Collins
also Ó Coileáin, Ó Cuilleáin
The man who beat the Empire, and the family of west Cork.
- Origin
- Munster, Ireland
- Famous bearer
- Michael Collins (1890–1922), IRA director of intelligence, Treaty signatory, Free State leader
- Register
- Irish family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Collins
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Collins community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Collins has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Collins clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Collins clan →What does the Collins name mean?
From Ó Coileáin (or Ó Cuilleáin), descendant of Coileán ('whelp', 'young hound'). The Ó Coileáin were a noble Munster sept who ruled the territory of Uí Conaill Gabhra in west Limerick until pushed south into west Cork by Anglo-Norman expansion in the 13th century. From Cork the surname spread densely through the Munster south-west; today Cork and Limerick remain the densest counties for Collins on the island. Some English Collins lines are independently of English origin (a diminutive of Nicholas), but Irish Collins overwhelmingly traces to Ó Coileáin.
The history of Collins
The Ó Coileáin lordship of Uí Conaill Gabhra was a distinct kingdom in late-medieval Munster, anchored at Glenmore in west Limerick. Driven south of the Mullaghareirk Mountains by the FitzGerald advance after 1200, the family re-established at Inchiquin in west Cork and remained a notable Catholic Old Irish line through the 16th and 17th centuries, surrendering and regranting in 1542, losing land in the Cromwellian settlement, and recovering some of it under James II before the Williamite confiscation extinguished the title. The Cork base became permanent; the Collins diaspora is overwhelmingly west-Cork-rooted.
Michael Collins (1890–1922), born at Sam's Cross outside Clonakilty in west Cork, was the IRA director of intelligence during the Irish War of Independence and the chief negotiator of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. His intelligence operation, the Squad, the Cairo Gang assassinations of 21 November 1920, the network of clerks inside Dublin Castle, broke British administration in Ireland. He led the Free State forces in the Civil War that followed the Treaty split and was killed in an ambush at Béal na mBláth in his native west Cork on 22 August 1922, two months short of his thirty-second birthday. The Sam's Cross homestead is preserved as a national monument.
Champions of the Collins name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Step Into History
Walk the streets and seats the Collins name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.
Notable bearers of the Collins name
- Michael Collins (1890–1922), IRA director of intelligence, Treaty signatory, Free State leader
- Joan Collins (b. 1933), actress (Dynasty)
- Jackie Collins (1937–2015), novelist
- Eileen Collins (b. 1956), astronaut, first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission
Stories of Collins
Béal na mBláth
1922On the afternoon of the twenty-second of August 1922, eight months after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London, with the Civil War running into its eleventh week and the anti-Treaty IRA reduced to flying-column operations across south Munster, Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the National Army of the Provisional Government, drove west into his native County Cork on a tour of inspection that the local commanders had counselled him not to make. He had attended the funeral of Arthur Griffith four days earlier in Dublin. He was thirty-one years old. He had told the friends who tried to dissuade him that he would not be shot in his own county. The convoy of an armoured car, a Crossley tender of soldiers, the Leyland touring-car and a motorcycle scout was ambushed at the bend of the road at Béal na mBláth, three miles west of Bandon, at twenty minutes past eight in the evening on the way back to Cork city. Collins was hit in the back of the head by a single rifle bullet from the high ground above the road, fired by a man at long range, and was dead at the scene within five minutes. The remaining ambushers withdrew within twenty. He was the only fatality of the action.
Read the story →
The Treaty signature
1921On the morning of the sixth of December 1921, at twenty past two in the morning, in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, after eight weeks of formal Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations and a final twenty-four-hour stretch in which the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had presented Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and three other Irish plenipotentiaries with the now-celebrated ultimatum of immediate and terrible war if a settlement was not reached by midnight, the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland were signed by Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill on the British side and by Griffith, Collins, Robert Barton, Eamonn Duggan and George Gavan Duffy on the Irish side. Collins, by his own letter written from Hans Place to his fiancée Kitty Kiernan in the hours of the morning afterwards, signed his own death warrant. He was thirty-one years old. The settlement granted Ireland dominion status on the model of Canada, with the partition of the six north-east counties as Northern Ireland under a separate parliament, and required an oath of allegiance from Irish parliamentarians to the Crown. The Treaty was ratified by the Dáil on the seventh of January 1922 by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. The Civil War broke out in June. Collins was killed in eight months and twenty-six days.
Read the story →