Britain had entered negotiations with de Valera on the basis of offering Ireland dominion status rather than complete independence. While the officer corps of Óglaigh na hÉireann pledged to abide by whatever the Dáil voted to accept, the effect that any Anglo-Irish agreement would have upon discipline among their own followers was far from certain, not least because the Sinn Féin organisation in the provinces acted under very different (and perhaps less disciplined) circumstances than in Dublin.123 De Valera’s initial correspondence with Lloyd George that summer was published almost immediately. Press reactions abroad were often very sceptical. The Toronto Star suggested that, within all the British dominions, ‘everybody knows that the status offered Ireland by Lloyd George falls a long way short of being dominion status … the half-dozen “reservations” made in the offer to Ireland make all the difference in the world’.124 The British approach to negotiating with the Dáil stemmed partly from its greater priority of settling Anglo-American relations. In the United States, the Friends of Irish Freedom had launched a congressional campaign that called upon the new Republican administration of President Warren Harding not to compromise with Britain, nor tolerate any reduction in American naval strength, at the forthcoming Washington Naval Disarmament Conference.125 On the British side, joining Balfour’s negotiating team was Maurice Hankey, the British cabinet secretary, director of intelligence and a key figure in setting the tone for British international relations. He privately feared that commercially motivated Anglo-American tensions could lead to an actual war.126 Just prior to Hankey’s leaving for Washington D.C., his intelligence agents in Dublin reported that any forthcoming Anglo-Irish agreement would be opposed by de Valera, in a party political sense, which was seen by Britain as a development that might minimise the dominance of the Sinn Féin Party hitherto within the Dáil Éireann assembly and allow for the re-emergence of old Irish Party networks.127 This strategy reflected Britain’s approach to negotiating with a six-man team of Irish plenipotentiaries that de Valera appointed a forthnight later. Having in no sense conceded defeat, London was determined to prioritise a demand that Dublin pay reparations for alleged damages caused to Irish unionists’ property during the recent independence struggle as a price for merely allowing the liaison arrangements to continue. In addition, London pressed home the Royal Navy’s alleged need of three western Irish ports, encompassing the northern and southern tips of the island, in order to sustain the defence of its ‘Western Approaches’, stretching from the northern and southern tips of the island of Britain out to several hundred miles beyond Ireland’s Atlantic coastline.128
Upon his release from prison in July 1921, Arthur Griffith was appointed as the Dáil’s foreign minister and was now chosen by de Valera to head the Irish team of plenipotentiaries. Dublin was determined that Ireland should have the right both to be neutral in international military conflicts and to have control of its own naval defence. London was prepared to concede that its need for western Irish ports should be made temporary, pending the formal assumption by Ireland of its own naval defence. So long as London’s right to these ports was conceded, however, Ireland’s capacity to capitalise upon the existence of an Atlantic economy could be neutralised. A practical consequence of this would soon be felt. Entrepreneurs in Ireland that had hitherto tendered their support for Sinn Féin’s trans-Atlantic ideas for the future of Irish commerce would soon withdraw that support and instead accommodate, or re-accommodate, themselves to Britain’s desire that Irish business would concentrate exclusively on imperial markets.129 On a diplomatic level, Britain had the means to potentially cement such an arrangement. Its offer to Ireland of dominion status equivalent to that of Canada would allow for an Irish admittance to the League of Nations on similar terms. This could potentially frame the future evolution of Irish economic, diplomatic and military affairs within a broader British imperial programme that was being championed not only by the Dominions Office but also by Sir Arthur Salter of the Royal Navy, who had managed to get himself appointed as the head of the economic and financial secretariat of the League of Nations.130
In negotiations, Griffith emphasised that Irish amenability to membership of the British Commonwealth would depend on a British recognition that Ireland could opt out of any future British war effort, and that ‘on no account could I recommend any association with the Crown or the Commonwealth if the unity of Ireland were denied in form or in fact’.131 The latter, essentially national, issue was one that Griffith believed should involve northern unionist representatives as much as the Dáil’s plenipotentiaries. H.E. Pollock, the chairman of the Belfast Harbour Board and London’s proposed finance minister for Northern Ireland, had argued previously that ‘northern Irishmen are just as patriotic as those in the south’ and ‘we will welcome a chance to join it in a self-governing Ireland’.132 Acting on the advice of the British Lord Chancellor, however, James Craig opted out of negotiating directly with the Dáil’s plenipotentiaries. Whilst championing fiscal autonomy for Ireland, Griffith emphasised that Britain’s demand for an Irish contribution to the British national debt was completely contrary to the fact that ‘none of the dominions has any share of Britain’s debt’.133 In this matter, the combined facts of the all-island nature of the economy of Ireland and Belfast’s status as an imperial city would prove problematic for Dublin. While Craig acknowledged privately that Ireland had been a victim of ‘excessive payment of contribution to imperial taxation in years gone by’,134 he would soon start demanding that Ireland make a massive contribution to the British national debt, in the process placing Dublin and Belfast at loggerheads, with London acting as an unwilling intermediary.135
Griffith maintained that because the English king held his position purely by a parliamentary title that could be revoked, it ‘follows that equality of status would make it possible for the Irish parliament to abolish the monarchy in Ireland’.136 Craig’s fears of Irish republican aspirations made him hostile to Irish claims that Article Twelve of a proposed treaty agreement, set up to deal with the northern border, should give the proposed Irish Free State within the British dominions a legal claim to a suzerainty over the whole of Ireland. Even more problematic was that Eoin O’Duffy, in his capacity as co-director of policing in Ulster, was acting as a fierce critic of the partiality of Craig’s prospective northern Irish administration.137 This fact would soon make Ulster unionists adamant that a condition of the establishment of an Irish Free State must be a legal declaration by Dublin that all republican political movements, including the secret IRB (of which O’Duffy, Collins and reputedly Griffith were also members), were illegal.138
The Irish negotiating team signed ‘articles of agreement for a treaty’ with London on 6 December 1921 on the understanding that the agreement would be binding only if it were subsequently approved by both Dáil Éireann and the Westminster parliament. A month later, the Dáil voted narrowly to accept the agreement, prompting the election of Griffith, rather than de Valera, as president. Michael Collins assumed