On January 7th, 1922, at the end of thirteen days of extraordinary debate about whether to endorse the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Dáil Éireann voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to do so. Éamon de Valera, president of the Irish Republic, who had led the arguments against it, said:
I would like my last word here to be this: we have had a glorious record for four years; it has been four years of magnificent discipline in our nation. The world is looking at us now …
Then he broke down.
On April 10th, 1998, Senator George Mitchell, the presiding moderator over months of extremely difficult negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland after decades of awful conflict, said:
If you support this agreement, and if you also reject the merchants of death and the purveyors of hate, if you make it clear to your political leaders that you want them to make it work, then it will.
The choice is yours … It doesn’t take courage to shoot a policeman in the back of the head, or to murder an unarmed taxi driver. What takes courage is to compete in the arena of democracy where the tools are persuasion, fairness and common decency.
You should help to build a society instead of tearing it down. This agreement points the way.
I want to explore two notable pieces of theatre which have been produced in the last few years in Ireland: Staging the Treaty, staged in Dublin in December 2022, and Agreement, staged in Belfast in March 2023. Both pieces deal with immensely consequential conversations which had far-reaching community, national and international consequences. One of those conversations ended in failure and civil war, the other put an end to a violent conflict which had lasted thirty years.
Staging the Treaty, with a script curated by Theo Dorgan, condensed fifteen days of intense discussion in the Dáil, the southern parliament, on whether or not to ratify the Anglo-Irish Treaty, concluded in London after months of negotiations between the British government and an Irish delegation. The treaty was meant to put an end to the War of Independence, which had started in 1919 after Sinn Féin was the overwhelming victor in an election in 1918 on a platform of separation from Britain. The treaty did not achieve an independent republic, but went much further in terms of self-government for Ireland than the Home Rule Act already on the statute book. The new Irish state would have control over taxation, defence and foreign affairs, would not have to send representatives to Westminster, and could not be dissolved at the whim of the British government; none of these important provisions obtained in the Home Rule Act.
The debates on the articles of the treaty took place between December 14th, 1921 and January 7th, 1922, with a crucial break for Christmas, when some deputies who had intended to vote against the treaty changed their minds under pressure from war-weary constituents. On January 7th, the treaty was ratified narrowly by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven.
Agreement, a play by one of Ireland’s most distinguished playwrights, Owen McCafferty, deals with the negotiations leading up to the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, which concluded on April 10th, 1998, a day that none of us who witnessed it will ever forget. The agreement mandated an end to armed conflict in Northern Ireland, a power-sharing assembly to govern there, a North-South body to promote co-operation between the two states on matters like tourism, environmental issues and trade, among others, and a British-Irish Council with two broad objectives: to further promote positive, practical relationships among the people of the islands; and to provide a forum for consultation and co-operation.
The Belfast or Good Friday Agreement was a watershed moment in the history of a small state created in 1920, with a troubled past which had produced many atrocities, and a profoundly divided society, over the previous thirty years. Like the treaty outcome, it was an international as well as a national story, offering hope that seemingly intractable conflicts were capable of resolution.
Whereas a lot of literary, dramatic and cinematic attention has traditionally been paid to the violence and horror of both the War of Independence and the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland, less has been paid to the talking part – what happens when antagonists put down their guns and have to engage in the hard work, compromise and communication required for genuine negotiation of what may look like intractable differences.
It is interesting to note that when Steven Spielberg made his movie about Abraham Lincoln, he chose not to focus on the battles of the American Civil War but on the fight in Congress to get the thirteenth amendment to the constitution passed. The movie is as exciting as it is possible to be, as Lincoln is seen getting his hands dirty to persuade congressmen from his own party and from the Confederate side to vote for the amendment which would permanently end slavery. In the end, documents have to be agreed and written, legislation has to be put in place, votes have to be held. Short of dictatorship, nothing can happen without this kind of vital work. Yet it is not deemed to be as exciting or ‘glamourous’ as armed conflict. We need to adjust our audience lenses and wise up to the drama of discussion and administration.
