Meeting of the Southern Ireland Parliament

Introduction from Chronology

Griffith - in his capacity as chair of the plenipotentiaries – having called the House of Commons of Southern Ireland for January 14^th (see Jan-11-22/3), they meet on this day to approve the Treaty and elect a Provisional Government to implement it. Sixty pro-Treaty TDs and four Unionist MPs (from Trinity) meet as the “Southern Parliament”. 

Michael Collins elected Chairman and the other members of his cabinet are:  William Cosgrave (Local Govt), Eammon Duggan (Home Affairs), Kevin O'Higgins (Economic Affairs), Patrick J Hogan (Agriculture), Joseph McGrath (Labour), Finian Lynch, Michael Hayes (Education), Desmond Fitzgerald (Publicity), Ernst Blythe (Trade and Commerce) and Eoin McNeill.  (Neither Griffith or Mulcahy are formally members of Provisional Government.) 

Under the Treaty, the Provisional Government would hold power in the South until December 6^th 1922 when the Free State government would come into being. This was first and only meeting of the 'Southern Ireland Parliament' if the meeting on June 26^th 1921 is ignored. 

Collins sets up office in City Hall in Dublin. See Jan-16-22/1/.

Comment on Provisional Government

There was some creative fiction going on. The Southern Parliament had been set up under the Government of Ireland Act which the Irish side wished to ignore. Therefore, Griffith said that it met in accordance with the Treaty. Also, because of the over-lapping cabinet positions, Townshend says that the “Provisional Government could be seen as deriving its authority, whether formally or informally, from the Dáil – not from Britain via the Treaty” (Townshend (2014), pg 286).

It would seem that the British will willing to go along with this dual system of authority in Ireland despite Churchill (who was responsible for overseeing the Irish Free State (Agreement) Bill through the Westminster parliament) saying that a provisional government “unsanctified by law” yet recognised by the British Government was “an anomaly unprecedented in the history of the British Empire”.

The Dáil continued to meet but the Southern Parliament did not. Regan points out that “Theoretically, this [provisional] government was responsible to a provisional parliament, also of the treaty’s creation. This body met once, in January 1922, for the purpose of electing the government’s executive. Thereafter, the Provisional Government remained responsible to no assembly” (Regan (2013), pg 116). However, the British would continue to interact with the Provisional Government. Regan continues “The treatyite governments, Dáil and Provisional, existed in parallel. Most of the ministers held the same brief in both cabinets, which for practical purposes acted as a hybrid executive, meeting in joint session from May. This obscured, as indeed was intended, their conflicting legitimacies.” (Regan (2013), pg 116).

The Dáil government received its legitimacy from the democratically elected Dáil, while the Provisional government derived its legitimacy from the Treaty. It was Griffith intention that the anomaly of the two governments would be resolved when the Irish electorate endorsed the Treaty so that the Dáil (and with it the Republic) could be dissolved by the will of the Irish people. However, anti-Treatyites pointed out that, unlike the elections of December 1918 and June 1921, any election on the Treaty would take place under “British ultimatums threatening war if the treaty was compromised, and with increasing vehemence they [the anti-Treatyites refused to contemplate any election legitimizing the Dáil’s termination” (Regan (2013), pg 116).

O’Higgins was later to famously characterise (in an address to the Irish Society of Oxford University in 1924) the Provisional Government as “simply eight young men in City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and the wild men screaming through the keyhole. No police force was functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of administration hung idle battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions”.  First, it is peculiar that he says eight as there were eleven in the Provisional cabinet.  Second, at this point in time, the ‘wild men’ were not yet ‘screaming through the keyhole’ but it would not take long.

(Earlier in his address, O’Higgins also made the following observation “it is necessary to remember that the country had come through a revolution and to remember what a weird composite of idealism, neurosis, megalomania and criminality is apt to be thrown to the surface in even the best regulated revolution”.)

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