"PEACE is today declared": this ringing declaration, inserted at Winston Churchill's suggestion, opens the Craig Collins pact of March 30th, 1922, signed in London 75 years ago yesterday. The essence of the agreement was clear: IRA activity was to cease in the six Northern counties in exchange for radical measures designed to make security, legal and employment policy more acceptable to Catholics.
In the event, the pact fail to open a new era of North-South reconciliation and much recent comment has understandably, stressed the cynicism which underlay the apparent statesmanship of Sir James Craig - anxious above all to secure the good opinion of the British state and public opinion.
And, indeed, of Michael Collins - anxious above all not to allow the plight of Northern Catholics to be used against him by anti Treaty forces in the South. In the end, Craig gained much more from the exercise than Collins, but it does not follow that Craig, in unpredictable circumstances, masterminded this as the only possible outcome. Indeed, the broad principles which underpinned the Craig Collins discussions of 1922 have continuing relevance to any discussion of a historic compromise in Ireland.
Craig and Collins had their first serious discussions in London on January 21st, 1922. The success of the meetings astounded some contemporaries; many unionists regarded Collins as the assassin of their kith and kin in the South, while many nationalists saw Craig, as a triumphalist bigot. But it was not the" first time Craig had taken such a risk. He had shown a willingness to be guided by those British officials who early on favoured a compromise with Sinn Fein - Craig's meeting with de Valera in May 1921 was an early orchestrated part of the process which led to the signing of the Treaty.
At the London meeting Craig and Collins were to appoint representatives who would report back with the objective of allowing them "to mutually agree" any possible adjustments to the Border. Craig promised to facilitate, so far as economic conditions allowed, the return of the Catholic shipyard workers expelled from their jobs in the bitter summer of 1920. In response, Collins offered to end the southern boycott of Belfast goods, a matter of more political than economic importance as, perhaps, only 10 per cent of Belfast firms were seriously affected.
Interestingly, the two governments committed themselves to devising "a more suitable system than the Council of Ireland (signalled in the Government of Ireland Act 1920) for dealing with problems affecting all Ireland".
There was a jubilant public reaction in some quarters. The Co Cork Eagle declared the agreement was a sensation" - "scarcely second in importance to the Treaty, Sir James Craig and Michael Collins can never again, be to one another as they were". The Eagle was delighted about the new approach to co operation: "Whatever Mr Collins and Sir Craig may design, it will have the supreme advantage over the discarded Council of Ireland that it will be of Irish manufacture - racy of the soil and so better fitted for its work than the imported model designed by British officials".
The Observer foolishly headlined its report "Step to Irish Union" and this sort of language created significant difficulties for Sir James Craig with some of his supporters. Craig replied before a meeting of 500 leading unionists that it was his duty to "lead not follow". He seemed to acknowledge, to use modern parlance, that Britain had no selfish strategic or economic interest in partition, and that the decision to join with the South was for the people of the North alone: even that there might be an advantage in holding out a highly theoretical long term willingness to do so.
His purpose here was clear both to protect Southern unionists and to encourage them to "rally" to the Free State government: "It seems to me that we will be some little check on the hotheads in the South, if they know that by proclaiming the Republic, by trailing the Union Jack in the dust, by causing harm to the loyal people who belong to us, that they may put the clock back for a century as far as any hope of getting Ulster in is concerned, whereas as Lord Carson said in the House of Commons on a famous occasion: Ulster might be wooed, she can never be coerced.
Collins's defence was less eloquent and rather more ambiguous: "There were only two policies - peace or war. He and his colleagues were going to try the peace policy first. As Northern nationalists accused him of betrayal, he wilted under the pressure: after a second sour meeting with Craig in Dublin at the beginning of February The Irish Times was briefed "that the provisional government is dallying" with the "notion of war upon Ulster".
Aims continued to go north while Collins talked in public of the need for large movement of territory rather than just the predominantly nationalist townlands of Fermanagh which the unionists' were clearly willing to lose. Rapidly goodwill evaporated in a chapter of chronic errors and miscalculations on all sides. The British government delayed the announcement of the reprieve of the death sentence for three Derry IRA men just long enough for Collins to feel it necessary to sanction on February 7th and 8th a massive cross Border IRA hostage taking raid in which 42 loyalist prisoners were taken.
Then, three days later four BSpecials were killed following an IRA challenge at Clones station. While Border Protestants displayed restraint, those in Belfast did not: in March 35 Catholics and 18 Protestants were killed in the North. Appalled by this deterioration, senior figures in the Irish government allowed themselves to publicly support IRA violence in the North.
