I Signed My Death Warrant by Ryle T. Dwyer

keep the home fires burning and yet prevent them blazing up the chimneys. We felt de Valera was best fitted to do this.’ That may have convinced Barton, who had been in jail throughout the worst of the troubles, but it sounded rather hollow to Collins, seeing that de Valera had spent most of the Black and Tan period in the United States.
    â€˜Collins was determined that Dev should go,’ according to Barton. A vote was eventually taken with each of the members of the cabinet being asked whether the president should go to London. Griffith said, “Yes”; Brugha “No”, Stack “No”, Cosgrave “Yes”, Collins “Yes”, and Barton “No”. The vote was therefore tied at three for going and three for staying, leaving de Valera to exclude himself with his own vote.’
    Thus it was Barton who provided the crucial vote that allowed de Valera to remain at home. ‘I voted against Dev going for purely tactical reasons,’ Barton later explained. ‘He was undoubtedly our best negotiator and the most difficult antagonist the British had to meet but he was also our President and the National pivot. If Dev went on the delegation and the negotiations failed we had a reserve. We could never discuss and return to Ireland except to commence war. If Dev remained in Ireland we could always break off negotiations and threaten war and still have Dev in the background to come in at the last and find some way of carrying on if the Army was not ready. If Dev went on the delegation then our last word must be said in London. If he remained in Dublin the scene of negotiations must return there before the final rupture.’ It should be remembered that Barton had helped to negotiate the Truce ‘mainly to enable the volunteers to rearm and equip’. Hence he felt that this aim could be furthered by de Valera staying in Dublin.

4 - ‘Better bait for Lloyd George’
    The president proposed that Griffith should be chairman of the delegation. ‘All agreed that Arthur Griffith must act as chairman,’ Barton noted. De Valera then proposed Collins as vice-chairman, even though he knew that Griffith and Collins were more amenable to the British terms than any other members of the cabinet. He was using them. Three months later, for instance, he wrote to Joe McGarrity in the United States that he selected them because he thought they would be ‘better bait for Lloyd George - leading him on and on, further in our direction.’
    â€˜That Griffith would accept the Crown under pressure I had no doubt,’ he explained. ‘From the preliminary work which M.C. [Collins] was doing with the IRB, of which I had heard something, and from my own weighing up of him I felt certain that he too was contemplating accepting the Crown.’
    Stack made ‘a weak kind of objection’, according to himself. He complained that ‘both gentlemen had been in favour of the July proposals.’
    â€˜Collins then took up my objections to himself, and denied that he would accept the proposals,’ Stack noted. ‘I reminded him of what he had said at Blackrock. He protested he said nothing of the kind.’
    Well, Stack explained, he got the impression that Griffith only wanted some modifications.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Griffith, ‘some modifications.’
    â€˜Cathal and the President then assured me I had misunderstood Mick at Blackrock,’ Stack noted. ‘I accepted this and said no more.’
    Collins still protested his reluctance. ‘We all realised that the delegation would not be representative if he was not included,’ Barton noted. The Big Fellow’s reluctance to go was prompted by a number of reasons, some selfish. ‘Of course,’ he later wrote, ‘we all knew that whatever the outcome of the negotiations, we could never hope to bring back all that Ireland wanted and deserved to have, and we therefore knew that more or