Pro-Treaty War
Council
Introduction from the Chronology
A pro-Treaty War Council comes into being with Michael Collins as
Commander-in-Chief; Richard Mulcahy as Minister of Defence and Chief-of-Staff
and Eoin O'Duffy as assistant Chief-of-Staff and commander of the south western
division.
More Detail
The minutes of the meeting of the
Dáil and Provisional Government cabinets from the morning of July 12th
state that “Mr Collins announced that he had arranged to take up duty as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army”. The
minutes of the cabinet meeting which took place in the evening of the 12th
state that Collins announced the creation of the War Council of Three. Regan says that “The authority for these
appointments came from no visible source other than Collins’s own” (Regan
(2013), pg 121). This seems to overstate
the case, as the very least, members of the joint cabinets acquiesced in these
appointments. Also, Hopkinson says that
this War Council never met again.
The anti-Treaty publicists called
these changes the setting up of a military dictatorship. In Poblacht
na nEireann on July 15th, Count Plunkett called the Provisional
Government a “colonial junta” and said that it was carrying out a war of
reconquest on the behalf of the British.
Regan argues that the setting up
of the War Council amounted to a military dictatorship saying that “circumstances
granted Collins in theory if not in practice dictatorial powers” (Regan (1999),
pg 80). Also see Regan (2013) pgs 9-18 and 91