Michael Collins: The Man Who Won The War E-Book

Ryle T Dwyer

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

In this completely revised and updated book, T. Ryle Dwyer, offers a fresh perspective on Collins' activities. With new information about his role in organising the IRB in London in his youth right through to his death in 1922, Dwyer's analysis supports the case for Collins as the chief architect of the Irish victory over the British Empire. Michael Collins co-ordinated the sweeping Sinn Féin election victory of 1918 and put structure on the organisation of the IRA. He was the prototype of the urban terrorist and the architect of the war against the Black and Tans. While many have questioned whether Collins ever fired a shot at an enemy of Ireland, he did order the deaths of people standing in his way, and he even advocated kidnapping a US President.

Leseprobe

T. RYLE DWYER

 MICHAEL COLLINS

THE MAN WHO WON THE WAR

MERCIER PRESS 3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd Blackrock, Cork, Ireland

www.mercierpress.ie

http://twitter.com/IrishPublisher

http://www.facebook.com/mercier.press

© revised edition: T. Ryle Dwyer, 2009

ISBN: 978 1 85635 625 1 Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 030 4 Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 031 1

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Contents

Preface

1  ‘Mind that Child’

2  Collins and the GAA

3  Preparing for the Rebellion

4  ‘We Lost, Didn’t We!’

5  ‘In the End They’ll Despair’

6  ‘Being Called Bad Names’

7  ‘All Ordinary Peaceful Means are Ended’

8  ‘Too Many of the Bargaining Type’

9  ‘We Struck at Individuals’

10 ‘Spies Beware’

11 ‘Well Shoot Him So’

12 Settling Old Scores

13 ‘I’ll Report You to Michael Collins’

14 ‘They Got What They Deserved’

15 ‘He’s No Big Fella to Me’

16 ‘You’ll Get None of My Men’

Notes

Bibliography

To Anne Maria, Bob, Kevin and Jack MacSweeney

Preface

In formally proposing the adoption of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 19 December 1921 Arthur Griffith referred to Michael Collins as ‘the man who won the war’, much to the annoyance of Defence Minister Cathal Brugha, who questioned whether Collins ‘had ever fired a shot at any enemy of Ireland.’1

Amid cries of ‘Shame’ and ‘Get on with the Treaty’, Brugha complained that Collins had originated the story that there was a price on his head and had personally sought the press publicity which built him into ‘a romantic figure’ and ‘a mystical character’ that he was not.2 Most of those present sat through the tirade in stunned silence, because there was no real substance to his wrath, just spite.

Even Brugha’s strongest critics – those who disagreed with what they believed was a grossly distorted assessment – accepted that he was telling the truth as he saw it. Collins has since been the subject of numerous books, but nobody has ever documented a single instance in which he fired a shot at the British.

Yet when Griffith rose to wind up the debate he had begun three weeks earlier, he made no apologies for the remark to which Brugha had taken such exception. ‘He referred to what I said about Michael Collins – that he was the man who won the war,’ Griffith explained. ‘I said it, and I say it again; he was the man that made the situation; he was the man, and nobody knows better than I do how, during a year and a half he worked from six in the morning until two next morning. He was the man whose matchless energy, whose indomitable will carried Ireland through the terrible crisis; and though I have not now, and never had, an ambition about either political affairs or history, if my name is to go down in history I want it associated with the name of Michael Collins. Michael Collins was the man who fought the Black and Tan terror for twelve months, until England was forced to offer terms.’3

The assembly erupted with a roar of approval and thunderous applause. It was the most emotional response of the whole debate. Those who had listened to Brugha’s invective in embarrassed silence jumped at the opportunity to disassociate themselves from the earlier embittered remarks.

Who was this Michael Collins, the man who could engender such passion, and what was his real role in the War of Independence? How was it that two unquestionably sincere, selfless individuals like Griffith and Brugha could differ so strongly about this man?

Unfortunately the papers of Michael Collins have been scattered to the four winds. His nephew, the late Liam Collins, had Michael’s papers for many years. In the 1950s he lent them to the writer Rex Taylor, who returned them in the same condition he received them. When another English writer subsequently approached Liam Collins, he lent him five diaries and never saw them again. The writer denied ever receiving them and the five diaries have vanished.

