Michael Collins (Irish leader)

Michael John Collins (Irish name Mícheál Eoin Ó Coileáin; 16 October, 1890 – 22 August, 1922) was an Irish revolutionary leader, served as Minister for Finance in the Irish Republic, as Director of Intelligence for the IRA, as a member of the Irish delegation during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations, as Chairman of the Provisional Government and as Commander-in-Chief of the National Army.

He was assassinated in August 1922, during the Irish Civil War. Although most Irish political parties honour him, members and supporters of the political party Fine Gael hold in particular respect his memory.

Early years

Michael John ("Mick") Collins was born in Sam's Cross, near Clonakilty, in County Cork, Ireland in 1890, the third son and youngest of eight children. Although most biographies list his date of birth as 16 October, 1890, his tombstone lists his date of birth as 12 October, 1890.

His family, muintir Uí Choileáin, had once been the lords of Uí Chonaill, near Limerick, but like many Irish gentry, had become dispossessed and reduced to the level of ordinary farmers. Yet their farm of 145 acres (0.9 km²) made them wealthier and more comfortable than most Irish farmers of late nineteenth century Ireland. It was into that relatively well-to-do farming existence that Michael Collins was born. Michael's older sister, Helena, became a nun, and was known as Sister Mary Celestine; she was a schoolteacher in London.

Michael's father, also called Michael Collins, had become a member of the republican Fenian movement when younger, but had left the movement and settled down to farming.

Collins was recorded as being a bright and precocious child, with a fiery temper and a passionate nationalism, spurred on by a local blacksmith, James Santry, and later, at the Lisavaird National School, by a local school headmaster, Denis Lyons, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (or IRB, an organization of which Collins would eventually become the leader). Collins was tall, strapping and loved sports, which did not detract from his cerebral development or uncanny instincts.

In February 1906 Collins took the British Civil Service examination in which (to pass it) he praised the "greatest empire" (see//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/3915341.stm).

After leaving school, the 15-year-old Michael, like many Irish, moved abroad: he worked in the British Post Office in London from July 1906, while living with his elder sister, Johanna ("Hannie").

He joined the IRB through Sam Maguire, a Protestant republican from Cork, in November, 1909, aged 19. He came to play a central role in the IRB, ending up as its president within little more than a decade.

The Easter Rising

Michael Collins first became known during the Easter Rising in 1916. A skilled organiser of considerable intelligence, he was highly respected in the IRB, so much so that he was made financial adviser to Count Plunkett, father of one of the Rising's organisers, Joseph Mary Plunkett, whose aide-de-camp Collins would become.

When the rising itself took place on Easter Monday, 1916, he fought alongside Patrick Pearse and others in the General Post Office in Dublin. The rising became (as expected by many) a military disaster. While many celebrated the fact that a rising had happened at all, believing in the theory of blood sacrifice (namely that the deaths of the rising's leaders would inspire others), Collins railed against what he perceived as its ham-fisted amateurism, notably the seizure of prominent buildings such as the GPO that were impossible to defend, impossible to escape from and difficult to supply. (During the War of Independence he ensured the avoidance of such tactics of "becoming sitting targets", with his soldiers operating as flying columns who waged a guerrilla war against the British, suddenly attacking then just as quickly suddenly withdrawing, minimising losses and maximising effectiveness.)

Collins, like many of the rising's participants, was arrested, almost sent to the gallows and wound up at Frongoch internment camp. There, as his contemporaries expected, his leadership skills showed. By the time of the general release, Collins had already become one of the leading figures in the post-rising Sinn Féin, a small nationalist party which the British government and the Irish media wrongly blamed for the rising. It was quickly infiltrated by survivors of the rising, so as to capitalise on the "notoriety" the innocent movement had gained through British attacks. By October 1917, through skill and ability, Collins had risen to become a member of the executive of Sinn Féin and director of organisation of the Irish Volunteers; Eamon de Valera was president of both organisations.

The First Dáil

Like all senior Sinn Féin members, Michael Collins was nominated to seek a seat in the 1918 general election to elect Irish MPs to the British House of Commons in London. And like the overwhelming majority (many without contests), Collins was elected, becoming MP for South Armagh. However, unlike their rivals in the Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Féin MPs had announced that they would not take their seats in Westminster, but instead would set up an Irish Parliament in Dublin. That new parliament, called Dáil Éireann (meaning Assembly of Ireland, see First Dáil) met in the Mansion House, Dublin in January 1919. De Valera and leading Sinn Féin MPs had been arrested. Collins, typically, had been tipped off by his network of spies about the plan and had warned leading figures. De Valera, equally typically, had talked many into ignoring the warnings, believing if the arrests happened they would constitute a propaganda coup, only to find that with the leadership now arrested, there were few people left to do the necessary "spinning" in the media. In de Valera's absence, Cathal Brugha was elected Príomh Aire (literally prime minister, but often translated as 'President of Dáil Éireann'), to be replaced by de Valera, when Collins helped his escape from Lincoln prison, in April, 1919.

