Hence, given such a tense atmosphere, it is most likely that Collins and Mulcahy thrived during de Valera’s and, especially, Brugha’s absence. For example, even if he had not been appointed CS in March, Mulcahy was now de facto CS,67 in which capacity he was both diligent and habitual:
At this time [May–June 1918] weekly meetings of the General Headquarters staff, and the resident Executive were held, sometimes in Cullenswood House, Ranelagh … and sometimes in a room in the offices of the Dublin Typographical Society … at 35 Lower Gardiner Street, a place that had been used by the IRB for many years previously.68
Additionally, he tried to inculcate the ethos of a professional chain of command by cutting a dash and by taking himself seriously, having been, like other veterans, ‘toughened – mentally rather than physically – by his prison-camp experiences’:69
He was in a grey-green uniform. It fitted well. He wore a soft, slouch hat, one side pinned up by the Fianna Fail badge of the Dublin Brigade. He looked neat and trim, quiet. He had a shrewd cold look. There was little expression on the muscles of his mouth or cheeks when he spoke. He spoke slowly, stressing words nasally. His face was of the thin type, clean-shaven with bushy eye-brows.70
In contrast to Mulcahy, the nicer points of bureaucracy and oligarchy were not so important to Collins. Primarily, at a point of time when he was already beginning to move towards a position of near total control,71 he was interested in acquiring as many arms and ammunition as possible from IRB contacts in New York and Liverpool, sometimes rerouting the supplies through Belfast or on to the coast of Galway and then distributing them to a ‘good commandant who would fight … [in] Cork, Clare, Mayo and places where the fighting was done afterwards’.72 To those ends, he personally travelled on a number of occasions to Liverpool to meet Neil Kerr, the same IRB contact who first met Brugha on his arrival in England.73 Another interest of his, during the summer of 1918, was the creation of a county brigade system, a concept which, because of its overarching authoritative nature, challenged the well-rooted sense of independence of the local companies and accordingly slowed down the introduction of the vertical chain of command.74 Furthermore, similar to the way the Volunteers picked up on a worthwhile idea, like when the Brennan brothers of Clare, having been arrested, spontaneously refused to recognise the court75 – ‘Irish Volunteers must as heretofore refuse to recognise the jurisdiction of the court’76 – so Collins was probably impressed by the topographically based, shock tactics introduced by his own West Cork people, as referred to above:
Forget the Company of the regular army. We are not establishing or attempting to establish a regular force on the lines of the standing armies of the small independent countries of Europe. If we undertake any such thing we shall fail. Our objective is to bring into existence, train and equip as riflemen scouts a body of men, and to secure that these are capable of acting as a self-contained unit, supplied with all the services that would ordinarily be required in the event of martial action in the country.77
On the other hand, and perhaps much more importantly in the long run, though paradoxical in the circumstance of Collins’ military preparations and Béaslaí’s rhetorical muscle flexing, a steady drift towards conventional politics within the entire Collins group began to gather momentum. Take, for instance, the slow but definite change of mind on the question of electioneering. Initially, as has already been suggested, GHQ did not approve of the Volunteers becoming involved: ‘they were not created for … political activities’.78 Eventually, however, GHQ became ambiguous: ‘but that must not be taken as absolving Volunteers from their individual duties as Irish citizens’.79 Finally, GHQ, along with the national executive, issued a detailed order on how the Volunteers were to behave during the pending general election campaign: ‘You will appoint a Volunteer Officer in each constituency within your Brigade area to take charge of all Volunteer activities therein.’80
That development was more than a reluctant acknowledgement of the realities on the ground. It was also a result of the fact that Collins and his closest IRB colleagues willingly took leadership roles in Sinn Féin so as ‘to see that the work of Sinn Féin was carried on pending the release of its elected officers [after the German Plot imprisonments]’.81 Thus willy-nilly did these men come into infectious contact with the conservative, procedural methodologies of negotiation and compromise traditionally associated with the world of party politics.
Mulcahy is a good example of that process. He had not bothered with party politics prior to 20 May, the date of the first Sinn Féin executive committee meeting after the German Plot arrests.82 But, typically of him, never doing things by half once he made a commitment, he assiduously joined its weekly meetings for the remainder of the year.83 Also he became a standing committee member.84 And, on 14 October – after Harry Boland decided to contest South Roscommon instead of the Dublin City Clontarf constituency, and even to try to deceive Kathleen Clarke, who wanted to replace him, into believing that there was a place for her at home in Limerick85 – he was selected by the Clontarf Sinn Féin district council to run in the general election, which, because the war in Europe lingered on longer than expected, did not happen until 14 December. In the meantime, the IRB campaigned strongly on his behalf.86
Even so, when targeting first-time voters87 from among the aforementioned, young, migrant inhabitants of the north inner city, rational considerations of self-interest, rather than moral and emotional appeals to nationalist sentiment, were the weapons of choice in his campaign against the IPP: ‘“The [Irish Parliamentary] Party” opposed the extension of the franchise, [so,] why should you, having secured the vote, support the Party candidate? Vote for Mulcahy.’88
Next, on 19 December, pending a positive electoral result for him, he was appointed a member of Sinn Féin’s Foreign Affairs committee, which was chaired by Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh, and which, in addition to communicating with other peoples and governments, was principally instituted to ready Ireland’s case for presentation to the Paris Peace Conference.89 On 28 December, having defeated the IPP’s Patrick Shortall, a well-known building contractor, municipal corporation member for the Rotunda ward, high sheriff and honorary knight of the British crown, by 2,746 votes, i.e. by nearly 30 per cent of the total votes cast, he became Member of Parliament (MP) for Dublin City Clontarf, a result which was all the more surprising – even with the possibility of bullying and multiple voting factored in90 – due to the fact that Clontarf was a constituency which traditionally favoured Unionist candidates.91
Once again, on 19 December, he was present when the executive committee of Sinn Féin decided to set up a native parliament. Furthermore, he attended at some of the plenary and sub-committee meetings which prepared the way for that momentous event. For instance, he was part of the joint meeting of the Sinn Féin executive and the newly elected Sinn Féin MPs which was held in the Mansion House on New Year’s Day, 1919; was chosen in his absence as a member of a committee of those MPs on 7 January; and chaired a meeting of the same committee on 14 January when the documents, which were considered suitable to be put before the inaugural assembly, were discussed.92
Overall, then, the final decision was that the new legislature, called Dáil Éireann (Parliament of Ireland), and its members called Teachtaí Dála (Dáil Deputies, i.e. parliamentary representatives), or TDs for short, would meet for the first time in the Mansion House on Tuesday, 21 January, and would adopt four constitutional documents, namely the Constitution of Dáil Éireann, the Declaration of Independence; the Message to the Free Nations of the World; and the Democratic Programme.93
The following are the general circumstances surrounding the creation and the adoption of the latter document. In the first place, having been proposed by Ó Ceallaigh,94 subsequent to the opening phase of haggling over the control of constituencies, it became the price which Sinn Féin was prepared to pay in order to get Labour to abstain from the general election, thereby leaving one side with the advantage of a free run and the other without a split in its ranks.95 It also became the incentive for Cathal O’Shannon and Thomas Johnson, Labour’s delegates at the International Socialist Congress, which was due to