Anglo-Irish Treaty

There wasn't space for it.

That's very different from the Irish example where they fight a very bloody war to get the British out, resulting in the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, and then actually have all the free time in the world to start killing each other for four years, from 1922 to 1926.

So so so those things are have nothing to do with I keep saying over we had no Philadelphia.

Yeah, that has nothing to do with the wisdom of Israel's founders.

From there, we saw how de Valera chose Michael Collins to go to London rather than himself, a pragmatic move acknowledging that the British negotiators could not be bribed by an individual's presence.

The resulting Anglo-Irish Treaty carved out a free state under the Crown and gave Northern Ireland the option to stay in the Union, a decision that was, from a constitutional perspective, a compromise designed more to appease Britain than to satisfy Irish republican ideals.

The treaty itself was far from straightforward.

It required all members of the Dáil to swear an oath to King George V and barred a fully independent republic.

The war stalled into a stalemate by July nineteen twenty-one after the IRA secured a ceasefire, which opened a diplomatic window.

Negotiations in London led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty on six December nineteen twenty-one, agreeing that an Irish Free State would become a dominion within the British Empire with internal self-governance but remaining linked to the Crown.

A critical clause of the treaty was Article Twelve, which gave Northern Ireland—those six counties that had been set up by the nineteen twenty Government of Ireland Act—an option to stay in the United Kingdom.

They exercised that right, leaving the south as a self-governing dominion and cementing the partition that still characterizes Irish-British relations.

Some scholars argue its constitutional terms entrenched Unionist dominance in the north, while others see it as an inevitable compromise given the period’s political realities.

Ultimately, this episode shows how a negotiated settlement can both resolve immediate hostilities and sow long-term divisions.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty remains a cornerstone of modern Irish identity and a touchstone for understanding Britain’s evolving relationship with its former colony.

Ever since I started teaching, the confusion over Britain’s name sticks with me.

Yeah.

So what I would say is that the Turkish episode and the sort of Greek violence or attacks on Turkey, you have to be seen as part of this wider crisis where Britain is experiencing what you might call imperial overstretch, right? And it is also happening at a time where Lloyd George, because of these ongoing unemployment problems, for example, because of scandals over the way in which honours have been distributed, with really Lloyd George selling peerages and knighthoods to the highest bidder in a rather blatant way, and the consequences of the Irish Treaty, that Lloyd George is increasingly living on borrowed time.

And that actually puts Churchill's political future at risk as one of his allies as well.

Now, from being very strongly pro-Turk, Churchill swings round in the summer of 1922 towards Lloyd George's position of being anti-Turk as the new nationalist regime in Turkey under Kemal Ataturk is making big military strides and really establishing itself.

It's interesting, and I'm particularly interested with the civic guard aspect of it, because that was before they became the guardee.

Yeah, so when the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921, it was kind of determined by the Irish delegates, such as Michael Collins, and even the British delegates, such as Winston Churchill, that the Royal Irish Consulate was a controversial police force and they would have to be disbanded.

So as part of that then, at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin on O'Connell Street, Michael Collins himself chaired a special committee along with men such as Richard Mulcahy, Eoin O'Duffy, Michael Staines, Ned Boyd, D.I. Walsh, D.I. Carney and that to set up a committee to determine, set up a new police force in Ireland.

And that is where the Civil Guard came into play.