Collins in 1919 had a number of roles: in the summer he was elected president of the IRB, and in September he was made Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army, as the Volunteers had become (the name symbolising the organisation's claim to be the army of the Irish Republic ratified in January 1919). The Irish War of Independence in effect began on the same day that the First Dáil met in January 1919, when two policemen guarding a consignment of gelignite were shot dead by IRA volunteers acting without orders, in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary. {See also Dan Breen}.

Minister for Finance

In 1919, the already busy Collins received yet another responsibility when de Valera appointed him to the Aireacht (ministry) as Minister for Finance.

Understandably, in the circumstances of a brutal war, in which ministers were liable to be arrested or killed by the Royal Irish Constabulary, the British Army, the Black and Tans or the Auxiliaries at a moment's notice, most of the ministries existed only on paper, or as one or two people working in a room of a private house.

Not with Collins, however, who produced a Finance Ministry that was able to organise a large bond issue in the form of a National Loan to fund the new Irish Republic. Such was Collins' reputation that even Lenin heard about his spectacular national loan, and sent a representative to Dublin to borrow some money from the Irish Republic to help fund the Russian Republic, offering some of the Russian Crown Jewels as collateral. (The jewels remained in a Dublin safe, forgotten by all sides, until the 1930s, when they were found by chance.)

In retrospect, the sheer scale of Collins' workload and his achievements are impressive. From creating a special assassination squad called The Twelve Apostles to kill British agents to the arrangement of an internationally famous "National Loan"; from running the IRA to effectively running the government when de Valera traveled to and remained in the United States for an extended period of time; and managing an arms-smuggling operation; Collins nearly became a one-man revolution.

Collins and Richard Mulcahy were two principal central organisers for the Irish Republican Army, in so far as it was possible to direct the actions of scattered and heavily localised guerrilla units. Collins is often credited with organising the IRA's guerrilla "flying columns" during the war of independence, although to suggest Collins organised this single handedly would be false. He had a prominent part in the formation of the flying columns but the main organiser would have been Dick McKee, later executed by the British in retaliation for Bloody Sunday (1920). In addition, a great deal of IRA activity was carried out on the initiative of local leaders, with tactics and overall strategy developed by Collins or Mulcahy.

By 1920, when he was 30 years old, the British offered a bounty of £10,000 (a vast sum in the 1920s) for information leading to the capture or death of Michael Collins. His fame had so transcended the IRA movement that he was nicknamed "The Big Fellow."

Among national leaders, he made enemies with two particular people: Cathal Brugha, the earnest but mediocre Minister for Defence who was overshadowed by his cabinet colleague in military matters (despite Collins being only nominally Minister for Finance with Brugha in defence supposedly the big player), and Éamon de Valera, the President of Dáil Éireann.

De Valera bitterly resented his much younger colleague and more so when Collins' reputation reached new heights while he, against Collins' advice, devoted a year to an ultimately fruitless search for American recognition of the Irish Republic. Their rivalry was even represented in their nicknames: the extremely tall de Valera earned the nickname the 'Long Fellow' while to de Valera's fury while abroad, Collins won the nickname 'Big Fellow' from his colleagues. Upon his return, De Valera attempted to get Collins to go to the States on the pretext that only he could achieve certain tasks there. Collins and most of the Sinn Féin leadership (except Brugha and Austin Stack) opposed this, and he stayed in Ireland.

Following a truce, arrangements were made for a conference between the British government and the leaders of the as yet unrecognised Irish Republic. Other than the Soviet Union, which needed money and so gave diplomatic recognition to the Irish Republic, not a single other state did so, despite sustained lobbying in Washington by de Valera and prominent Irish-Americans, as well as at the Versailles Peace Conference by Sean T. O'Kelly.

In a move that astonished observers, de Valera — who in August 1921 made the Dáil upgrade his office from prime minister to President of the Republic to make him the equivalent of King George V in the negotiations — then announced that as the King would not attend neither should the President of the Republic.

Instead with the reluctant agreement of his cabinet, de Valera nominated a team of plenipotentiaries — delegates with the power to sign a treaty without seeking approval from the government at home — headed by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins as his deputy. With heavy misgivings, believing de Valera should head the delegation, Collins agreed to go to London.