In the 1950s some of the Big Fellow’s earlier papers were sold, such as records that he kept as secretary of the Geraldine GAA club in London and essays that he wrote while attending night school at King’s College, London. They were purchased by Marquette University in Wisconsin. The man in charge of the archives told me that the university gave the Geraldine material to the GAA for its museum, and was planning to give the other material to UCD.

Knowing the story of what had happened to the diaries I approached Liam Collins for access to the Collins papers in 1980. Figuring that people were always looking for things but never giving him anything in return, I enclosed copies of some letters that Michael Collins had written to Austin Stack. I had been allowed to copy them by the late Nannette Barrett, a niece of Austin Stack.

Liam Collins promptly invited me to meet him. Before responding to my request for access to the papers, he had one question – what did I think of Eamon de Valera? I had already written a short biography of de Valera for the Gill’s Irish Lives series, so I told him that while critical of de Valera’s role regarding the Anglo-Irish Treaty, I felt he did a magnificent job in handling Irish neutrality during the Second World War. Liam immediately announced he would give me the metal trunk of papers, and went on to explain that he was sick of people denouncing de Valera. Growing up, he said he was friendly with de Valera’s youngest son, Terry, and was often in the de Valera home, where Sinéad de Valera frequently told him of her admiration for Michael Collins and what he had done for their family while Eamon de Valera was in the United States in 1919 and 1920.

All too often it seemed that people were expected to argue that if Collins was good, then de Valera was an ogre, or the other way around. Following the initial publication of my book Michael Collins: The Man Who Won the War, I was invited to take part in an RTÉ discussion programme chaired by Joe Duffy. The programme included Tim Pat Coogan, Mary Banotti and the late Brendan O’Reilly. It was like a Michael Collins love-in.

It became so obsequious that as an historian I felt distinctly uncomfortable. At one point I complained the programme sounded like an argument for his canonisation, but that he was no saint. Joe Duffy joked that Mary Banotti – a grandniece of Michael Collins’ – had just fallen off her stool.

Some weeks later I received a letter from Liam Collins, mentioning that he had heard the radio programme. ‘I was very taken aback at the time by your contribution,’ he wrote. ‘Since then I have decided to read your publication The Man Who Won the War. And quite frankly I am very glad I did so. As I see your book, it recognises in quite a fair and honest way the pluses and minuses of the man.’4

‘I am sorry that the stance as taken by Tim Pat Coogan only allowed you to develop and argue the more or less “downsides” of my uncle,’ he continued. ‘I know from others to whom I have spoken that the view I took of you that day, of being a definite anti-Michael Collins person, was shared by them. Naturally I now accept that I was at fault in my “reading” of you in the radio programme.’5 Over the years I received a number of other kind letters from Liam Collins that I have treasured.

There has been too much distortion on all sides in relation to this period of Irish history, and there should be no room in a book for polemics, distorting leading figures into either gods or devils. De Valera made an invaluable contribution to the history of the period covered in this book by his promotion of the Bureau of Military History, which conducted interviews in the 1940s and 1950s with hundreds of survivors of the War of Independence.

After any war those involved frequently do not like to talk about it. This was especially true in the wake of the bitterness of the Irish Civil War, when men who had struggled side by side during the War of Independence took opposite sides in the Civil War. Those most involved in the War of Independence seemed to talk least, with a few exceptions. Having remained silent while the soapbox patriots sounded off, many of those who had been active were only prepared to talk to the Bureau of Military History, as they did not consider this bragging, because their statements would only be released after their deaths.

Michael Collins: The Man Who Won the War has been reprinted ten times since it was first published in 1990. The current edition has been expanded with a considerable amount of material that was not available earlier, especially the insights afforded by the witness statements at the Bureau of Military History. I would like to commend Mercier Press for keeping the book in print throughout this whole period. I have since written three other books in relation to other aspect of Collins’ life: Big Fellow, Long Fellow: A Joint Biography of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera in 1999, The Squad and the Intelligence Operation of Michael Collins in 2005, and ‘I Signed My Death Warrant’: Michael Collins and the Treaty in 2007.

TRD Tralee

1

‘Mind that Child’

Michael Collins was born on 16 October 1890 near the tiny County Cork hamlet of Sam’s Cross, where his father had a sixty-acre farm. He was the youngest of eight children.

