....death stills the bitterest controversy. - Erskine Childers

From this farcical Belfast, where anti-Catholic pogroms are occurring daily and where 30,000 Catholics are out of work because of their religion, and where the religious test is imposed on civic and private employment, we have cut ourselves off from as entirely as we have severed British connection. We will never recognize the partition of Ireland. When the time comes, Dail Eireann will be summoned by President Eamon De Valera and it will meet as an all Ireland parliament, independent of England.

What we all know is that Ireland is permeated with spies, ordinary and extraordinary, imported Englishmen and perverted Irishmen, in and out of uniform, in low places and high places....punishing first and foremost the great national crime of Republicanism, and in the second place real crimes artificially promoted by the regime––symptoms of a disease invariably arising from the forcible suppression of a national ideal.

The British can sign and find a way to repudiate their signatures. They've done it over and over again. You need to go back to the Treaty Of Limerick. You have Malta and Egypt, for instance. They can always find high moral reasons for such repudiation. They are opportunists. Griffith, however, having given his word, would stick to it whatever the consequences, even though it meant the disaster of a civil war. They knew that.