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Michael Collins

1890–1922

 

Though he died fighting in the Irish civil war at the age of thirty-one, Michael Collins remains for many Irish people the very epitome of the Irish rebel - bold, handsome, and romantic.  He was the man who masterminded the guerrilla war against the British army in Ireland between 1919 and 1921, but also lived just long enough to firmly lay the foundations of a democratic state in Ireland.  Though divided from his former comrades by the civil war (1922 to 1923), he saw the Treaty with Great Britain as a stepping-stone to fully securing what many Irish people had longed for, a united thirty-two-country Irish republic.  But he had to place responsibilities before dreams and accept what was offered, even though it meant the partition of the island.  It had been effectively partitioned since 1880, and it has taken Irish nationalists another century to come to terms with the outlook of many Ulstermen.

      Michael Collins was born on 16th October 1890, in Woodfield, Clonakilty, in County Cork.  Like so many Irish leaders, he was the son of a small farmer.  After being educated in the local national school, he went to London at the age of sixteen, where he joined the civil service as a clerk in the post office.  Later he worked as a clerk for a stockbroker, which gave him some grasp of finance.

      In London he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the main group plotting for an Irish revolution - their derived from the original Fenians who had attempted an invasion of Canada and an insurrection in Ireland back in the 1860s, a generation before Collins’ birth.  He returned to Dublin to take part in the Easter Rising in 1916, which the Brotherhood instigated.  He fought in the General Post Office in Dublin where the rebels had their headquarters, with PATRICK HENRY PEARSE [7] and was detained when the rebels surrendered.  On his release from prison, he quickly came to the fore as a leading figure in the political party Sinn Féin, as well as in the Irish Volunteers, the military wing of the movement that became known, from its Fenian roots, as the IRA.  Against the wishes of EAMON DE VALERA [2] and others, in 1917 he organized for a Sinn Féin candidate to run in a local election, and to win the seat.  Many felt that Irish republicans should have nothing to do with British institutions of any kind.

      In 1919, with the establishment of the first Dáil - the assembly of Irish representatives who had been elected to the imperial parliament in London but chose instead to sit in Dublin - and the declaration of Irish independence, he became the minister of home affairs and later the minister of finance in the underground Sinn Féin government of Ireland.  But it was not for these public roles that he became well known.  He was also director of intelligence for the Irish Volunteers.  While he was raising the National Loan to finance the activities of the new movement, with help from Irish Americans, he was also setting up an espionage system which infiltrated the British system in Ireland.

      A forceful personality of great energy, he was also famous for his personal courage and contempt for danger.  His coup in organizing the murder of fourteen British intelligence officers on a Sunday morning, 21 November 1921, led that afternoon to twelve fatalities in Croke Park when British soldiers opened fire on a crowd attending a Gaelic football match.

      The British prime minister Lloyd George, an astute Welshman, realized that the excesses of the war fought the length and breadth of Ireland during late 1920 and early 1921 could no longer be sustained.  A truce came into effect in July 1921, and a second Dáil was assembled in August.  Collins was one of those who went to London to negotiate the treaty in December 1921.

      What might have been the end of Ireland's troubles and the beginning of a new era became instead the object of fierce objections from some republicans.  Collins became chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State, and after the civil war broke out became commander in chief of the national army.  On a tour of west Cork his party was ambushed at Beal na Bláth on 22nd August 1922 and during the firefight which followed he was struck in the head by a ricocheting bullet and died almost at once.

      He had been in his own country, the countryside of his childhood.  As Cork writer Frank O'Connor later expressed it, 'The countryside he had seen in his dreams, the people he had loved, the tradition which had been his inspiration - they had risen in the falling light and struck him dead.'  His funeral, so soon after the sudden death of his colleague Arthur Griffith, was an occasion for an outpouring of national grief.  But there were other men to succeed them, and despite the turmoil and terror of the civil war (far worse than anything that had been seen in the short war against the British) the Irish state remained stable.

      This was, perhaps, Collins' greatest gift to his people, but his other qualities of bravery and leadership have given him almost mythical stature in modern Ireland.  That Ireland is today a mature and thriving democracy owes much to the life and struggle of Michael Collins.