The Treaty

The negotiations ultimately resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which provided for a new Irish State, named the "Irish Free State" (a literal translation from the Irish language term Saorstát Éireann, which appeared on the letterhead de Valera had used, though de Valera had translated it less literally as the Irish Republic).

It provided for a possible all-Ireland state, subject to the right of a six-county region in the northeast to opt out of the Free State (which it immediately did). If this happened, an Irish Boundary Commission was to be established to redraw the Irish border, which Collins expected would so reduce the size of Northern Ireland as to make it economically unviable, thus enabling unity, as most of the unionist population was concentrated in a relatively small area in eastern Ulster.

The new Irish Free State was to be a Dominion, with a bicameral parliament, executive authority vested in the king but exercised by an Irish government elected by a lower house called Dáil Éireann (translated this time as Chamber of Deputies), an independent courts system, and a form of independence that far exceeded anything sought by Charles Stewart Parnell or the subsequent Irish Parliamentary Party.

Republican purists saw it as a sell-out, with the replacement of the republic by dominion status within the British Empire, and an Oath of Allegiance made (it was then claimed) directly to the King. (The actual wording shows that the oath was made to the Irish Free State, with a subsidiary oath of fidelity to the king as part of the Treaty settlement, not to the king unilaterally. See Oath of Allegiance (Ireland).)

Sinn Féin split over the treaty, with de Valera joining the anti-treaty faction opposing the perceived concession. His opponents charged that he had prior knowledge that the crown would have to feature in whatever form of settlement was agreed. His bitterest opponents even accused de Valera of "chickening out" of leading the delegation, in the knowledge that a republic could not possibly result from the negotiations in the short-term.

De Valera denied the charge, though most historians now accept the allegation as explaining his absence. Collins argued that while the treaty did not deliver the freedom that Irishmen had fought and died for, it gave "the freedom to achieve that freedom". De Valera was eventually to prove him right.

The Triple Approval

Under the terms of the treaty, three separate parliaments had to approve the document. The British parliament did so. So too did Dáil Éireann, although its approval was required for political rather than legal reasons: Dáil Éireann, though it had no status in international law and was not accepted as the parliament of Ireland by the international community (as it was regarded by the British as an illegal assembly), nevertheless had a crucial de-facto position as the voice of Sinn Féin members and (as they represented the majority of Irish people) of Irish public opinion. In addition the treaty required the approval of a third body, the House of Commons of Southern Ireland, which constituted the "lawful" parliament of the twenty-six county state called Southern Ireland created under the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (of its 128 members, 124, having been elected, had formed the Second Dáil in 1921, the body which had approved the new Treaty in December 1921).

Though few Irish people recognised it as a valid entity, as the legal Parliament it too needed to give approval, which it did overwhelmingly (anti-Treaty members stayed away, meaning only pro-treaty members — and the four unionists elected who had never sat in Dáil Éireann — attended its meeting in January 1922).

The Provisional Government

Under the Dáil Constitution adopted in 1919, Dáil Éireann continued to exist. De Valera resigned the presidency and sought re-election (in an effort to destroy the newly approved Treaty), but Arthur Griffith defeated him in the vote and assumed the presidency. (Griffith called himself President of Dáil Éireann rather than de Valera's more exalted President of the Republic.) However this government or Aireacht had no legal status in British constitutional law, so another co-existent government emerged, nominally answerable to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland.

The new Provisional Government formed under Collins, who became President of the Provisional Government (i.e., Prime Minister). He also remained Minister for Finance of Griffith's republican administration. An example of the complexities involved can be seen even in the manner of his installation. In British legal theory he was a Crown-appointed prime minister, installed under the Royal Prerogative. To be so installed, he had to formally meet the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Viscount Fitzalan (the head of the British administration in Ireland). According to the republican view, Collins met Fitzalan to accept the surrender of Dublin Castle, the seat of British government in Ireland. According to British constitutional theory, he met Fitzalan to "kiss hands" (the formal name for the installation of a minister of the Crown), the fact of their meeting rather than the signing of any documents, duly installing him in office.

Allegedly, Collins was late to this ceremony by seven minutes and was rebuked for this by Fitzalan. Collins replied, "You had to wait seven minutes but we had to wait seven hundred years!"

