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The explosion in Dublin’s Four Courts which scattered the papers of centuries of English misgovernment in Ireland, was, naturally, a disappointment for serious students of history. But it may have had its compensations. Imagine how one might feel, if one found out that an honoured ancestor, had been an informer, a spy or an Agent Provocateur for that cruel and tyrannous regime?
As it happens, there was at the time of the Four Courts explosion a Diarist who had long been keeping a political Diary, had been for some years a Liberal MP at Westminster, an experienced Journalist and confidante of leading politicians in these islands. It could be said of him, as was said of a daughter of a Special Clinician, that he knew all the men that mattered.
The Diarist was C.P.Scott an MP from 1895 to 1906 Editor of THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN from 1872 to 1929 and its owner from1907 until his death in 1932. An edited selection from 1911 to 1928 totalling less than 500 pages is a virtual goldmine even for someone concerned with Irish issues only. But there are many more.
A lot being written now about Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith is unadulterated twaddle. Scott was not writing his diary for propaganda at the time. He considered himself a democrat but his aim was keep Ireland in permanent subjection to Britain.
Asquith and Balfour, MacDonald and Bonar Law. Lloyd George and Churchill, Carson and T.P.O’Connor, John Dillon and John Redmond and Joe Devlin.
Scott was most closely involved with Lloyd George and in 1922 was not merely a journalist but a key agent in bendiing the Irish delegation into signing Articles of Agreement under threat of war. Scott and Lloyd George considered Michael Collins a likeable, “uneducated and rather stupid man” and Lloyd George regarded the whole Irish Delegation as “only children – not one man of any account among them”
Lloyd George was angry about the influence of Erskine Childers, a Secretary to the delegation, but did not categorise him as either uneducated or stupid.
Lloyd George boasted that if he had ” Collins and Griffith alone to deal with could settle in five minutes.”
Collins and Griffith proved putty in Lloyd George’s hands. (Cathal Brugha, not privy to Scott’s Diary, which first saw the light in 1961, remarked in Dail Eireann that Lloyd George had picked his men..
It seems to me that Collins, an IRB man from his teens, failed to appreciate that the voters’ establishment of Dail Eireann, responsible to them, made conspiracy inexcusable.
And, when it came to the crunch Arthur Griffith clung to his Hungarian dream of a Dual Monarchy, after the Austro-Hungarian model had been destroyed.
Collins and Griifith, though they had signed Artcles of Agreement in (with ) London together were at Cross Purposes when de Valera resigned Presidency of the Dail.
Collins waged a war in the North against the British where “pro-Treaty” and “anti-Treaty” foces worked as one army. “Anti-Treaty” forces evacuated a number of posts and were prepared to leave the Four Courts.But Dick Mulcahy laughed and advised Rory O’Connor to hold the For Courts, so the Brits wouldn’t realise that he (Mulcahy) and Collins were double-crossing them.
The shooting of Field Marshal Wilson was almost certainly done on Collins’s ordrers. Churchill ordered Collins to attack the Four Courts and Collins complied.
De Valera had nothing to do with the war in the North. Nor had Griffith. Griffith had for months been trying to have “pro-Treaty” troops, paid and armed by the British, to crush the troops who had stuck with the Republic when the Republican Parliament (by a tiny majority) failed to reject the “Treaty.”
Dail Eireann diid not ratify the “Treaty”
Ratification came from an irregular “parliament of Southern Ireland” summoned by a British Lord with no Irish Connections.
And it chose Michael Collins as Its Chairman.
It seems to me that while Griffith and Collins reverted to outdated notions, Erskine Childers reacted in a more enlightened way.
He started off a dyed in the wool Imperialst and fought in the Second South African War. In 1903 he was a propagandist for a war to smash Germany, Germany was seen as a trade rival and the idea was around for years. Neither under the Kaisers nor under Hitler was there a serious German intention of invading Britain. The Riddle of the Sands was pure hokum.
In 1904 the secret Committee of Imperial Defence was founded by A.J.Balfour, the Entente Cordiale was made with France and preparations for war set in train.
Childers came to believe in Irish Home Rule and when the Tories and Ulster Unionists prepared for rebellion against the British Government, Childers landed rifles in Howth to oppose them. Within less than a week Childers was back in uniform and fighting against Germany.
In 1917 he was Secretary to the IRISH CONVENTION, a forum set up by Lloyd George to fool the Americans that Britain was serious about democracy in Ireland. Childers was converted to Republicanism, as was his cousin Robert Barton, who at Easter 1916, as an Officer in the British Army helped to suppress the Insurrection.
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