Arthur Griffith

And of course, they were seeking to win Home Rule.

His big thing, and it was also a big thing of Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, was fiscal autonomy.

Yeah.

and control over Irish economic affairs.

Also involved was the Attorney General, Sir Gordon Hewitt and Sir Hamar Greenwood, in his capacity as Secretary for Ireland.

On the other side, when formal negotiations began, the plenipotentiaries sent over from the Dáil were headed by Arthur Griffiths, once leader of Sinn Féin and MP for Kevin and Fermanagh and Tyrone.

Michael Collins was with him, de facto head of the IRA and Secretary of State for Finance.

After two weeks of formal negotiations, the parties broke into a series of informal negotiations, with two delegates from each side representing the parties.

The only sweetener the British negotiating team could put on the table was the issue of the state of Northern Ireland.

And for the Irish, with the IRA hard pressed, as Collins would later admit, Irish independence, not Irish unity, was the priority.

And Arthur Griffiths and Michael Collins watched as they were corralled into seeing only two issues for compromise.

The issue of symbols, such as the oaths to be taken, and the question of Northern Ireland.

And even during World War I, there's a lot of interesting material.

Arthur Griffith, who actually founded Sinn Féin, And everyone now sees Sinn Féin obviously as just this leftist globalist force, which they are.

But he was writing during World War I about the fact that the British Empire and the Allied powers were destroying Europe by importing Africans and Indians and people from the colonies to fight this war.

And this was the greatest injustice ever.

Um, and again, open to interpretation even to this day.

So the people who go are Griffith, uh, Arthur Griffith as the chair of the delegation, Collins himself, who, as you have said, is reluctant.

But we know that Collins is good at detail.

We know that he's good at sitting down and looking through a document and working out what's here or there.

There's a bit of a breakdown as well- Um, in, in, in trust, uh, on occasion.

But Catriona, crucially, there's also a rift, a growing rift between Sinn Féin in Dublin and Sinn Féin in London, and this is where I suppose the hothouse, uh, that the negotiations became, um, is apparent, uh, that they're underestimating in Dublin the pressures that they are under.

Uh, and I- th- there's a particular letter, uh, that is sent by Arthur Griffith to Eamon de Valera on behalf of, of the Irish delegation, and it says, "We strongly resent, in the position in which we are placed, the interference with our powers.

The responsibility if this interference breaks the very slight possibility there is of a settlement will not and must not rest on the plenipotentiaries."