5th Plenary Session
Introduction from Chronology
This session again took place in 10 Downing St and started at 3.30pm.
This session was again mostly on Ulster. Griffith argued on the basis of
carefully prepared maps and statistics for five of Ulster’s nine counties
should be governed from Dublin. He pointed, for example, that the whole
of Ulster would have 890,000 Protestants and 700,000 Catholics while the six
counties of Northern Ireland would have 820,570 Protestants and 429,161
Catholics.
However, Griffith did not put forward de Valera’s full proposal (which
he had received on October 14th - see Oct-14-21/1) but asked Britain stand
aside while Sinn Féin made the unionists a fair offer. If agreement was
not reached then the Six Counties must be allowed to decide on its future by local
option (with poor law areas being the best unit for local option). The
remaining area could have its own parliament but subordinate to the Dublin
parliament, not Westminster.
Significantly, none of the Irish delegates insisted on the majority
Unionist areas being brought into the Irish state against their
will. Llyod George said that the six county
boundary embodied in the British Government
of Ireland Act was “a compromise, not our proposal, but a compromise”.
Comment
This last comment by Llyod George is a very strange statement for him to
make. He would seem to be saying that
his government drafted the Government of
Ireland Act and introduced it into the British House of Commons in February
1920 – see Feb-25-20/1. His government
then steered it through the British House of Commons and House of Lords over
many months) where it met with vorciferous opposition
from the few Irish nationalists at Westminster.
Nevertheless, at this point, some twenty months after introducing the
Act, Llyod George was saying the exact partition of Ireland contained in the
Act was not “our proposal”. This, of
course, gives rise to the question: If it wasn’t a British government proposal
then who’s proposal was it?
Llyod George is also quoted as saying “We made a compromise: no
compromise was logically defensible”. According to Kenny, this last quote is
from Tom Jones’s Whitehall Diary (Vol iii, pg 65).
Perhaps the reason that Llyod George was making no sense is that he was
worried. In a note slipped to Tom Jones
during this plenary, he wrote “This is going to wreck settlement”.
The British also countered that local opt outs were impractical.
However, they do not seem to have put forward any reasons as to why they were
impractical. It would seem that the British knew that they were on thin ice
with regards the nationalist areas of the six counties which had been
incorporated into the area governed by the NI parliament. But they did not want
a break on Fermanagh and Tyrone (and Derry City and south Armagh). If there was
to be a break, they wanted it to be on Crown and Empire.
The meeting ended with no agreement.
Also, at this meeting, Collins complained to Llyod George that he had
been trailed when he went to mass the previous day. Llyod George’s cryptic answer was “We have,
of course, had to contemplate what to do in the event of a break, not as an act
of menace but as an act of prudence”.
There was not a lot of trust around this negotiating table.