‘Well do I remember the night,’ his sister Helena wrote some eighty years later. She was seven years old at the time. ‘Mother came round to the three youngest, Pat (6), Katie (4) and myself, to see us safely landed in bed. Next morning we were thrilled to hear we had a baby brother found under the proverbial head of cabbage.’1

It was a closely-knit family. ‘We were a very happy family even though we lived under very primitive conditions in the old house, where we all were born,’ Helena remembered. Michael had a normal childhood, though being the youngest of such a large family he tended to be rather spoiled.2

Michael’s father was generally somewhat aloof with his children – Mary Anne was charged with looking after their needs – but he had a particularly soft spot for Michael as the youngest. He would frequently bring him on his rounds of the farm. At other times the boy’s older sisters were charged with looking after him – a duty they relished. ‘We thought he had been invented for our own special edification,’ Hannie said years later.3

In addition to the eight children, there were usually a number of aunts and uncles about the house. Michael’s father, Michael John Collins, was born in 1815, the youngest of six boys. He lived at Woodfield, the farm where he was born, all his life. He believed his children were the sixth generation of the family born there. In 1875, at the age of fifty-nine, he married his goddaughter, Mary Anne O’Brien.

It was a made match. Michael John was living with his three older bachelor brothers, Maurice, Tom and Paddy, and they needed a housekeeper. Mary Anne O’Brien was twenty-three at the time. She was the eldest daughter of a family of ten. Her father, James O’Brien from Sam’s Cross, was killed when his horse shied. Mary Anne’s mother was seriously injured in the accident. As a result, Mary Anne and her older brother, Danny, had to take responsibility for the large family at an early age. Mary Anne became a second mother to the younger members of her family. After she married, her younger brothers and sisters were frequently to be found in the Collins home. The last of Michael’s paternal uncles died some four months before he was born.

The family would usually gather in the kitchen at night. This was before the age of rural electricity, radio or television, so they had to make their own entertainment. Discussions would invariably take on a patriotic slant, with nationalistic songs or poems figuring prominently. Mary Anne’s brother, Danny, would sing rebel ballads and her mother, Johanna O’Brien, who lived until 1899, would recount watching victims of the Great Famine die by the roadside half a century earlier. West Cork was one of the areas most severely hit by the famine.

These evenings would have formed some of Michael’s earliest memories. At the age of four and a half he began his formal education at Lisavaird National School. ‘The boys were on one side, and the girls on the other side of a semi-detached building,’ according to Helena. ‘Both heads were strict disciplinarians. Miss Ellen Collins, a cousin of ours, was head of the girls’ school and Mr Denis Lyons of the boys’. We had no intercourse with each other; we might have been miles apart.’4

In later life people would remember Michael taking a particular delight in listening to old people reminiscing. ‘Great age held something for me that was awesome,’ he later told Hayden Talbot, an American journalist. ‘I was much fonder of old people in the darkness than of young people in the daylight.’5 This attachment to old people may have had something to do with his early memories of the family gatherings in the dimly lit kitchen and the fact that his father was already seventy-five years old when Michael was born. In terms of age he was much more like the boy’s grandfather.

Michael never forgot an incident that occurred when he was with his father on the farm one day. They were out in the fields and his father was standing on a stone wall from which he dislodged a stone accidentally. Michael remembered looking at the stone as it came towards him, but he figured that it would not hurt him because his father had dislodged it.

‘Would you believe it?’ his father would say. ‘There he was, barefooted, and the stone rolling down on him, and him never so much as looking at it! And when I got the thing off his foot and asked him why he had stood there and let it hit him, what do you think he replied? He told me ’twas I who sent it down! It’s a true Collins he is.’6

In December 1896, when Michael was six, his father had a heart attack from which he never really recovered. He lingered for a couple of months, but never went out again. ‘Our darling Papa died on March 7th 1897,’ Helena recalled. ‘Mama called us all at about 10 p.m. and we all got round the bed. Papa, who was quite conscious, spoke.’7

‘Mind that child,’ he said, pointing to Michael. ‘He’ll be a great man yet, and will do great things for Ireland.’ He added that Nellie (his pet name for Helena) ‘will be a nun’.8

One can easily imagine the kind of influence this incident would have on children at such an impressionable age, especially as the family revered their dying father. Helena duly entered a Mercy Convent and spent the rest of her life as a nun.

