To minimise losses due to competition from other parties, Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins worked out a pact approved on 20 May 1922.

Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, opposed the Pact as undemocratic, and made a long statement on 31 May.

This boycott gave uncontested control to the pro-treaty members of Sinn Féin, and so enabled W. T. Cosgrave to establish the Second Provisional Government.

[9] The vote was seen as significant in several ways: Further, the anti-Treaty candidates had taken part in an election in line with Article 11 of the Treaty, even though they had argued that it was flawed, being partitionist.

Within 12 days, on 28 June 1922, as a result of the tensions between pro- and anti-Treatyites, the Irish Civil War broke out, when the Provisional Government's troops began a bombardment of the Anti-Treaty IRA's occupation of the Four Courts, Dublin.

[10] Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, leaders of two separate but co-operating administrations, had respectively been killed and had died in August.

[11] On 6 December 1922, on the establishment of the Irish Free State, Cosgrave was nominated by the Dáil to the position of President of the Executive Council, and was appointed by the Governor-General Tim Healy.