So, let us start with Staging the Treaty. I confess that I had always wanted to see a substantial dramatisation of these extraordinary debates, which are in themselves naturally dramatic. Theo Dorgan, poet, novelist and serious political thinker, harboured similar longings, and in 2020 we both converged on Louise Lowe, artistic director of ANU Productions and one of the most innovative theatre directors working in Ireland, someone I had worked with in the past during our recent Decade of Centenaries on plays dealing with the 1913 Lockout, the Irish at Gallipoli, the 1916 Rising and other subjects. Louise and Theo found common ground, and planning for this major project began.
Theo went off to figure out how to cut 440,000 words down to 90,000. He was working with the published debates, freely available on the Oireachtas website. The script would contain nothing but the words of the debaters as recorded. His task was to be as fair as possible to all contributors, to reflect differences of opinion, political positions and the growing split between the members of the Second Dáil as the debates progressed. His choices of what to include or to leave out would dictate the balance of the drama. Louise Lowe’s actions as director would dictate the dramatic effect of these choices.
Funding was secured from the Dept of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to pay for this grand project. And yes, that is a ridiculously large portfolio for any department. The National Concert Hall, the current occupant of what used to be University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace, was approached to see if the room in which the debates originally took place could be made available. Miraculously it could, and ANU’s award-winning set designer, Owen Boss, began to plan its return to its 1921/22 condition, right down to the correct paper clips.
At this stage, it was becoming clear that Covid 19 would sadly prevent the piece being publicly performed on the hundredth anniversary of the debates, and it was postponed for a year. It was finally staged in December 2022, over four nights, ten hours on stage, with a cast of forty-five, and it made for one of the most enthralling theatrical events of that or any year.
In December 1921, a delegation of five so-called plenipotentiaries, appointed by the Dáil to negotiate Irish independence with the British government, returned from London with a momentous document signed by, on the Irish side, Arthur Griffith, minister of foreign affairs; Michael Collins, minister of finance; Robert Barton, minister for economic affairs; and lawyers Eamonn Duggan and George Gavan Duffy; and on the British side, by prime minister David Lloyd George; Austen Chamberlain, the Conservative Party leader; FE Smith (Lord Birkenhead), the lord chancellor; Winston Churchill, the chairman of the cabinet commission on Irish affairs; Laming Worthington-Evans, the minister of war; Hamar Greenwood, the chief secretary for Ireland; and Gordon Hewart, the lord chief justice. As you can see, the full might of the leaders of the British empire was ranged against the Irish side.
Nonetheless, the delegation, over a period of two months of often intense negotiation, secured a remarkable settlement from these formidable individuals. It did not provide an independent Republic, which had been the platform espoused by Sinn Féin in the 1918 election, but it got dominion status, and as Michael Collins put it ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’. Partition was already a done deal, the Northern Ireland parliament having been established in 1921, and a boundary commission proposed which was supposed to settle outstanding questions. There was a requirement for politicians in the new Free State to take an oath of allegiance to the king, the provision which most rankled with the Dáil, and indeed with some of the signatories.
The debates which took place on the treaty constituted the most consequential conversation Ireland ever had with itself. The future of the state, its legitimacy, fledgling Irish democracy, fidelity to the idea of a republic, the memory and sacrifice of those who had died in 1916 and during the War of Independence, what kind of independent country we might become, the Irish language, partition – all were discussed in increasingly heated terms.
The debates took place in Earlsfort Terrace, with a large crowd gathered outside and the world press in attendance. In the country at large, everyone was riveted by these discussions on their future, many weary of long years of war, some determined to accept nothing less than a sovereign republic. These days were a turning point in our history, with consequences lasting to this day.
