Anglo-Irish Treaty

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Signature page of the Anglo-Irish Treaty

The Anglo-Irish Treaty, officially called the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty Between Great Britain and Ireland, was a treaty between the Government of the United Kingdom and representatives of the (extra-judicial) Irish Republic which concluded the Irish War of Independence. It established an Irish dominion within the British Empire known as the Irish Free State and provided an option for the previously existing Northern Ireland, created by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, to opt out of the Irish Free State, which it duly exercised.

The treaty was signed in London by representatives of the British government and envoys plenipotentiary of the Irish Republic (i.e., negotiators empowered to sign a treaty without reference back to their superiors) on December 6, 1921. Three-fold ratification of the treaty by Dáil Éireann, the House of Commons of Southern Ireland and the British Parliament was required. The Irish side was split on the Treaty, and it was only narrowly ratified in the Dáil. Though duly enacted, the split produced the Irish Civil War which was ultimately won by the pro-treaty side.

The Irish Free State created by the Treaty came into force on 6 December 1922 by royal proclamation, after its constitution was enacted by the Third Dáil and the British parliament.

Content of the Treaty

• British forces would withdraw from most of Ireland.
• Most of Ireland was to become a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, like Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand and The Union of South Africa.

Éamon de Valera, who as President of the Republic opposed the Treaty. He later regarded this opposition as his biggest mistake.

• As with the other dominions, the head of state of the Irish Free State / Saorstát Éireann would be the British monarch, who would be represented by a Governor General (See Representative of the Crown).
• Members of the new Free State's parliament would be required to take an Oath of Allegiance to the Free State. A secondary part of the Oath was to "be faithful to His Majesty King George V., his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship" as part of the Treaty settlement.
• Northern Ireland (which had been created earlier by the Government of Ireland Act) was to have the option of withdrawing from the Irish Free State within one month of the Treaty coming into effect.
• If Northern Ireland chose to withdraw, a Boundary Commission would be constituted to draw the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.
• Britain, for its own security, would continue to control a limited number of ports, known as the Treaty Ports, for the Royal Navy.
• The Irish Free State would assume responsibility for its part of the Imperial debt.
• The Treaty would have superior status in Irish law: in the event of a conflict between it and the new 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, it would take precedence.

Page from a draft of the Treaty, as annotated by Arthur Griffith

Negotiators of the Treaty

• David Lloyd George, MP

(British Prime Minister)

Detail and background

Eamon de Valera sent the Irish plenipotentiaries to the 1921 negotiations in London with several draft treaties and secret instructions from the cabinet. The first two weeks of the negotiations were spent in formal sessions. Upon the request of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, the two delegations began informal negotiations, in which only two members of each negotiating team were allowed to attend. On the Irish side, these members were always Collins and Griffith, while on the British side, Neville Chamberlain always attended, though the second British negotiator would vary from day to day. In late December, the Irish delegation returned to Dublin to consult the cabinet according to their instructions. When they returned, Collins and Griffith hammered out the final details of the treaty, which included British concessions on the wording of the oath and the defence and trade clauses, along with the addition of a Boundary Commission to the treaty and a clause upholding Irish unity. Collins and Griffith in turn convinced the other plenipotentiaries to sign the treaty. Upon Eamon de Valera's hearing of the signing the next day, he issued a statement calling a cabinet meeting to discuss the treaty. At the end of the cabinet meeting, de Valera came out against the treaty.

Arthur Griffith
Minister for Foreign Affairs, Leader of the Irish delegation

The contents of the Treaty divided the Irish Republic's leadership, with the President of the Republic, Eamon de Valera, leading the anti-Treaty minority. The main dispute was centred on the status as a dominion (as represented by the Oath of Allegiance and Fidelity) rather than as an independent republic. Partition, though certainly a factor, was not the most important; both sides believed that the Boundary Commission would transfer many large nationalist areas to the Free State, reducing Northern Ireland's size so as to make it too small to be a viable political entity, leading to Irish unity. (In fact, the commission made no changes, despite the wishes of hundreds of thousands who found themselves left under British jurisdiction.)

The Second Dáil formally ratified the Treaty in December 1921. (The House of Commons of Southern Ireland, which was made up largely of the same membership as the Dáil, but which was in British constitutional theory the parliament legally empowered to ratify the Treaty, did so in January 1922.) De Valera resigned as President and was replaced by Arthur Griffith. Michael Collins formed a Provisional Government of Ireland theoretically answerable to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland, as the Treaty laid down. In December 1922 a new Irish constitution was enacted by the Third Dáil, sitting as a Constituent Assembly.

David Lloyd George
Prime Minister and head of the British delegation

Opponents of the Treaty mounted a military campaign of opposition which produced the Irish Civil War (1922–23). In 1922 its two main Irish signatories, President Griffith and Michael Collins, both died. Griffith died partially from exhaustion; Collins, at the signing of the Treaty, had said that in signing it, he may have signed his "actual death warrant", and he was correct: he was assassinated by anti-Treaty republicans in Béal na mBláth in August 1922, barely a week after Griffith's death. Both men were replaced in their posts by William T. Cosgrave.

