Collins · 1922
Béal na mBláth
On 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.
It is twenty past eight in the evening of the twenty-second of August 1922, on the bend of the road at Béal na mBláth, three miles west of Bandon, in soft west-Cork rain, with the light coming up off the road through the open hood of the Leyland touring-car. He is thirty-one years old. He is Michael Collins, born at Woodfield, Sam's Cross, three miles south of where he is sitting now, on the sixteenth of October 1890, the youngest of eight children of a Munster farmer who was already seventy-five at his birth. He is in the green-grey uniform of the National Army of the Provisional Government, with a peaked cap and a Sam Browne belt. He is Commander-in-Chief of the National Army. He is, at this hour, the most-shot-at man on the island.
The convoy ahead of him is a Rolls-Royce armoured car, the Slievenamon, with a Vickers gun in its turret; behind him, a Crossley tender with twelve soldiers and a Lewis gun, and a motorcycle scout. The Leyland is open. Emmet Dalton is sitting beside him in the back seat. The chauffeur is Smith, of the National Army Transport Corps. The road runs through a defile at this point with a high bank on the southern side and the Bríde river on the northern.
He has, in the last twenty minutes, ordered the convoy to stop because Smith was uncertain at the previous junction. He has gone out of the car himself to ask directions of an old farmer at a gate. The farmer pointed back the way they had come. Collins thanked him, got back in. The convoy is again moving, slowly, the road has narrowed.
He thinks: the column that went past Macroom this morning was Tom Hales's. Hales is in the country. Hales has between thirty and forty men. Hales would not pass up an armoured-car target if he could put one in front of his rifles.
He thinks: Hales is my own people. Hales fought beside me in the Tan war. Hales has been on the other side since January.
He thinks: I asked the local commanders not to let it be known I was coming this way. Cork city is full of leaks. The barman at the Imperial knows. The barman at the Imperial is Hales's cousin.
He thinks: if there is going to be a contact today it will be in this defile.
The first volley comes from the high bank to his right at twenty past eight. Three rifles, one Lewis gun. The Vickers in the Slievenamon opens up at once on the high ground. Collins, by Dalton's deposition four days later, jumps out of the touring-car onto the road with his Lee-Enfield rifle in his hands and goes to the ditch on the southern side. He fires from the prone position, three rounds, in the direction of the bank. The fight on the convoy side runs about thirty minutes. The ambushers (most accounts agree there were about eight at the firing-positions) are running short of ammunition by the half-hour mark and begin to withdraw up the bank to the woods at the top.
At twenty minutes to nine, by Dalton, Collins stands up at the ditch, by some accounts to give an order to the Crossley party, and is hit in the back of the head by a single rifle round fired from the bank above. The shot is at long range, perhaps three hundred and fifty yards. The man who fired it has, in the tradition, been variously identified as Denis Sonny O'Neill, the column's longest-range marksman, who claimed the shot in old age, and as another column member who never spoke. The matter has not been resolved by ninety years of inquiry. The bullet was a Mauser .303, fired by chance or design at long range, and took him in the back of the head as he stood.
Dalton, who is at his side within ten seconds, by his own account: he was dying when I reached him. He could not speak. He died in my arms within three or four minutes. The convoy held the road position until twenty past nine. The ambushers had cleared the high ground by then. Smith got the Leyland turned. The convoy carried Collins's 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 funeral procession in Dublin five days later was a quarter of a million people on the streets between the Pro-Cathedral and Glasnevin.
The Civil War continued for another seven months after Collins's death; the Free State forces fought a steadily winning campaign through the autumn of 1922 and into the spring of 1923. The anti-Treaty IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch was killed by Free State troops 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, the State that Collins had signed for and died for, was the Irish Free State of December 1922, the Republic of Ireland of 1948, and the European Union member-state of 1973. The road at Béal na mBláth was, until 1971, an unsurfaced country lane. The cross-roads is now marked by a stone Celtic cross with 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 the convention of the Irish State, the oration is given alternately by a Fianna Fáil and a Fine Gael speaker. The convention has held without serious break since 1924 and is, in the terms by which an emergent State manages its founding wound, the country's solution to the question of who claims the man and how. The bullet has not been found. The marksman, by every plausible reading of the record, took the question with him to his own grave.