Criticism of Michael Collins for signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London in 1921 failed to recognise the narrow window of time in which the Irish negotiators were working, Independent Senator Michael McDowell has said.
McDowell, who writes an opinion column for The Irish Times, delivered the oration at the annual Collins Griffith Commemoration at Glasnevin Cemetery on Sunday. He said detractors of the Treaty – which led to the foundation of the State but also to a bitter split in the republican leadership – had not grasped how precarious a position David Lloyd George’s Liberal government found itself in.
“The very precarity of the Lloyd George coalition, and the very real probability of the Conservative and Unionist Party becoming the sole and utterly hostile interlocutor with Irish nationalism – as happened not much later in 1922 – were well known to Collins and Griffith. So were the implications,” said McDowell.
“They clearly understood that the substance of Irish independence might so easily have trickled away through the hesitant fingers of Ireland’s leaders if it were rejected by reference to its form rather than its substance.
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“They understood the responsibility that lay on those who had to choose between establishing Irish independence or joining the long line of patriots who had failed to deliver it.”
McDowell argued that Collins and President Arthur Griffith had envisaged the development of Ireland’s modern democracy. He said its success in many ways may even have surpassed what they regarded as its potential at the time.
