WEXFORD-L Archives

From: "Jane Lyons" <>
Subject: [WEX] Michael Collins: 2
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 13:28:33 -0000

>From the Epilogue: 'Michael Collins The Lost Leader' by Margery Forester.
Published by Gill & McMillan 1989.
A number 0 7171 1711 1 may be the ISBN it doesn't say.

I am told that the books by Tim Pat Coogan 'The Big Fellow'and the Long
Fello' one about Michael Collins and the other about Devalera are the two
best concerning the lives of these two men.

The circumstances of Michael Collins's death caused a fierce controversy
that has never wholly been forgotten. The temper of the time added rumours
of treachery to the jealousies and tragic idealism to which his life had
been sacrificed. Later years have heightened certain incidents and distorted
others in the memories of those who witnessed his death. Time is an
unreliable collaborator.

There can be no value today in dwelling upon a dispute which has, in its
time, aroused a bitterness which the generous soul of Collins himself could
only have deplored. Only one fact of any importance emerges when all has
been said and done: Michael Collins was dead.

Of all the tributes paid him after his death there was none to equal that
which, in his lifetime, he had already received, and which he left among his
possessions: a hundred door keys; by which he might come and go as he
pleased in the houses of his friends in safety and the certainty of welcome.

The numbing shock which had struck first his comrades at Beal na mblath and
then those in Cork in the early hours of Wednesday morning 23 August, spread
quickly to Dublin and the rest of Ireland and so to the world. The Army was
the first to hear the news. Keyin O'Higgins took the telephone message with
the same inability to believe what he heard as those to whom he passed it.
Realizing only the terrible aftermath at must come, Richard Mulcahy went
away to write, at 3.15 a.m., his call to the Army which was to have an
immensely steadying effect upon it. As the news spread, soldiers whom the
chances of the guerilla years had inured to human shocks, gave way to grief.

The Government, like the Army, had lost its leader. Its members were
awakened by young Army officers, incoherent with shock, despite their
efforts to observe discipline. All the available Ministers gathered, a sober
and heavy-hearted little group, and appointed W. T. Cosgrave in Collins's
place. He issued his own call to the people that day:

"Michael Collins's death is a terrible blow to the Irish nation at the time
it stood in greatest need of his wise and courageous guidance, but we are
confident that the example of his life impressed on the people's mind by
this tragedy will raise their spirit to face difficulties in a great crisis
as he faced them, and to triumph over them.
His death has scaled his work, and before the tragedy of his death the
nation is resolved to bring the work to triumph."

It was not easy to think of the future's responsibilities without him.


To Dublin, as to Ireland generally, Collins's death was a traumatic shock.
Men and women who had never met him felt a sense of personal loss. They
crowded to Government Buildings, to the newspaper offices, stopping those in
the street who might be able to add to the reports in the censored papers.
Shopkeepers worked desultorily, or closed their doors completely. Blinds
were drawn in many houses as if death had come within. At de Valera's
political offices in Suffolk Street the flag hung at half- mast.

Not all Ireland mourned. Young Republican soldiers, who saw only a great
victory against the Free State, rejoiced. But those soldiers of the Republic
who had been his comrades-in-arms did not share their elation. There can
have been few times of war in which the death in battle of the opposing
Commander-in-Chief has aroused such personal sorrow as Republicans felt at
the passing of Michael Collins. Peadar Kearney, then the official censor in
Maryborough (Portlaoise) Prison, broke the news to a Republican prisoner.
The man, stunned, cried: 'Good God - no!' then added quietly, 'Ireland is
lost'

Tom Barry had been captured in the Four Courts' fighting and was then
imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol. He writes:
"I was talking with some other prisoners on the night of August 22nd 1922
when the news came in that Michael Collins had been shot dead in West Cork.
There was a heavy silence throughout the jail, and ten minutes later from
the corridor outside the top tier of cells I looked down on the
extraordinary spectacle of about a thousand kneeling Republican prisoners
spontaneously reciting the Rosary for the repose of the soul of the dead
Michael Collins."

Frank O'Connor, destined to make his own reparation of love to Collins's
memory, was one of the youngsters in arms who rejoiced then to hear of his
death. He was with Erskine Childers, and was to recall in later years 'how
Childers slunk away to his table silently, lit a cigarette, and wrote a
leading article in praise of Collins' It appeared in Poblacht na h.Eireann
on 24 August 1922. 'This supremacy of tragedy', Childers termed Collins's
death. Three months later he was himself to die, no less bravely, before a
firing squad of Collins's men, his alleged crime of a small revolver, given
him in earlier days by Collins himself, and prized by him long after each
had gone his reluctant, irreconcilable way. Of all the tragedies of the
Civil War, that which came upon that strangely consorted friendship is
perhaps the most moving, for only Collins of all the Free State leaders
really understood Childers's sincere devotion to Ireland, even while he
hated its negation of the evolutionary processes he himself believed in.
Certainly, had Collins lived, he would have saved Childers to serve his
espoused country in more comprehending days, as Childers himself found only
cause for mourning in the killing of Collins.

The times in which he lived were the turbulent times of a nation's rebirth.
They were not to be set apart from those, less chronicled, that followed
them, but were the spring from which that future took its life. They should,
therefore, be regarded only in the light of its achievements, as President
John Kennedy pointed out when, on 28 June 1963, he addressed Dail Eireann:

" . . . There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as
better forgotten, but to use the phrase of Yeats: "Let us not casually
reduce that great past to a trouble of fools, for we need not feel the
bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the
future."
". . . . Great powers have their responsibilities and their burdens, but the
smaller nations of the world must fulfil their obligations as well.... My
friends, Ireland's hour has come. You have something to give to the world,
and that is a future of peace with freedom."

The President of the United States, a young man who, like Collins himself,
was to crowd the work of a lifetime lived at full stretch into a handful of
years, spoke to the assembled representatives of Ireland who had come
together, forgetful of political differences, to hear him. His words were
surely words of which Michael Collins, a man, not of party or creed, but of
all Ireland, whose stride had lengthened to reach to constantly expanding
horizons, would have approved.

This thread:

• [WEX] Michael Collins: 2 by "Jane Lyons" <>