‘DUBLIN CASTLE HAS FALLEN!’—COMMEMORATING THE ‘HANDOVER’
Published in Issue 1 (January/February 2022), News, Volume 30By John Gibney
Two days before the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London on 6 December 1921, Arthur Griffith wrote to Eamon de Valera in Dublin, telling him that David Lloyd George and the other British negotiators had told him that, if he and his colleagues were to sign it, ‘they would hand us over Dublin Castle and withdraw their troops from the country’. They signed it two days later, and the story of the negotiations that led to the Treaty is explored in the National Archives’ major centenary exhibition The Treaty, 1921: records from the archives, currently on display—appropriately enough—in Dublin Castle until the end of March. It is being presented by the National Archives in partnership with the Royal Irish Academy, the Office of Public Works and the National Library of Ireland, with additional records from the collections of the Military Archives and University College Dublin. The RIA’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) project played a central role as a partner in the exhibition, developing the exhibition text and co-curating the structure and content for the exhibition. The story of the negotiations can be overshadowed by the acrimonious split over the Treaty. What is even less well known, however, are the procedures that slowly but surely brought the Treaty into effect, and Dublin Castle had a central role to play within that.
The last two articles of the Treaty set the stage for the handover of power from British to Irish hands. The British never formally recognised the Dáil, so Article 17 specified that the Treaty had to be ratified by a meeting of MPs elected to the putative ‘Parliament of Southern Ireland’ established by the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. This was effectively a meeting of the pro-Treaty TDs of the Second Dáil, along with the four Unionist MPs returned for Trinity College, Dublin, and took place in the Mansion House on 14 December 1922. In accordance with Article 18 of the Treaty, it also established a Provisional Government, led by Michael Collins, that was to oversee the transition of power until the Irish Free State formally came into being on 6 December 1922.
Above: Michael Collins entering Dublin Castle in a taxi on 16 January 1922. (Pathé News)
The British were preparing to withdraw from Ireland (oddly, the profound reality of the British military withdrawal from Ireland in the months that followed is often skimmed over in accounts of the period) but this would not begin until there was something that could take their place. And so, on 16 January 1922, the Provisional Government made their way to Dublin Castle to be formally installed as the new power in the land by the outgoing viceroy, Lord FitzAlan. Dublin Castle had a real and a symbolic importance, not only as the centrepiece of the British administration in Ireland but also as the complex that was seen to symbolise British misrule in Ireland. ‘Dublin Castle’, Eamon Broy later recalled, was ‘believed by the people to be the centre and focus of all that was evil and secret and sinister.’ It is often assumed, and it was claimed at the time, that the brief procedural meeting that took place between the incoming Provisional Government and the viceroy constituted the ‘surrender’ or ‘handover’ of the castle. It was nothing of the sort, for the Provisional Government would not finally take possession of the castle until the following August, but the meeting on 16 January had an undeniable resonance, as a milestone in the British withdrawal from (‘Southern’) Ireland and the establishment of an independent Irish state.
The centenary of the ‘handover’ of Dublin Castle will be officially marked on Sunday 16 January 2022 but the questions about what actually happened that day and its significance are teased out in a new illustrated book from the RIA—The handover: Dublin Castle and the British withdrawal from Ireland, 1922. The Treaty itself was the subject of a recent History Ireland Hedge School (available now as a podcast). The handover (or otherwise) of Dublin Castle will be explored in a ‘live’ Hedge School in the castle’s Chapel Royal on 6 January 2022. It will also be the subject of a separate academic conference, organised by Trinity College, Dublin, in the castle’s Printworks on 14–15 January 2022, which will also be livestreamed.
John Gibney is Assistant Editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series.
- History Ireland Hedge School, ‘Dublin Castle has fallen!’—the handover, 16 January 1922, 3pm, Thursday 6 January 2022, Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle.
- Academic conference on the handover (TCD), the Printworks, Dublin Castle, 14–15 January 2022.
- The Treaty, 1921: records from the archives (NAI), Coach House, Dublin Castle, until the end of March 2022.
- In Our Own Image: Photography in Ireland, 1839 to the present (OPW), the Printworks, Dublin Castle, until 6 February 2022.
- John Gibney and Kate O’Malley, The handover: Dublin Castle and the British withdrawal from Ireland, 1922 (RIA, 2022).
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.