During the Four Courts crisis, on 22 June 1922 Diarmuid O Hegarty wrote to the Lloyd George explaining the strategy of the government for dealing with the anti-Treatyites, saying "The Government was, however, satisfied, that those forces contained within themselves elements of disruption which given time would accomplish their own disintegration and relieve the Government of the necessity of employing methods of suppression which would have perhaps evoked a certain amount of misplaced sympathy for them", arguing that force need not be used against them.