FROM THE ARCHIVES:Euphoria greeted the signature of the Anglo Irish Treaty in the early hours of December 6th, 1921, but lasted less than a day as Éamon de Valera voiced his opposition to it. The Irish Timesgave its view in this editorial.
To-day Ireland’s future is in her own hands. She knows what she wants and, if she chooses to insist, she will get what she wants. The country has welcomed the Peace Treaty as men welcome water in the desert. The people, their Churches, their newspapers have lifted a single voice of thanksgiving and joy. They hail the end of a long and bitter conflict, the prospect of happiness and progress, the sure and certain hope of unity in their own land. Already they are girding their loins for the noble task of nation-building. They know that Mr. Griffith speaks truly when he says that the Treaty “will lay the foundation of peace and friendship” between Ireland and the rest of the Empire. It is being laid at this moment; for the Commonwealth of Australia has flashed a greeting to Ireland as “our new sister Dominion.” Sinn Fein has dared and suffered much, and its methods, however we may detest many of them, have been effective. Now the country is completely satisfied of two things – that it has won an almost unprecedented measure of freedom as the result of a wholly unprecedented act of Imperial magnanimity, and that rejection of this boon must mean ruin. If civil warfare is renewed, it will be renewed by an infinitely weaker Ireland and by an infinitely stronger England. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Killaloe declares that the moral effect of the Treaty “will be worth half a navy to England.”
By this agreement England surrenders much of her secular authority over Ireland for the sake of peace with Ireland. Mr. Griffith and his fellow-delegates, as we admit freely, have sacrificed a measure of their idealism for the sake of peace with England. They have done rightly, and the mass of the nation supports, and will support, them in that sacrifice. Ulster is asked to abandon deep-rooted convictions for the sake of Irish unity, and we hope and believe that, under the beneficent influence of new conditions, she will find the abandonment not merely possible, but easy. The Southern loyalists, perhaps, are surrendering most of all. They have watched the passage, in mournful procession, of the host of laws, institutions, traditions, and ideals that bound them to Great Britain.
They have embarked – not gladly, yet not afraid – on uncharted seas. They are entrusting themselves to the good-will of a majority from which, politically, they have suffered much, and with which in the past they have had little in common save the love of Ireland. The Southern loyalists accept the Treaty because the country accepts it and invites their aid in making it a success.
Is Mr. de Valera alone to make no sacrifice? Are this nation’s present peace and future greatness to count as nothing in the scales against his relentless self-sufficiency? The answer is with Ireland.
http://url.ie/dlpr