Mick Clifford: Call for day to commemorate Anglo-Irish Treaty and reconcile people across island
Some of the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of Diarmaid Fawsitt who were present at the launch of their grandfather's archive. Included is Cllr. Shane O'Callaghan who deputised for the Lord Mayor of Cork; Brian McGee, Senior Archivist, Cork City and County Archives Service; Gabriel Doherty of UCC and former Lord Mayor, Cllr. John Sheehan. File picture: Brian Lougheed
Diarmuid Fawsitt was called home from the US to help out with the Treaty negotiations of 1921. He was one of 11 children born in Ballymacthomas, Co Cork, to a Protestant father and Catholic mother. He was raised by his mother’s family and attended the North Mon where he got to know Terence MacSwiney and Tomás McCurtain.
DeValera sent him to the US in the Autumn of 1919 to represent the new government and negotiate the treacherous straits of Irish-American politics. He didn’t take part in the Civil War but was pro-treaty.
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His granddaughter Carol and her siblings and cousins knew some of his story, but not all. A few years ago they came together to get stuck into a bit of research. This was bang smack in the middle of the Decade of Centenaries, celebrating the revolutionary period of the early 20th century.
“We didn’t know enough about our own grandfather,” she says.
“Six of us came together and did the research, and as a consequence of that Maurice Manning (chair of the advisory group on the Decade of centenaries) gave us the opportunity to present the research at the NUI Dublin in 2019. There had been over the years a lot of secrecy, a lack of information, silence at home. My father died at 56 and I was the eldest of six. Anyway, we found a diary through the research and now it is in the Cork and County archive.”
Carol Fawsitt and her family didn’t stop there. They got in contact with other descendants of those who had negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty that gave birth to the Irish State. A book, entitled was published in 2022.
And now the Fawsitts and a number of other descendants are campaigning for a fitting memorial, a day of reconciliation, to be established by the State. Such an event, they suggest, should not just be for the Irish State but should be right across the island, where there is surely plenty of scope for reconciliation among all sorts of groups.
The proposal has serious merit. There appears to be a consensus that the decade of centenaries was handled well, with due respect and sensitivity. However, one of the thorniest issues, the signing of the treaty, was, to a large extent, glossed over.
On one level this was entirely understandable. The treaty had opened a fissure, initially violent and for decades after, political, in the new state. Yet all that it promised and all the “stepping stone” theory advocated by Michael Collins all came to pass.
The partition of the island remained, but that was always going to be the case. So the treaty ultimately was the greatest achievement in 800 years of attempting to separate this island from John Bull. That was not, and never really has been, fully acknowledged even a century down the line.
The other slightly leftover aspect to the recent commemorations is the absence emerging from it of an annual day of commemoration, a standard feature in most established nations, not to mind democracies. In this regard, the proposal by the descendants steers a sensitive and considered course, advocating for a day or reconciliation, rather than independence or commemoration of a still contested history.
Michael O’Mahony is a grandnephew of Michael Collins. His two sisters, Nora Owen and Mary Banotti went into politics but he pursued a career in law that began when he was sent down to Clonakilty to apprentice to his uncle, Liam Collins.
“My mother Kitty Collins was one of Johnny Collins' children and he was a teacher in Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin,” O’Mahony remembers. “There was silence around a lot of what happened. My mother was teaching a large cross-section of students, you couldn’t very well be talking about points of view, Collins or Brugha or anyone else. We didn’t speak about it.
“When I became an apprentice to my uncle I was up and down to Clon for four years and I became very interested in the whole thing.”
Today, he believes there should be a “visual manifestation” of reconciliation. “It’s very important that this (day of reconciliation proposal) is taken over by the State. We are all transient, ships in the night. This should become part of the calendar.
"You will know from Cork and Kerry and other places there is still this deep trauma from splits which is very destructive and there is silence between people who are connected in one way or the other to (civil war) sides.” Fittingly, the group that has come together has descendants from the other side of the divide that opened up over the treaty.
Cathal McSwiney Brugha has a double-barrelled surname that is about as iconographic as one could find in relation to the period of revolution. His grandfather Terence MacSwiney died, as Lord Mayor of Cork, on hunger strike in 1920. His grandfather Cathal Brugha died in a blaze of gunfire after he refused to surrender to free state forces in the early days of the Civil War in 1922.
“We have a day in mind,” he says. “Sunday 2nd June. The next day is a bank holiday. People are free, chilling out, let’s go out on the green and shake hands with somebody else.”
Another major name from the period was Harry Boland, who also died in the Civil War. His grand-nephew Tadgh Coakley says that the concept of inter-generational trauma is one that really interests him. “Harry Boland on his deathbed gave instructions to his sister, my grandmother, that there be no retribution and he didn’t want the family to find out who mortally wounded him.”
One idea that the group has floated is the use of a cup that had been presented to Harry Boland, and is currently in the Irish embassy in Washington, be awarded as an annual peace award. The group stresses that their concept should be all-encompassing, and not include just the divisions that opened up on this island.
The large numbers of people that are born here but who have now made this state their home should also be included as many will have come from countries of origin where there also was internal strife.
Retired high court judge Bernard Barton, whose family was close to Robert Barton, points out that the day should also be celebrated north of the border.
“It’s very much our intention that this is nationwide, we are hoping that the concept is adopted not just in the south but the north as well because there reconciliation between nationalists and unionists is just as necessary.”
The descendants of the Irish Delegation to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and others from major figures of the period are guests on this week’s Mick Clifford Podcast.
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