The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

His intelligence network had left him in no doubt as to the extent of the forces in men and money which the British were deploying to bolster the Unionists’ resistance to any encroachment on the six-county state. If he did not seize the opportunity of setting up an imperfect twenty-six-county state, the British might not withdraw from the south either. There was precedent for such missed opportunities for Ireland in Parnell’s career and what had happened to Home Rule. Conservative Party members and senior figures in the army, like Sir Henry Wilson, who had been one of the architects of the Curragh Mutiny saga, were strongly opposed to such withdrawal, arguing that it was ‘giving in to terrorism’. Collins did not regard the treaty as a perfect solution but as a ‘stepping stone’, as he put it, to full and final freedom. Eventually, after one of the most sterile and rancorous debates in Irish political history, the ‘stepping stone’ argument carried the day and the treaty was accepted by a majority of the southern electorate. The sizeable Catholic minority in the northern state viewed the treaty with considerable apprehension because of the prospect of being handed over to the tender mercies of the Unionist and Protestant majority.