The Treaty was hugely controversial in Ireland. First, Éamon de Valera, the President of the Irish Republic was unhappy that Collins had signed any deal without his and his cabinet's authorisation. Second, the contents of the Treaty were bitterly disputed. De Valera and many other members of the republican movement objected to Ireland's status as a dominion of the British Empire and to the symbolism of having to take an Oath to the British King to this effect. Also controversial was the British retention of Treaty Ports on the south coast of Ireland for the Royal Navy. Both of these things threatened to give Britain control over Ireland's foreign policy. Almost half the TDs in the Dáil opposed the Treaty, which was narrowly passed on 7 January, 1922, by 64 votes to 57, a margin of 7 votes. Most seriously, most of the Irish Republican Army opposed the Treaty, opening the prospect of civil war over it.

Curiously, in hindsight, the partition of Ireland between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland was not as controversial. One of the main reasons for this was that Collins was secretly planning to launch a clandestine guerrilla war against the Northern State. Throughout the early months of 1922, he had been sending IRA units to the border and sending arms to the northern units of the IRA. The plan was interrupted by the outbreak of civil war in the south, but had Collins lived, there is every chance he would have launched a full scale guerrilla offensive against Northern Ireland. Because of this, most northern IRA units supported Collins and over 1000 of them joined the Free State Army in the Irish Civil War.

In the months leading up to the outbreak of civil war in June 1922, Collins tried deperately to heal the rift in the nationalist movement and prevent war. De Valera, having opposed the Treaty in the Dáil, withdrew from the assembly with his supporters. Collins secured a compromise, whereby the two factions of Sinn Féin, pro and anti Treaty, would fight the Free State's first election jointly and form a coalition government afterwards.

Collins proposed that the Free State would have a republican constitution, with no mention of the British King, without repudiating the Treaty, a compromise acceptable to all but the most intransigent republicans. To foster military unity, he established an "army re-unification committee" with delegates from pro and anti Treaty factions. He also made efforts to use the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood of which he was president, to get IRA officers to accept the Treaty. However, the British vetoed the proposed republican constitution and Collins was unable to reconcile the anti-treaty side. The subsequent actions of some anti-Treaty IRA men led to fighting and then all out civil war.

The Civil War, Death of Collins

In April 1922, a group of 200 anti-Treaty IRA men occupied the Four Courts in Dublin in defiance of the Provisional government. Collins, who wanted to avoid civil war at all costs did not attack them until June 1922, when British pressure forced his hand. On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson a retired British general, was shot dead by two IRA men in Belgravia, London. At the time, it was presumed that the anti-Treaty faction of the IRA were responsible and Winston Churchill told Collins that unless he moved against the Four Courts garrison, he, (Churchill) would use British troops to do so.

In fact, it has since been proved that Collins himself ordered the killing of Wilson in reprisal for his part in the attacks on Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland. Joe Dolan — a member of Collins' "Squad" or assassination unit in the War of Independence and in 1922 a captain in the Free State Army — revealed this in 1950s, along with the revelation that Collins had ordered him to try to rescue the two gunmen before they were executed (T. Ryle Dwyer, The Squad, Dublin 2005, page 256-258). In any event, this forced Collins to take action against the Four Courts men and the final provocation came when they kidnapped J.J. O'Connell, the Free State General. After a final attempt to persuade the men to leave, Collins borrowed two 18 pounder artillery pieces from the British (Tim Pat Coogan Michael Collins p331) and bombarded the Four Courts until its garrison surrendered.

This led to the Irish Civil War as fighting broke out in Dublin between the anti-Treaty IRA and the Free State troops. Under Collins' supervision, the Free State rapidly took control of the capital. In July 1922, anti-treaty forces held the southern province of Munster and several other areas of the country. De Valera and the other anti-treaty TDs sided with the anti-treaty IRA. By mid-1922, Collins in effect laid down his responsibilities as Chairman of the Provisional Government to become Commander-in-Chief of the National Army, a formal structured, uniformed army that formed around the nucleus of the pro-Treaty IRA. The Free State Army that was armed and funded by the British was rapidly expanded to fight the civil war. Collins, along with Richard Mulcahy and Eoin O'Duffy decided on a series of seaborne landings into republican held areas that re-took Munster and the west in July-August 1922. As part of this offensive, Collins travelled to his native Cork against the orders of his companions in order met with several anti-treaty leaders to end the fighting as soon as possible despite suffering from stomach ache and depression. Collins, however, told his comrades that "They wouldn't shoot me in my own county."^*.