Having helped to rear her own brothers and sisters from an early age, Mary Anne Collins was almost trained to cope with the trials of being widowed with a young family. Michael’s eldest brother, John, was eighteen at the time and he took over the running of the farm.

The local headmaster, Denis Lyons, was a member of the secret oath-bound Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). He had a formative influence on Michael’s developing nationalism. Lyons and the local blacksmith James Santry, whose forge was across the road from the school, regaled young Collins with stories of past Irish rebellions. In his mid twenties Michael would recall what a seminal influence they were.

‘In Denis Lyons and James Santry I had my first tutors capable of – because of their personalities alone – infusing into me a pride of the Irish as a race,’ he wrote to a cousin. ‘Other men may have helped me along the searching path to a political goal, I may have worked hard myself in the long search, nevertheless, Denis Lyons and James Santry remain to me as my first stalwarts. In Denis Lyons especially, his manner, although seemingly hiding what meant most to him, had this pride of Irishness which has always meant most to me.’9

When Lyons or Santry talked of the events of the nineteenth century, the Great Famine, the Young Ireland Rebellion and the trauma of the 1870s and 1880s, they were talking about times through which Michael’s father and uncles had lived. His paternal grandparents’ lives went back well into the eighteenth century. Indeed, one of his father’s brothers had been old enough to remember the Rebellion of 1798. Michael’s paternal grandmother’s brother, Tadgh O’Sullivan, had been a Professor of Greek at the University of Louvain and had acted as an emissary for Wolfe Tone, who was regarded as the father of Irish republicanism. It was therefore understandable that young Michael Collins showed a great interest in the history of the past century.

Lyons detected ‘a certain restlessness in temperament’ in young Michael, whom he described at the time as ‘exceptionally intelligent in observation and at figures’. Collins was ‘a good reader’ with a striking concern for political matters and ‘more than a normal interest in things appertaining to the welfare of his country’. His political idol at the time was the man who would later credit him with winning the war. ‘In Arthur Griffith there is a mighty force afoot in Ireland,’ Collins wrote in one of his school essays in 1902.10

In spite of the above-mentioned ‘restlessness in temperament’, his teacher still described him as ‘able and willing to adjust himself to all circumstances.’11 Having finished National School, Michael went on to school in Clonakilty to prepare for the civil service entrance examination. During the school-week he lived with his eldest sister, Margaret O’Driscoll. Her husband owned a local newspaper and Michael helped with the reporting, usually on hurling or football matches. While there, he learned to type.

His best friend in those early days was Jack Hurley, whose sister married Michael’s brother, John, and so became an in-law of the Collins family. The two boys were inseparable and often stayed the night at each other’s homes.

In July 1906 Collins went to London to take up a job with the Post Office Savings Bank. It was a natural move for an ambitious boy of his age, because there were few prospects for him in west Cork. His second oldest sister, Johanna (or Hannie as he called her) was already in the civil service in London, and they lived together at 5 Netherwood Place, West Kensington.

‘There were no loose ends about Michael, physically or mentally, and he was very impatient of loose statements and vague information, holding that no one had any business speaking on a subject which he had not studied,’ Hannie recalled. ‘He was an omnivorous reader: like the other members of his family, he had got through a good course of the English classics before he was sixteen: Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, Swift, Addison, Burke, Sheridan, Dryden, Pope and Shakespeare and Milton, as well as Moore, Byron, Shelly and Keats. Later he read Hardy and Meredith Wessels, Arnold Bennett and Conrad, also Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, as well as contemporary writers like W.B. Yeats, Pádraig Colum and James Stephens.12

‘No one appreciated Bernard Shaw more than he,’ Hannie continued, ‘and he felt his influence, as all among the younger generation who think at all have come under the same salutary influence. How we discussed literature together and how often have we sat up long after midnight discussing the merits and demerits of the English and Irish and French writers who happened to be our idols at the time. He was thoroughly modern and liked realism and the plays of the younger dramatists who wrote for the Abbey Theatre.’13 A number of people later expressed surprise at the range of his reading.