The Treaty's provisions relating to the monarch, governor-general and the treaty's own superiority in law were all deleted from the Constitution of the Irish Free State in 1932, following the enactment of the Statute of Westminster by the British Parliament. The Statute provided that all dominions extant or newly created thereafter were fully independent of the United Kingdom and thus not subject to any acts of the British Parliament. (The sole exception to this was Canada, at her own request, who remained nominally subject to the British Parliament until 1982, because the federal and provincial governments could not agree on an amending formula for the Canadian Constitution.) Thus, the Government of the Irish Free State was free to change any laws previously passed by the British Parliament on their behalf.

Nearly thirty years earlier, Michael Collins had argued that the Treaty would give "the freedom to achieve freedom". De Valera himself acknowledged the accuracy of this claim both in his actions in the 1930s but also in words he used to describe his opponents and their securing of independence during the 1920s. "They were magnificent", he told his son in 1932, just after he had entered government and read the files left by Cosgrave's Cumann na nGaedheal Executive Council.

Michael Collins, Minister for Finance, deputy leader of the Irish delegation. He was assassinated less than eight months later.

Most people in Ireland today, including members of de Valera's own party, Fianna Fáil, agree that it was a mistake to oppose the Treaty and that it was the best deal possible in the circumstances. Although the British government of the day had, since 1914, desired home rule for the whole of Ireland, the British Parliament believed that it could not possibly grant complete independence to all of Ireland in 1921 without provoking a massacre of Ulster Catholics at the hands of their heavily-armed Protestant Unionist neighbours. At the time, although there were Unionists throughout the country, they were concentrated in the northeast. An uprising by them against home rule would have been an insurrection against the "mother county" as well as a civil war in Ireland. (See Ulster Volunteer Force). Dominion status for 26 counties, with partition for the six counties that the Unionists felt they could comfortably control, seemed the best compromise possible at the time.

In fact, what Ireland received in dominion status, on par with that enjoyed by Canada, New Zealand and Australia, was far more than the Home Rule Act 1914 (negotiated and won, albeit through democratic parliamentary procedure by the Irish Parliamentary Party leaders John Redmond and John Dillon), and certainly a considerable advance on the Home Rule once offered to Charles Stewart Parnell in the nineteenth century.

Further, though it was not generally realised at the time, the Irish Republican Army was in trouble. It had little ammunition or weaponry left. When Collins first heard that the British had called a Truce in mid-1921, following King George V's appeal for reconciliation at the opening of the Parliament of Northern Ireland under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, he commented: "We thought they were mad". The British, though they may never have realised it, were weeks, perhaps even days away from inflicting severe losses on an exhausted IRA; though, even if they had, it is unlikely that some form of autonomy in excess of home rule would not have been achieved, given the extent to which the Irish population had turned its back on continuing British rule. It is also doubtful that British public opinion would have tolerated the larger and more frequent atrocities this would have entailed.

Winston Churchill
Secretary of State for the Colonies, a member of the British delegation.

De Valera was once asked in a private conversation what had been his biggest mistake. His answer was blunt: "Not accepting the Treaty". Current Taoiseach (prime minister and leader of Fianna Fáil) Bertie Ahern has conceded that the date that marks the real achievement of independence is 1922, when the Irish Free State created by the Anglo-Irish Treaty came into being, as this brought about British and international recognition of Irish independence.

Further reading

• Lord Longford, Peace By Ordeal (long out of print)
• Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins (ISBN 0091741068)
• Tim Pat Coogan, DeValera (ISBN 009175030X)

See also

• Fianna Fáil
• Fine Gael
• Irish Free State
• Michael Collins
• Eamon de Valera
• Irish Civil War

• Treaty of Limerick (1691)
• Sunningdale Agreement (1973)
• Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985)
• Belfast Agreement (1998)

Trivia

• Robert Barton was the last surviving signatory. He died on August 10, 1975 at the age of 94.

External links

• [Anglo-Irish Treaty] — full text of the treaty from the National Archive of Ireland
• [Contemporaneous record of the debate on the Treaty in Dáil Éireann].

Pre-Union

UK Acts

Constitutions

Oireachtas Acts

Treaties

The Irish Free State (1922-1937)
Anglo-Irish Treaty | Provisional Government | Constitution of the Irish Free State | Statute of Westminster | Great Seal of the Irish Free State | Monarchy in the Irish Free State
Executive King of Ireland | Governor-General | President of the Executive Council | Vice-President of the Executive Council | Executive Council | Extern Minister | Ministers and Secretaries Act | His Majesty's Government in the Irish Free State
''Legislative: Oireachtas of Saorstát Éireann (made up of the King of Ireland, Dáil Éireann & Seanad Éireann) | Royal Assent | Ceann Comhairle | Cathaoirleach | Oath of Allegiance | Governor-General's Address to the Oireachtas
Judiciary Supreme Court | High Court | Chief Justice | Courts of Justice Act, 1924
Other topics: General elections: 1922 | 1923 | 1927 (June) | 1927 (Sept) 1932 | 1933 | 1937 See also: External Relations Act | Executive Powers (Consequential Provisions) Act | Constitution (Amendment No. 27) Act

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