Michael Collins(1890–1922)

Michael Collins was born at Sam's Cross outside Clonakilty in west Cork in October 1890, the youngest of eight children on a family farm three miles from the coast. He was schooled at the local Lisavaird national school, then at fifteen sent to London to work as a Post Office clerk — the standard ambitious-young-Irishman path of the Edwardian decade. In London he joined the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers in quick succession. The radicalising network that produced him put him on a returning boat to Dublin in January 1916.

He fought in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising that April, under the command of Patrick Pearse and James Connolly. After the surrender he was interned at Frongoch in north Wales — what the prisoners called the Republican University, the place where the next generation of Irish revolutionary leadership organised itself. Released at Christmas 1916, he rose with extraordinary speed through the reconstituted IRB. By 1918 he was Minister for Finance in the underground Dáil, raising the National Loan that funded the War of Independence.

His real work was the intelligence war. As IRA Director of Intelligence from 1919 he ran what is, by serious assessment, the most successful asymmetric intelligence operation of the early twentieth century. The Twelve Apostles — his hand-picked assassination unit, the Squad — neutralised the G-Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police one detective at a time. On 21 November 1920 they killed fourteen named British intelligence officers — the Cairo Gang — in a single coordinated dawn operation across the Dublin suburbs. Collins ran simultaneously a network of moles inside Dublin Castle itself — clerks who copied British orders before they reached the streets. By the summer of 1921 the British administration in Ireland was effectively blind.

London opened secret negotiations that summer. Collins was one of five plenipotentiaries to the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks in London from October to December 1921. On 6 December 1921 he signed the Treaty creating the Irish Free State — a 26-county dominion, Northern Ireland excluded, an oath to the Crown required. He famously remarked, after signing, that he had signed his death warrant. The Treaty split the IRA and the Dáil; Eamon de Valera led the anti-Treaty faction into Civil War in June 1922.

Collins commanded the Free State forces in the Civil War that followed. On 22 August 1922, returning from a tour of his native west Cork in an open-topped Crossley tender, his convoy was ambushed at Béal na mBláth — 'the mouth of the flowers' — a few miles from Sam's Cross. He was the only fatality. He was thirty-one. The Collins name today carries this paradoxical weight: a man who beat the British Empire and was killed by his own countrymen, the architect of Irish independence and the symbol of its splits. His birthplace at Sam's Cross is preserved as a national monument and the Béal na mBláth ambush site is commemorated each August.