LITMIR.BIZ

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and the opposing military leaderships established joint committees committed to seeking unity. In early May, it emerged that five senior Munster IRA officers, Dan Breen, Sean O’Hegarty, Sean Moylan, Florence O’Donoghue and Tom Hales, were negotiating with the Free State Army leadership and called publicly for army unification based on ‘the acceptance of the fact, admitted by all sides, that the majority of the people of Ireland are willing to accept the Treaty’, and proposing a non-contested general election and the formation of a coalition government.82 The peace moves were immediately repudiated by the Four Courts IRA Executive and resulted in the resignations of O’Hegarty, O’Donoghue and Hales.

      Mellows participated in army re-unification talks led by Liam Lynch and Eoin O’Duffy that brought together senior officers from both sides.83 This new round of talks saw prisoners released and the anti-Treaty forces agreeing to leave several positions it occupied around Dublin. The talks envisaged a unified army launching a joint offensive against the Crown Forces in Northern Ireland, if anti-Treaty republicans were willing to serve under a chief of staff nominated by the Free State Minister for Defence. For the militant faction within the republican executive, however, the offer was seen as tantamount to surrender. Mellows continued to attend meetings of Dáil Éireann until its dissolution in May, speaking on the failed attempts at army unity in two short speeches on 3 and 17 May. On 3 May, he made a short, defiant speech rejecting the terms the Free State Army leadership were offering to secure reunification of the army as ‘plainly another political dodge’:

      As I stated here in this House last week, the cause of disunity in the country and in the army was the signing of the Treaty, and so long as that Treaty remains, as long as it is tried to be forced down the throats of people who will not become British subjects, so long you cannot hope for unity either in the army or in the country. This proposal that is put forward now would come very well indeed if it came from people who were acknowledged Free Staters, because it is a Free State document.

      What is happening in the country? This threat of civil war, this dissension, is all the result of the political chicanery that is going on and of the attempt to turn this grand national movement, of which we heard some nice words from one of the Deputies a few moments ago, into a game of political humbug – this movement that was an honest movement and a straight movement, a movement of principle, to turn it into the sea of Party politics, to try to get the people of this country who are pledged to a Republic, to desert the Republic on the plea that they may get the Republic sometime, and overthrow the Declaration of Independence upon which Ireland’s claim for a Republic rests.

      The blame lies on those who have deserted the Republic, who have betrayed the Republic and who would endeavour to make their comrades betray the Republic as well. Now the Republic exists. It is here still and the army, whether in whole or in part, will still stand by the Republic.

      No man is going to die for hypocrisy. No man is going to throw his life away for humbug and if this is what the cause is going to come to, then certainly some of us will not have anything to do with it.84

      In the first week of May, the so-called ‘committee of ten’, comprising five TDs from either side of the Treaty split, met to discuss ways of preventing a conflict. Mellows was appointed to the republican panel, alongside Harry Boland, Sean Moylan, Kathleen Clarke and P.J. Ruttledge, with Sean Hales, Pádraic Ó Máille, Joseph McGuinness, Seamus O’Dwyer and Sean MacEoin representing their pro-Treaty counterparts.85 The committee reported back to the Dáil on 10 May, having failed to reach any basis for national unity. Peace proposals were debated in the Dáil again on 17 May, with the so-called pact election agreed two days later, postponing a direct vote on the Treaty and declaring an undertaking on both sides to put forward an agreed panel of candidates to reflect their existing strengths in Dáil Éireann. It was proposed that a new constitution would be produced and a coalition executive formed comprising both pro- and anti-Treaty members. On this occasion, Mellows made another characteristically hard-line speech:

      Our idea of a coalition was a coalition formed to save the national honour, a coalition formed to preserve the position of Ireland – the position she entered upon on the 21st January 1919. We went in, if possible to try and save that situation and reconcile it with the present situation we find in the country. We did not go there to make any bargain over seats in this Dáil, which we have no right to bargain about.

      Seats mean nothing to us. The Republic meant everything to us. That Declaration of Independence meant everything to us. If it was a question of unity being based upon ten or eleven seats, the manly way for that to be done would be for those of us who are prepared, as I am, to resign in order to let anybody else have that seat, provided the principle is not impugned.

      The nation’s honour comes before the nation’s life. Other nations have found themselves in such positions. Some have backed down and have gone the way that such nations deserve. Others have faced it and put their faith where we are prepared to put ours, despite the British Empire. We are prepared to put our faith in God and as long as Ireland did that in the last six years she won respect.86

      While both sides of the Treaty divide moved further from agreement in the first six months of 1922, the anti-Treaty IRA was itself splintering with the decisive breach occurring at a hastily convened army convention on 18 June, called to discuss the progress of talks on the proposed army unification agreement. The urgency was explained by the executive’s anxiety that Liam Lynch ‘had agreed to certain proposals which, if accepted, would have given complete control of the army to the Free State government’.87 Mellows delivered a ‘very depressing speech which showed clearly that there was a very big split in the executive’ between a largely Cork-based group, including Lynch, Liam Deasy and Sean Moylan, and the Dublin-based faction that rejected Lynch’s proposals, centred around Rory O’Connor and Ernie O’Malley.88 The executive rejected Lynch’s proposal to allow the Free State to appoint the chief of staff of a unified army by a majority of fourteen votes to four. To counter the proposals, the West Cork flying column leader Tom Barry proposed a motion that an ultimatum be given to Britain to withdraw all its forces from Ireland within seventy-two hours of a given date. Barry’s proposal was designed to quash Lynch’s attempt to unify the army, which the militants perceived as an acceptance of the Treaty. Republican officer Sean MacBride believed that Barry ‘hardly realised to the full extent the meaning or importance of the proposals under discussion’ and Mellows and O’Connor ‘saw the huge mistake it had been for Barry to bring forward such a proposal to a convention; but who, at the same time, understood that this was the best, or rather the only policy, that could be consistently followed by us’.89 ‘Everybody was depressed and solemn’, MacBride recalled, but ‘it was far better to break off quits from those who were prepared to compromise on such a vital question, that of control of the army, and of the working of the Treaty’.

      Barry’s motion was defeated, but upon Lynch’s compromise motion being proposed, the rump of hard-line republican officers stormed out of the meeting and reconvened in the Four Courts. Lynch and the other Munster officers who had supported the unity resolution were now excluded by the militant faction from even entering the Four Courts, with the latter ostensibly setting themselves up as a separate entity, electing Belfast republican Joe McKelvey as their chief of staff – there were now two rival IRA leaderships. Republican Todd Andrews initially pledged his allegiance to the Four Courts Executive but was disgusted with the turn of events, believing Barry’s motion to be ‘the daftest proposal yet conceived by a floundering executive, but to so many of the youthful, immature delegates it did not seem so lunatic’. ‘The Four Courts Garrison had amputated their most powerful limb, effectively isolating themselves in the last bastion of the Republic.’90 Mellows remained outwardly hopeful despite the split, however, and Sighle Bean Uí Dhonnchadha recalled that a week before the attack on the Four Courts by the Free State, which began the Civil War, he ‘seemed to be in an unusually cheerful mood. Outlining to me how the two sides hoped to sink their differences through united action on the North.’91

      ‘The end of sentimentality’

      Following a series of incidents between the pro- and anti-Treaty Forces in the capital that saw both sides take rival officers prisoner, the National Army commenced the shelling of the Four Courts garrison in the early hours of 28 June.92 On the morning of the attack, Rory O’Connor issued a communique

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