, it gives us the freedom to achieve it. the Doyle voted on the 7th of January and they voted by 64 votes to 57 to back the treaty de Valera led his supporters out of the chamber the next day and Colin shouts at them as they go out and he calls them deserters and his parting shot as de Valera and Erskine Childers go out of the chamber he goes for the worst insult in the Irish political lexicon he says foreigners Americans English Yeah because de Valera had been born in America and Childers of course was English Yeah So in the next few weeks the Republican movement tears itself apart even the IRA splits into competing factions and on the 14th of April 1922 about 150 armed IRA fighters anti-treaty faction occupy one of the biggest buildings in Dublin which is the Four Courts Legal Complex and they're doing this as a deliberate provocation to the new pro-treaty government of Griffith and Collins and indeed to the British.

1:02:16For the next few weeks, they are still there in this building and everybody is waiting and the tension is rising. And then on the 22nd of June, news arrives from London of an assassination on the streets of London in broad daylight that shocks the world and will change everything. Brilliant, Dominic. Thanks ever so much. So we will continue this story on Monday when we will be returning to Dublin and we'll be exploring the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in the very place where it begins in the heart of the Irish capital in the Four Courts Complex. And we will be joined there by the brilliant Ronan McGreevy.

1:02:58And if you want to get both those episodes on Monday, then you can do so by joining our very own elite negotiating team, The Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.