Béal na mBláth

The founding of a State is rarely a single decision made in a single room. It is more often the working through of a wound: the moment at which a movement that has fought one enemy turns and finds the next enemy wearing its own face. The man who signs the treaty is the man who must die for it, and he generally knows this before he signs. What he does not know is the road, the hour, the hand.

THE BOY FROM WOODFIELD

Michael Collins was born at Woodfield, Sam's Cross, on the sixteenth of October 1890, the youngest of eight children of a Munster farmer who was already seventy-five at the birth. He went out at fifteen to the Post Office Savings Bank in West Kensington, sat his examinations, kept the books of London-Irish clubs, and came home in 1916 to be interned at Frongoch after the Rising. He was Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army through the Tan war, ran the Squad out of offices in Mary Street and Crow Street under the noses of G Division, and broke the Dublin Castle system from the inside. In October 1921 he went to London with Griffith to negotiate. In December he put his name to the Articles of Agreement, and wrote that night to John O'Kane the line that has followed him since: he had signed, he said, my actual death warrant. By August 1922 he was Commander-in-Chief of the National Army of the Provisional Government, the Civil War was eleven weeks old, Griffith had been buried four days, and Collins was thirty-one years old and the most-shot-at man on the island.

THE WEST CORK ROAD

On the morning of the twenty-second of August he left the Imperial Hotel in Cork city with a convoy of four vehicles: a Rolls-Royce armoured car, the Slievenamon, with a Vickers in the turret; a Crossley tender of soldiers with a Lewis gun; the open Leyland touring-car carrying Collins and Major-General Emmet Dalton in the back, with Smith of the Transport Corps at the wheel; and a motorcycle scout. He had been warned. The local commanders had counselled against the tour. Friends in Dublin had told him not to go down into Cork at all. He had answered them that they would not shoot him in his own county. He went west by Macroom and Bandon, called on relations at Sam's Cross, drank a pint at the Four Alls public house, and turned the convoy back towards the city in the late afternoon. The west Cork rain was coming in soft and slant. The light was going off the fields. At a junction near Béal na mBláth, Smith hesitated. Collins got down himself and asked an old farmer at a gate. The farmer pointed back the way they had come. Collins thanked him and got back in.

A BEND IN THE ROAD

The defile narrows three miles west of Bandon. The road runs between a high bank on the southern side and the Bríde river on the northern. A column of the anti-Treaty IRA under Tom Hales, perhaps eight men at the firing positions, had been laying an ambush there since morning and had stood down twenty minutes earlier, believing the convoy would not return that way. They were dismantling the mine in the road and pulling back when the Slievenamon came round the bend. At twenty past eight in the evening the first volley came from the bank to the right. Three rifles, one Lewis. The Vickers in the armoured car opened at once on the high ground. Collins, by Dalton's deposition four days later, jumped from the open Leyland onto the road with his Lee-Enfield in his hands and went to the ditch on the southern side. He fired from the prone position, three rounds, towards the bank. The fight on the convoy side ran about half an hour.

THE STANDING UP

Now he is at the ditch. The bank is three hundred yards above him in the gathering dusk and the rifles up there are firing more raggedly, fewer of them, the column is running short of rounds and beginning to draw off into the woods at the crest. He knows this country. He was born three miles south of here. He knows that Tom Hales is up on that bank, that Hales fought beside him through the Tan war, that Hales has been on the other side since the New Year, that the column will be Macroom men and Bandon men, his own people, men whose fathers his father knew. He thinks of the Imperial Hotel in Cork and the leaks out of it, of the cousin behind the bar, of the morning's warnings he set aside. He thinks of what an army is, and what it is for, when the men firing on him from the bank above are the same men who carried him on their shoulders through Sam's Cross in 1917. He thinks that a Commander-in-Chief who has come down into his own country to be seen cannot finish a contact in a ditch. The Crossley party are firing wide. He needs to give them an order. He stands up at the ditch. A single round, fired at long range from the bank above, a Mauser .303 by every reading of the cartridge case afterwards, takes him in the back of the head. He is, by Dalton at his side within ten seconds, dying when Dalton reaches him. He could not speak, Dalton said long afterwards. He died in Dalton's arms within five minutes. He was the only fatality of the action.

THE COLUMN ON THE BANK

Up on the high ground the men of the column did not yet know what they had done. They were drawing off in good order, ammunition spent, four hundred yards of bracken between them and the road. One of them, in the tradition Denis Sonny O'Neill of the Bandon battalion, the column's longest-range marksman, had taken the figure at the ditch with a single round and had not, in the moment of firing, known who it was. He learned the name at midnight, from a neighbour at a half-door, and by every account he never spoke of it again in any detail that could be set down. The other men of the column scattered to safe houses across the parish. Tom Hales lived another sixteen years, sat as a Fianna Fáil TD for West Cork, and never gave an interview on the matter. The bullet was never found. The marksman, by every plausible reading of the record, took the question with him to his own grave.

SHANAKIEL AND THE PRO-CATHEDRAL

The convoy held the road until twenty past nine. Smith got the Leyland turned. They carried the body in the open touring-car back through the dark to Cork city, twenty-eight miles by Crookstown and Coachford and the Lee Valley, and laid it in the parlour of Shanakiel Hospital at half past eleven. The body was taken by sea to Dublin, lay in state at City Hall, and was buried at Glasnevin on the twenty-eighth of August after a procession of a quarter of a million people between the Pro-Cathedral and the cemetery gates. Richard Mulcahy gave the oration. The Provisional Government did not fall. W. T. Cosgrave took the chair. The Free State forces fought a steadily winning campaign through the autumn and into the spring. Liam Lynch, anti-Treaty Chief of Staff, was killed in the Knockmealdown Mountains on the tenth of April 1923. The remaining anti-Treaty leadership ordered a dump-arms in May. The State that came out of the Treaty was the Irish Free State of December 1922, the Republic of Ireland of 1948, and the European Union member-state of 1973.

THE CROSS AT THE BEND

A State that is born of a civil war must decide, early, what to do with the body of the man who signed for it and was killed by the other side of the argument. Ireland's solution was neither denial nor monopoly. The road at Béal na mBláth was, until 1971, an unsurfaced country lane. The cross-roads is now marked by a stone Celtic cross on a granite plinth, put up by the National Graves Association in 1924, with the inscription I gcuimhne Mícheál Ó Coileáin. Every year on the Sunday closest to the twenty-second of August a commemoration is held on the spot. By a convention that has held without serious break since 1924, the oration is given alternately by a Fianna Fáil and a Fine Gael speaker, the parties descended from the two sides of the argument that killed him. The country's solution to the question of who claims the man, and how, has been to claim him on alternate years and let the bend in the road do the rest. The plinth is plain granite. The rain comes in slant off the Bríde.