Irish Free State within the British dominions a legal claim to a suzerainty over the whole of Ireland. Even more problematic was that Eoin O’Duffy, in his capacity as co-director of policing in Ulster, was acting as a fierce critic of the partiality of Craig’s prospective northern Irish administration.137 This fact would soon make Ulster unionists adamant that a condition of the establishment of an Irish Free State must be a legal declaration by Dublin that all republican political movements, including the secret IRB (of which O’Duffy, Collins and reputedly Griffith were also members), were illegal.138
The Irish negotiating team signed ‘articles of agreement for a treaty’ with London on 6 December 1921 on the understanding that the agreement would be binding only if it were subsequently approved by both Dáil Éireann and the Westminster parliament. A month later, the Dáil voted narrowly to accept the agreement, prompting the election of Griffith, rather than de Valera, as president. Michael Collins assumed the role as chairman of a temporary ‘Provisional Government’ to facilitate an administrative transfer of powers from London to an Irish Free State government. During the treaty debates and afterwards, Griffith and Collins deemed its principal selling points to be the agreement’s status as a guarantor that all British armed forces would legally have to be withdrawn from the proposed Irish Free State’s jurisdiction, and that the Dáil would have the capacity to exercise complete Irish fiscal autonomy and parliamentary sovereignty.139 However, the treaty debates were characterised by comparatively little reflections on either issues of sovereignty or international affairs, with most members of the Dáil evidently being concerned solely with how they would be perceived by their constituents. Partly for this reason, Erskine Childers, who subsequently became a spokesman for de Valera’s supporters who opposed the agreement, was of note for placing particular emphasis on Britain’s retention of three western Irish ports as a probable negation of Ireland’s right to exercise any independence in international relations.140 Griffith evidently came to believe that Ireland’s membership of the British Commonwealth could serve to guarantee its equal right to exercise an independent voice in international relations,141 although in doing so he would seem to have underestimated the extent to which that commonwealth invariably spoke with a united political voice. By contrast, Collins argued that while ‘the expression “common citizenship” in the treaty is not ideal’, ‘it does not attempt to confine Ireland’s mother [country] claims to the states of the British Commonwealth’.142 In making this argument, he was evidently thinking of the potential value of the planned ‘World Conference of the Irish Race’ in Paris, after which de Valera would return to the Irish parliament to highlight various other issues.
France welcomed the Anglo-Irish agreement. While Le Figaro inaccurately predicted that the Irish would soon outdo the French republic in abolishing all aristocratic titles,143 the French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, on accepting a suggestion from Michael MacWhite, invited the Dáil’s delegation to the World Conference of the Irish Race to the French Foreign Office at the Quay D’Orsay. On this occasion, Poincaré recalled ‘the secular friendship that existed between Ireland and France in the past’ and expressed his gladness that now that Ireland had reached an agreement with Britain he could express his sympathy for the Irish government ‘without offending the susceptibilities of his English allies’.144 At the time of the Parisian conference, an American-born Óglaigh na hÉireann army officer J.J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell, who was deemed by the French as ‘the only competent army expert in Ireland’, visited the French War Ministry in the hope of initiating an agreement whereby an Irish army would purchase most its armaments from Parisian suppliers.145 British forces, however, had not yet even begun to withdraw from the country, making this a premature action. As a result, George Gavan Duffy, the Dáil’s new minister for foreign affairs, chastised both O’Connell and MacWhite.146 This reflected a definite reality about the Anglo-Irish agreement for a treaty. Although the Dáil had ratified it in January 1922, Westminster would not even vote on it until December 1922, placing an unknown moratorium upon its eventual implementation.
Katherine Hughes and Thomas Hughes Kelly had been in Paris since the autumn of 1921 laying the basis for the weeklong conference and the associated art, drama and music festivals. This was done with support from Robert Brennan, an under-secretary of the department of foreign affairs, and Art O’Brien, the Dáil’s London consul who also liaised with the Irish in the British dominions. A sad reality for the Parisian conference, however, was that although delegates were originally expected from every American state, aside from Hughes and Kelly, the only North American attendee would be de Valera’s Catholic business friend John Castellini, an Italian American. Aside from the location (Paris), this happened because American political opinion was focused almost entirely upon the Washington Naval Conference. The lack of American attendance gave the conference a very imbalanced profile, with just six representatives from the Americas, including three from South America, and an extraordinarily high number of representatives from Britain, namely, thirty members of the Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain, which almost doubled the representation from Ireland itself.147 Furthermore, tensions developed quickly at the conference because the London representative Art O’Brien determined that the British delegates should vote en bloc on all proposals with a view to making the proposed global Irish organisation, to be established in the wake of the conference, both independent of the Dáil’s department of foreign affairs as well as politically opposed to the whole treaty agreement. This evoked protests from the Australian, South African, Argentinian and New Zealand representatives (totalling five representatives), who were in favour of Ireland being a member of the British Commonwealth and reported that they were unwilling to cooperate with a movement such as O’Brien suggested.148 A compromise agreement was soon arranged, but not without controversy.
Eoin MacNeill, who was intended to be minister of education in Dublin and acted as a representative of the Dáil cabinet in Paris, found some reasonable fault with the whole planning of the conference: P.J. Little, a member of the governing body of UCD who de Valera had previously sent to South Africa, appointed many proxy delegates. More controversially, MacNeill judged that Robert Brennan, on resigning as under-secretary of the department of foreign affairs, was attempting to use the conference not for the purpose for which the department of foreign affairs had funded the conference – the creation of a global Irish organisation – but instead to create a new Irish party political movement specifically in Britain to campaign against the treaty agreement.149 Reflecting this, de Valera and Childers were already launching a company in Manchester called Equity Press to publish Poblacht na hÉireann newspapers. This included a Glasgow paper called Éire: the Irish Nation (edited by P.J. Little) with a stated editorial policy of calling on the Irish in Britain to actively campaign in British party politics for a revision of the treaty agreement.150 Quite illogically, de Valera had even suggested to Brennan that he should concentrate on creating ‘an entente between ourselves, the Scotch, Welsh and the overseas dominions as if they were nations independent of England’.151 The incongruity of this whole situation was judged by MacNeill to be reflected most by the choice of a mere seven-man executive for the global Irish organisation, to be known as ‘Fine Gaedhael’, in which he was to be the only representative of the Dáil cabinet. This idea originated with Harry Boland who, as the Dáil’s former representative in the United