As a theatrical event, Staging the Treaty was extraordinary: the audience was seated at either end of the room where the debates had actually taken place a hundred years before, with some privileged to sit among the speakers. I found myself sitting between Éamon de Valera and Cathal Brugha, both of whom had plenty to say. The visceral effect of being right in the middle of the action, with a cast of forty-five all completely invested in their characters, all speaking the actual words spoken by those characters a hundred years ago is unforgettable.
Thus we heard Mary MacSwiney on the gruesome death of her brother Terence on hunger strike in 1920; Arthur Griffith with a landmark speech on the importance of democracy; Éamon de Valera on the inviolability of the republic; Michael Collins on the gradual achievement of freedom; Margaret Pearse on the debt owed to her two dead sons; Seán MacEntee (a Belfast Catholic) on the partition of the country; Cathal Brugha, fatally for his own side, on the alleged villainy and incompetence of Michael Collins; and everyone on the subject of oaths to the republic and the king, couched in the pietistic language common at the time.
There were six women in the second Dáil, four of them bereaved by the previous conflicts: Mary MacSwiney lost her brother; Mrs Pearse lost her two sons to execution in 1916; Kathleen Clarke lost her husband, Tom, and brother Ned Daly, also to execution in 1916; Kate O’Callaghan saw her husband shot dead in front of her. Constance Markievicz and psychiatrist Ada English were the other two. All were anti-Treaty, a subject that deserves further scrutiny. Loss of loved ones can turn people against conflict; in these cases it inspired a desire to fight on.
It is difficult to describe the emotional effect of watching these men and women try and fail to reach agreement on flawed peace or further war. As the debates go on, you see the sides drawing further and further apart, ceasing to listen to each other and settling into entrenched positions, and it is heartbreaking. Because we are watching and listening to actors speaking the real words of their characters, we are forced out of our own comfort zones into the difficult but rewarding enterprise of trying to understand both sides. Compassion can replace partisanship. To paraphrase Sean O’Casey, hearts of stone can become hearts of flesh.
Our emotional involvement is enhanced by our knowledge of what happened after the talking was over. As Theo Dorgan has written: ‘ …the Civil War descended into savagery and barbarism. What had been a war of identifiable armed forces became a wild and undisciplined campaign of murder directed against civilians, extra-judicial killings on the part of the State, score-settling and plain atrocity on both sides.’
Luckily, Louise Lowe, director of the piece, had the idea of filming the performances, so that they could reach a wider audience. The ten hours of Staging the Treaty, divided into four separate films, are available on the website of the Irish Film Institute, IFIHome.ie. I commend it to all who have an interest in Irish history. Even though we know the outcome, it is riveting viewing.
When I got news that Owen McCafferty’s Agreement was to be staged in the Lyric in Belfast, one of my favourite theatres, I arranged to go up to see it for a matinee one Saturday as I could not attend the opening night. Owen McCafferty has a slew of wonderful plays to his credit, including Scenes from the Big Picture, Closing Time, Fire Below and one of my all-time favourite plays, Quietly. Owen made a foray into the same kind of area as Staging the Treaty with his well-reviewed Titanic in 2012, a recreation of parts of the London inquiry into the sinking of Ireland’s most famous ship. Alas I did not get to see it. Great actors want to be in Owen’s plays, people like Patrick O’Kane, Declan Conlon, Ian McElhinney and the celestial Andrea Irvine. So the prospect of a play on the Belfast Agreement from him was deeply interesting.
