Fergus Finlay: To blink, to ink: I feel for Collins and the pressure he was under in 1921

One hundred years on from the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty it is worth recalling that tactics often matter more than substance when negotiating with the British

Patrick Mayhew, John Major, John Bruton and Dick Spring with a Framework for the Future of Northern Ireland that was fundamental to laying the groundwork for the Good Friday Agreement.

So, it’s 100 years since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was signed, and we’re still talking about it. Who was right, who was wrong? Who were the better negotiators? Who blinked?

Our State wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the treaty. Neither, of course, would Northern Ireland. The two most dominant political parties in our Republic throughout most of our history wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Treaty.

There can be no denying that the decision taken in the small hours of December 6 exactly a century ago, by a small team of worn-out men who had been put under the most intense pressure, had its consequences.

But things change. Ireland is not the country that Collins and Griffith went to London for. It’s not a Free State, it’s a republic. It’s not a small dependent agricultural economy — it’s one of the richest countries in the world. In that 100 years Ireland has become not by any means a world power, but a significant world player.

Along the way, we’ve overcome the kind of crises that would sink many — emigration, unemployment, recession, depression, 30 years of a bloody internecine conflict. They all left scars, but we came through them all. There’ll be scars left by the Covid pandemic too, but we’re dealing with that better than most, and we’ll come through it as well.

Without the Treaty, maybe that resilience, that ability to deal with crisis, wouldn’t have happened either.

As a lad, I grew up admiring Michael Collins because he was dashing, and disliking Éamon de Valera because he was cold. As an adult, I came to realise that I would never want to follow either of those men. But I’ve never lost sympathy for the dilemmas they faced, nor the choices they had to make. Especially Collins.

I’ve tried to imagine sometimes what must have gone through Collins’ head at the end of those negotiations.

From everything I’ve read, it’s clear that he was the target of the British side throughout, and especially the target of Lloyd George. The British prime minister believed he had to have Collins’ signature on the documents, or they’d be worthless.

So when he talked about immediate and terrible war, it was Collins he was aiming at. When he waved letters in the year and said he had a warship waiting to take one or the other to James Craig, it was Collins he was aiming at. All the time pushing Collins to believe that his choices, and his alone, could cause a war between Protestant and Catholic that would drown the island of Ireland in its own blood.

Collins chose to sign, and maybe he blinked. Despite being part of a team, he was probably more alone in that moment than at any time in his life. I’m pretty sure that if it had been me in that moment, I’d have blinked too.

They were dirty negotiations. As I got older, and more involved, I learned that nearly all negotiations with the British are dirty negotiations. Tactics always matter more than substance with them. It’s always about winning, never about reconciling differences. That’s the negotiating style that led Britain into what will come to be seen as the terrible historic mistake of Brexit, and they’re still employing that approach to this day in relation to the Northern Ireland protocol.

Yes, there are differences to be reconciled — but all the British are after is a piece of paper that can be waved in the air.

And it leads them into mistakes. Often terrible ones, like Brexit. John Major, who did a lot right, made a terrible mistake in 1996 because the process of negotiations mattered more than the outcome, because he had to be seen to win.

There was an IRA ceasefire in place then, but it was hanging by a thread. The British had insisted from the start of the ceasefire that they had to have a victory on the issue of decommissioning of weapons. The Irish Government back then came up with the idea of an international body on decommissioning, and the British were persuaded to accept it.

At the end of January 1996 that international body issued its first report. When John Major stood up to address the report in the House of Commons, all he had to do really was to thank the body for a report of simplicity and clarity, and give them the time and space to get on with their work. Instead he made a speech that was widely seen as binning the last remaining attempt to give peace a chance — picking and choosing the bits of the report he could stomach. A few days later, the IRA went back to war.

It was John Bruton as Taoiseach who had to pick up those pieces, and he did. Eventually an agreement was put in place to allow for all-party talks, and I was part of a delegation that went to London, headed by Dick Spring, to finally agree the rules for those talks, and particularly how thorny issues like consensus could be defined.

After a very long meeting that ran late into the night, Dick Spring and Patrick Mayhew, British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, arrived at a formula that reconciled the differences between us pretty effectively. The following day our delegation, now consisting only of public servants (because Dick Spring was in Buckingham Palace with President Robinson), went to the Northern Ireland Office in London to tie up some loose ends.

That’s when we discovered that John Major had torn up the agreement made between Spring and Mayhew, and had written his own, which we were supposed to agree to there and then. To the obvious astonishment of the British side, the leader of our delegation, a great Irish civil servant called Seán Ó hUiginn, refused to accept it.

With eyebrows raised, the senior British official involved, Quentin Thomas, said: “Do I take it therefore that you are refusing to even consider the prime minister’s proposal?” “Yes,” said Seán Ó hUiginn. And we left.

Three or four agonising days went by after that. They were some of the longest days I can ever remember (locked in a suite in the Dorchester Hotel, but that’s another story). Although we had Dick Spring’s immediate and total support, we couldn’t help wondering what kind of an international incident we had caused. Above all, had our intransigence backed John Major — no enemy of Ireland — into an impossible position?

In the end, John Major changed his mind and adopted the agreement made between Dick Spring and Patrick Mayhew, without a comma being changed. That agreement formed the ground rules for all-party inclusive talks that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement.

We talked it through on the plane on the way home. What if it had all gone wrong, I wondered. What if our Tánaiste and Taoiseach had been embarrassed by us taking a flyer, without any mandate from home?

One of the wise heads in our party was Tim Dalton, who at the time was Secretary-General of the Department of Justice. “It didn’t go wrong, Fergus,” he said. “And even if it had,” he grinned, “at least we can say we didn’t blink.”