En route through County Cork on 22 August, 1922, at the village of Béal na mBláth (in Irish — the Mouth of Flowers'), he was killed in an ambush mounted by local anti-Treaty IRA men, which lasted 45 minutes, probably by a ricocheting bullet. Collins was the only fatality in the action. Perhaps rashly, he had ordered his convoy to stop and return fire, instead of choosing the safer option of driving on in the safety of his armoured car, as his companion, Emmet Dalton, had wished. Collins was 31 years old when he died. There is no consensus as to who killed Collins. However, some books have stated that the bullet that killed Collins was fired by Denis ("Sonny") O'Neill, a former British Army marksman who died in 1950. Shocked that anything could have happened to 'the Big Fellow' whose fame was, by now, legendary, Collins' men brought his body back to Cork where it was shipped to Dublin. His body lay in state for three days in the rotunda where tens of thousands of mourners filed past his casket to pay their respects.

Collins' legacy

Michael Collins has gone down in Irish history as one of the great "what might have beens". A man of extraordinary intelligence, incredible passion but most of all a monumental work rate, his loss was a disaster for the nascent Irish state. Despite opposition, he had supported and supplied the IRA in Northern Ireland throughout the civil war, a policy which was quickly discontinued after his death, and it is doubtful he would have regarded the findings of the Irish Boundary Commission with the same equanimity as his successors. His loss was made all the more tragic by the death of President Griffith only 10 days before due to stress. One of Collins' last public appearances was marching behind the body of his friend and cabinet colleague. Within one week, Collins joined Griffith in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

But most striking of all were his prophetic words on the day the treaty was signed. When Lord Birkenhead, aware of how unpopular the Treaty would be in Britain, commented that he may have signed his political death warrant, Collins said that he had signed his actual death warrant. In words to a close friend Collins wrote:

''' "When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London's streets, cold and dank in the night air. Think - what have I got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this; early this morning I signed my death warrant. I thought at the time how odd, how ridiculous — a bullet may just as well have done the job five years ago"'''

Whereas his colleagues, whether Eamon de Valera, W.T. Cosgrave, Richard Mulcahy or Eoin O'Duffy were judged by how they handled the difficult task of building a state, Collins by his early death is simply remembered as a radical young man who faced none of their subsequent peace-time problems.

If people remember de Valera as a blind old man in semi-retirement in the presidency of Ireland in the 1960s and early 1970s, Cosgrave as the prime minister who had to balance the books financially after the Wall Street Crash, Mulcahy as the man who authorised executions of prisoners during the Civil War, Eoin O'Duffy as the policeman turned politician who became attracted to at least the Spanish form of fascism (under Franco), Collins remains in the public memory as the glorious, strapping, young man, barely 30, who delivered a republic, then a treaty, who inspired a generation, and who died before his time as his country stood on the threshold of independence.

The film Michael Collins

In 1996, Michael Collins became the subject of a film by Neil Jordan called Michael Collins with Liam Neeson playing the title role, as well as Julia Roberts playing Collins' fiancé, Kitty Kiernan. Although the film received praise for bringing the story of Michael Collins to a wide international audience, some historians criticised it for taking a number of liberties with facts.

Footnotes

Most agree that the Irish Republican Army of 1919–21 had the general sanction of the Irish people and Dáil Éireann to act as the "Army of the Republic". The majority of Irish people believe that the IRA's legitimacy was passed on to the new Irish National Army, established in 1922, and that later organisations calling themselves the IRA (whether the Official IRA, the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA etc.) had little legitimacy and only tenuous links with the earlier army of the Republic. A small republican minority disagrees and claims that the Second Dáil (the Parliament elected in June 1921 and which was replaced in another election in 1922) was never constitutionally disestablished and was thus always the real Irish parliament. A small number of republicans from the Second Dáil meeting in the 1930s voted to pass the Second Dáil's supposed legal authority to the Army Council of the IRA, making it in the eyes of some Irish republicans the real government of Ireland, and the IRA the real army. (In 2005 Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin, explicitly repudiated, at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, this constitutional theory (previously the cornerstone of physical force republicanism's claim to legitimacy) and instead declared there was no legitimate government of Ireland as long as it was partitioned).

Two Irish Gaelic titles correspond to the term 'Irish Republic': Saorstát Éireann (which literally meant "Free State of Ireland") and Poblacht na hÉireann. Irish language purists preferred the former title, which came from real previously existing Gaelic words, unlike the latter, a specially Gaeliscised word.

Revolutionary movements across the world have taken Michael Collins' approach to military operations. The tactic of wearing "the uniform of the common man" as opposed to formal military clothing is now common among guerilla movements. Indeed, the Israeli guerilla leader, Yitzhak Shamir, used as his code name Michael Collins in fighting the British, and the conflict to establish Taiwan (in the face of the Communist revolution in China) was called Operation Michael Collins.

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