There is no day-by-day verbatim account of the negotiations for the Agreement, although there is good contemporary reporting and a slew of memoirs from some key players after the fact. Owen could not do what Theo did, so he deployed his considerable imaginative and theatrical skills to give us a lightly fictionalised version of the last four days of negotiations, when tensions were at their highest, not helped by Ian Paisley, the ultimate refusenik, bawling insults down the road. He reduces what could have been a huge cast down to a manageable seven – George Mitchell, John Hume, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and Mo Mowlam, with Bill Clinton’s disembodied voice showing up when necessary. The set is the simplest possible, an assortment of office furniture on castors which can be moved by the cast at will. We are focused on the talking, which is brilliantly rendered: George Mitchell’s insistence that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed; John Hume’s dogged commitment to the process and his infinite patience, at least in this scenario; David Trimble and Gerry Adams, both nervous, inclined to threaten withdrawal and unable to communicate with each other; Tony Blair, vain and slightly, sometimes seriously, annoying, but deeply committed to the process; Bertie Ahern grieving his mother’s death but absolutely willing to make very big concessions, like changing our constitution; and Mo Mowlam, funny, irreverent, seriously ill, caring for them all like a weary mother hen.
Owen McCafferty kindly agreed to talk to me about the process involved in creating Agreement. He was working with Charlotte Westenra, the director who had done the Titanic piece with him, and who had presided over an acclaimed dramatic version of the Bloody Sunday tribunal. Owen said he was sceptical about whether he could deal with the subject at first, but she read all the books and reportage and sent him extracts from them. He made detailed notes based on these, then read the notes through, put them away and wrote the play. Interestingly, the title of the play helped him make his way into the heart of the matter: Agreement, rather than The Agreement, allowed him to conceive of the task as dealing with a bunch of people having an argument with a set deadline for conclusion, and partially untethered him from the actual dialogue, which in any case was not available, to create his own version of what might have been said by whom.
For example, Seamus Mallon tells us in his memoir: ‘I have a vivid memory of saying to Blair at a dinner in Hillsborough that the SDLP was the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, yet he was doing a lot of talking behind our backs to the smaller nationalist party Sinn Féin. His answer was breathtaking: “The trouble with you fellows, Seamus, is that you have no guns.’”
This was during the interminable discussions about decommissioning, a good while after the agreement was signed. In the play, Owen has Blair say to Bertie Ahern, who complains that too much attention is being paid to Gerry Adams: ‘He’s the one with the guns.’ Hume overhears this and addresses the audience: ‘He’s the one with the guns – that’s not an easy thing to hear – I’ve spent my life fighting for civil rights through peaceful protest.’
While Owen has displaced the quote backwards, it allows the audience to know what Blair is thinking. The playwright uses his imaginative licence to give us the subterranean context to what is going on, and thus enhances our understanding of the dynamics of the discussion, which ranges from mechanisms for power-sharing, with the collapse of Sunningdale hanging over proceedings, to the three strands of the agreement – local, North-South, and East-West, to protections for identities, to the highly vexed questions of decommissioning and prisoner release, matters of particular concern to ‘the ones with the guns’. The pace of the play is furious, reflecting the extreme tensions of attempting to reach agreement to a strict deadline.
When it is reached, the relief is enormous, even though the audience already knows the outcome. What we have seen is how they got there, with the pressures of different personalities, responsibilities and desires vying together to reach a conclusion. And it is incredibly exciting. Every performance of Agreement got an extended standing ovation in the Lyric. People were greatly moved by the raw spectacle of the serious difficulties of the process, and the efforts of all to overcome them.
Now, more than ever, we need reminders that seemingly intractable conflicts are capable of resolution. There are dangerous and increasingly contentious disputes and wars worldwide – Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Yemen among others, not to mention the move towards authoritarianism in the US and some European countries.
What are the issues raised by these two remarkable pieces of drama, and how do they deal with them? Both discussions arise from violent conflict, the War of Independence of 1919-21 and the so-called Troubles of 1968-1998. Both have to try to rise above partisan versions of the past, and to impose the idea that those with guns do not get to decide everything. An ongoing Irish problem has been the belief that violence is a legitimate tool to achieve political objectives. In the case of the Treaty debates, some of the speakers are insistent that the men who fought the War of Independence should be the people to decide the outcome, and they display a thinly disguised contempt for democracy. And to a certain degree, they win – they walk out of the parliamentary process and eventually begin a civil war, despite the overwhelming public support for the Treaty expressed in the election of June 1922. Arthur Griffith’s speech on the last day of the debates is a defence of democracy and a reminder to the deputies in the Dáil that they are there to represent the views of their constituents, no matter what their own opinions might be:
I have heard one Deputy saying here that it does not matter what his constituents say. I tell him it does. If representative government is going to remain on the earth, then a representative must voice the opinion of his constituents; if his conscience will not let him do that he has only one way out and that is to resign and refuse to misrepresent them.
