After months of negotiation, delegates including Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the early hours of December 6, 1921, establishing the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth. The treaty ended the guerrilla war against British rule but split the independence movement, since it required an oath of allegiance to the Crown and partitioned Northern Ireland, grievances that ignited a civil war within months.
Michael Collins signed the treaty knowing it would likely cost him his life. 'I tell you, I have signed my death warrant,' he reportedly said afterward, and he was right—he was shot dead in an ambush during the ensuing Irish Civil War less than nine months later.
The negotiations in London had dragged through the autumn of 1921, with Collins and Arthur Griffith facing British Prime Minister David Lloyd George's delegation across the table, both sides exhausted by a guerrilla war that had turned brutal on all fronts—ambushes, reprisals, and the infamous Bloody Sunday shootings in Dublin the previous year. The resulting treaty gave Ireland dominion status, similar to Canada's, complete with its own parliament and army, but it fell short of the full republic that many revolutionaries had fought for.
The sticking points—an oath of fidelity to the King and the exclusion of six northern counties—tore the independence movement apart. Éamon de Valera rejected the treaty, and the Dáil ratified it by only a narrow margin, 64 votes to 57. Within months, former comrades were fighting each other in a civil war more vicious in some respects than the war against Britain had been, a wound in Irish politics that shaped party lines for the rest of the twentieth century.
Key people: Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, David Lloyd George