This was the context, with policemen being killed even as negotiations went on, of the British pressure which led to the second pact - designed principally to protect Collins against de Valera. It went further than the first in its effort to deal with specific Catholic grievances. Among its provisions was a complex clause, which attempted to reform the B Special Constabulary and to recruit Catholics into that force by means of an advisory committee - to which Collins was to make nominations.
Non-jury courts were to be established for serious crimes - only shortly before a Belfast jury in the face of apparently strong evidence had acquitted a loyalist for a murderous attack on Catholics at Mass. To side step Craig's difficulty in getting Catholics back to work in a hard economic climate the British government was prepared to supply a relief grant, not exceeding £500,000, one third of which was to go for the relief of Catholics and two thirds for Protestants.
On April 1st, a new cycle of violence opened up. Constable Turner was shot dead in Belfast by an IRA sniper. The immediate reaction was the appearance on the streets of loyalist mobs firing wildly, attacking Catholic houses and leaving behind scenes of death and destruction. Nationalists alleged security force involvement. In particular, emphasis was placed on the alleged role of DI Nixon, a rather undeniable thorn in Craig's flesh. Nixon on his own did not have the power to set the agenda - a recently opened file shows his impotent anger as the government pointedly promoted a Catholic policeman above him - but, in combination with IRA violence, he and the other grass roots sectarian loyalists had the capability to set serious problems for Craig and to generate further Catholic alienation.
On April 2nd, Collins defended the pact at Castlebar: "They must show that they could be practical upbuilders as well as idealists", but de Valera in Dundalk was right to say that the Belfast murders already made it a "scrap of paper": by June the government organ, The Free State, which had once praised Craig, was referring to "government by animals" in the North and Collins spoke of a "very definite endeavour to restore the old ascendancy".
STEPHEN GWYNN, the Protestant nationalist and former Redmondite MP, offered an interesting analysis. He had been inclined to blame Craig's bad faith (particularly in the matter of getting Catholics back to work) for the failure of the first pact but this time, he insisted, "it looks as if the strategists had decided Ulster's interest was peace". After all, he reasoned, it was obvious that continued IRA Border raids were bound to produce a dramatic British response in favour of the Ulster unionists - as happened when the British expelled the Free State forces from Pettigo in June 1922 - and, knowing this, if "Ulster wanted war, Ulster only had to wait". He believed that Southern Orange leaders had played a role along with moderate Northern nationalists, like Joe Devlin, in brokering the deal. The message was clear: "Generous recognition for differing interests without regard to their numerical strength is the saving formula for Ireland.
Northern Catholics now had the"chance of their lives to work the new joint committee. However, many important Northern nationalists, including some nominated by Collins to the new committee, did not agree - insisting that the unionists worked the new body in bad faith and hankering, anyway, after the destruction of the Northern state.
As for Craig, as IRA attacks continued, his efforts and those of his officials shifted from any serious attempt to implement the terms of the pact to demonstrating to the British government - with the extensive evidence, including captured documents, that was to hand - that Collins and the IRA had not kept their side of the bargain. A conclusion in the end accepted by S. G. Tallents in his crucial report for the British cabinet, despite Tallents's reservations about the partisan nature of Craig's colleagues: "I have no doubt that the failure to give effect to Clause 6 of the Craig Collins agreement, which provided for the cessation of IRA activity in the six counties, was the major cause of its failure.
Something was undeniably lost. By the end of April it was the Dublin government which withdrew from the ministerial contacts designed to lead to "working agreements for joint action" in matters which affect both governments. The unionist Northern Whig lamented: "But friendly co operation between North and South - is not only perfectly practicable but necessary." As Protestant numbers in the South dropped rapidly, Craig himself became more "little Ulsterist" and sectarian in outlook. Protestant patrimonalism, always a part of his political make up - he had personally paid for the superior rations given to the Co Down men under his command in the Boer War - became the dominating part. Only this time he played with the State's funds rather than his own.
But at a moment when a willingness to envisage a new level of North South co operation must be part of any possible negotiated settlement, we are not well served with a version of history - promoted both by extreme republicans and hardline unionists - which exaggerates unionist intransigence and unwillingness to do a deal in the past. Today no unionist leader has the incentive (which Craig had) of helping the Southern loyalist population but, on the other hand, the commitment of the Irish government to the principle of consent is unambiguous in a way that it was not in the time of Michael Collins.