But that men who know their constituents want this Treaty, should come here and tell us that, by virtue of the vote they derive from these constituents, they are going to vote against this Treaty, that is the negation of all democratic right; it is the negation of all freedom. You are doing what Castlereagh and Pitt did in 1800; you are doing what these two men did when they refused to let the Irish Parliament dissolve on the question of the Union, and to allow the people to be consulted. You are trying to reject this Treaty without allowing the Irish people to say whether they want it or not – the people whose lives and fortunes are involved.”
We have to remember that the Second Dáil was an unpractised parliamentary assembly, and that most of its members had no experience of democratic procedure. Griffith forcibly reminded them of their responsibilities at a crucial phase of the debate.
In the case of the Agreement, one of the infamous moments is Tony Blair’s remark, referred to above, about ‘the fellows with the guns’. The shadow of the gunman hangs over the play, not just the from the IRA but also from loyalist paramilitaries. And again, the Agreement is proposing a brand-new political system (if we discount Sunningdale) which will have to be worked by some people completely unused to democratic procedures. The negotiations also operate as a workshop in compromise, the essential and most difficult ingredient in conflict resolution. At one point Bertie Ahern asks Tony Blair:
What are you giving up? … We’re talking about changing my country’s constitution – moving from an historic claim to a future aspiration … what I’m doing isn’t nothing – I am willing to do it and I will take whatever flak there is coming to me for doing it – but Trimble must be told there is no triumphalism or grandstanding about this – and you need to tell him he is here to negotiate.
As the play progresses, we watch the exhausting but exciting round of different people talking to each other (and some not), until compromise reaches a point that is satisfactory, at least for that day, to them all. We know there is more to do, although eleven years to get proper decommissioning was not imagined then, but the achievement is huge, almost unexpected, and highly significant.
Over both plays hang the ghosts of the dead and the suffering of the maimed, the desolation of violent bereavement and the trauma of those losses. There is a lot of talk about the patriot dead in the Treaty debates, but none about the civilians killed during the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. In Agreement, there is similarly little said about the many dead and injured in the conflict, the majority of them civilians, as is often the case in war.
Ireland has had, for far too long, a blithe tolerance for violence as a mechanism for gaining political objectives. It is still there today, in heedless politicians and sportspeople in the South singing ‘Up the Ra’, or equally heedless people in the North mocking murder victims like Michaela Harte. There needs to be a debate on both sides of our now fluid border on what we plan to do about these residual feelings of rectitude when it comes to killing and maiming people who disagree with us.
I was fortunate enough to be in New York in April 2024 when Agreement came to the beautiful Irish Arts Centre, and I went to the opening night. George Mitchell was there, looking exactly the same as when he left Ireland twenty-five years ago to be with his infant child. He made a solemn and beautiful speech about how much the Agreement meant to him, and about its exemplary potential to aid other conflict resolution processes. Three of the main participants are dead: John Hume, David Trimble and the heroic Mo Mowlam. They understood that time was and always is short, and with that understanding, overcame major obstacles to make life better for a shattered community.
Democracy is hard and imperfect, but it’s the best and fairest system so far worked out by our flawed species to achieve some kind of fair consensus on how and by whom we are governed. Both of these superlative plays bring us face to face with the hard work of democracy, and remind us how much is lost when it is abandoned, and how much is gained when it is embraced.
1/10/2024
Catriona Crowe is a member of the Dublin Theatre Festival board, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
