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. Schooled locally at Lisavaird, he went to London at fifteen as a Post Office clerk, and there joined the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers in quick succession, before returning to Dublin in January 1916.

He fought in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising of 1916 under Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, and was interned afterwards at Frongoch in north Wales, the camp the prisoners called the Republican University, where the next generation of Irish leadership organised itself. Released at Christmas 1916, he rose with remarkable speed through the reconstituted movement; by 1918 he was Minister for Finance in the underground Dáil, raising and administering the National Loan that funded the independence struggle.

His decisive contribution was the intelligence war. As Director of Intelligence from 1919 he built and ran what serious assessment regards as the most effective asymmetric intelligence operation of the early twentieth century, including a network of sources inside Dublin Castle itself who passed him British orders before they reached the street. By the summer of 1921 the British administration in Ireland was effectively blind, and London opened negotiations.

Collins was one of five plenipotentiaries to the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks in London from October to December 1921, and on 6 December 1921 he signed the Treaty that created the Irish Free State, the twenty-six-county dominion from which the modern independent Irish state grew. In 1922 he led the Provisional Government and was commander-in-chief of its new National Army, charged with bringing the new state into being.

Michael Collins is remembered as the principal architect of Irish independence: the man who out-thought an empire's security apparatus and then negotiated the settlement from which the Republic of Ireland grew. His birthplace at Sam's Cross is preserved as a national monument, and his name carries, in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora, the weight of the figure who did more than almost any other to win the country its freedom.