I Signed My Death Warrant Read Online Free PDF

‘Collins called out this evening and spent several hours with the President’. He tried to insist on his own inclusion in the team going to London, but the president flatly refused to have him, saying that he feared the negotiations ‘might end in a stalemate and that war might be resumed, so he saw no reason why photographers should, at this stage, be given too many opportunities of taking pictures of Collins.’ They had an acrimonious meeting, with the Big Fellow refusing to accept the explanation because, for one thing, it could not be squared with de Valera’s attempt to send him to the United States earlier in the year. ‘Hot discussion,’ Kathleen noted. ‘President rather upset’.
    Having been demoted in favour of Stack, of all people, Collins was now being ignored for peripheral figures like Laurence O’Neill, the lord mayor of Dublin, and the Dáil deputy, Robert Farnan, who had been invited along with his wife. In addition, there were two secretaries, Kathleen O’Connell and Lily O’Brennan. The delegation set up headquarters at the Grosvenor Hotel, but de Valera and Kathleen stayed with the Farnans in a private house acquired for them.
    It was in the context of these events that Collins wrote the opening words of this foreword about the ill will among members of the Dáil. He was clearly despondent.
    â€˜I think you would be warned of the changes here,’ he wrote to Harry Boland in the United States some days later. ‘There’s something about [them] which I don’t like, and I have the impression that the whole thing is pressing on me. I find myself looking at friends as if they were enemies – looking at them twice just to make sure that they really are friends after all. I mention no names. After all it may be a wrong impression that’s got into me. Frankly, though, I don’t care for things as they are now.’
    Prior to his arrest in February 1920 ‘all members of the Cabinet were, as far as I knew, fast friends with complete trust in one another,’ Robert Barton noted. ‘There was not a sign of disunion, suspicion or ill feeling. I verily believe that had the occasion arisen each of us would have given his life for any other member without a thought. We acted like a one-man team. If we disagreed it was upon matters of detail rather than of policy or principle. Every member appeared to have implicit faith in the integrity of his comrades.’
    â€˜Seventeen months later when I returned from imprisonment a great change had come over relationships in the cabinet,’ Barton added. ‘Michael Collins whom I knew best, for we had worked together every evening in Cullenswood house for more than 6 months told me that efforts were being made to get rid of him as he and Richard Mulcahy were distrusted by Cathal Brugha and Stack. I soon found this to be true.’ Barton found had difficulty meeting other cabinet colleagues. ‘All ministers were too busy with their own departments to meet except for cabinet meetings or when necessity required.’ He had ‘practically no acquaintance’ with either Austin Stack, or W. T. Cosgrave, and he had never even met Kevin O’Higgins before. The cabinet was apparently split. ‘There was an obvious rift between Brugha and Stack on one side and Collins and Griffith on the other,’ according to Barton. As he saw it IRA chief of staff Dick Mulcahy was ‘at logger heads’ with Defence Minister Cathal Brugha, with ‘Collins obviously supporting Mulcahy,’ and ‘Stack supporting Brugha’. In fact, the real rift was between Brugha and Collins, with Mulcahy being drawn into the vortex, because of his support of Collins.
    â€˜I tried to discover from Collins what was the root cause of his antipathy to Brugha,’ Barton wrote. ‘I failed but learned that he bore resentment to Dev also for the impartial attitude he adopted regarding