Michael appeared to have no problems fitting in. ‘I had Irish friends in London before I arrived, and in the intervening years I had made many more friends among Irish residents in London,’ he recalled later. ‘For the most part we lived lives apart. We chose to consider ourselves outposts of our nation.’14 One of those friends was his boyhood pal Jack Hurley, who had emigrated some months earlier. Hurley’s presence undoubtedly eased the transition to life in London, but even so Collins retained and developed a rather romantic view of Ireland, given how much he missed his home.

‘I stand for an Irish civilisation based on the people and embodying and maintaining the things – their habits, ways of thought, customs – that make them different – the sort of life I was brought up in,’ he wrote. As a result he and his friends never really integrated into British society, and never wanted to. ‘We were proud of isolation,’ he said, ‘and we maintained it to the end.’15

‘Once,’ he explained some years later, ‘a crowd of us were going along the Shepherd’s Bush Road when out of a lane came a chap with a donkey – just the sort of donkey and just the sort of cart they have at home. He came out quite suddenly and abruptly and we all cheered him. Nobody who has not been an exile will understand me, but I stand for that.’16

During the nine and a half formative years that Collins spent in London he took a very active part in the Irish life of the city. In 1907 he helped raise money when Arthur Griffith’s new party, Sinn Féin, ran a candidate in a parliamentary by-election. The candidate, who had resigned his seat in order to re-contest it on a Sinn Féin ticket, was defeated. Party supporters tried to put the gloss of moral victory on what was really a devastating defeat from which the party did not recover for many years.

Those years had a profound influence on Michael. ‘He kept his interests exclusively Irish, and his holidays were always spent at home in Woodfield,’ according to Hannie. ‘He cultivated the society of old people who knew Irish, and never tired of drawing them out and listening to the tales and traditions of the past. He was popular with both old and young all his life. His tastes and inclinations were for a country life – and he chafed against the restraints and restrictions of London existence.’17

Like many other Irish immigrants, he probably became more acutely aware of his Irishness while in exile, and this reinforced his sense of nationalism. Although his parents had both been native Irish speakers, they associated the Irish language with the economic backwardness of Gaeltacht areas, so while they spoke to each other in Irish when they did not want the children to understand, they only spoke English to their children. Michael started to learn Irish on a number of occasions, but other events inevitably took precedence.

His work – together with his educational, political and sporting activities – all combined to take up a lot of time. He continued his education by attending night classes at King’s College, London, from the autumn of 1907 to the spring of 1909. Many of the essays that he wrote there have survived and give an insight into his adolescent mind. On reflection, they may well provide an explanation for his actions in later years, when he became the prototype of the modern urban terrorist.

Ironically, those writings suggested he was critical of urban life, especially the overcrowding. ‘Families of four or five each, all living in one room, can hardly be healthy or moral,’ he wrote. Last year there were ‘122,000 underfed children in London. These children will grow up to be unemployables – unfit for almost everything save crime – made characterless by the sordid conditions under which they were reared.’ He was equally critical of the death rate in cities, especially infant mortality, which he believed was double the rate of rural areas.18

‘Do not we, as Englishmen, understand that it is our sacred duty to Christianise and civilise the savage lands all over the world,’ Michael Collins wrote in a letter dated 10 January 1908. ‘The more territory we hold, the more self-supporting will our empire become, and the more advantageous fields for emigration will it offer to the surplus population of the mother country, as well as providing a more extensive market for our manufactured goods.19

‘Your disgust at our withholding self-government from some colonies is ridiculous,’ he continued. ‘Did we not give it freely to those that were able to make laws for themselves; and as soon as the others reach that responsible stage we will undoubtedly also grant it to them.’20

Collins never thought of himself as an Englishman. This letter was written as part of an academic exercise at King’s College. He had been assigned to write two letters, one to ‘a friend who thinks that the British Empire is expanding too rapidly and his reply’. It was not the first letter, which had ‘14 Idiot’s Row’ as its return address, but the second letter from ‘11 Wiseman’s Alley’ that reflected his real views. ‘The strongest link of your argument on the advantages of expansion is the honour of Christianising. Do you not think that it would be well if we first Christianised ourselves?’ he wrote in the reply. ‘But it is not for this laudable purpose that England goes abroad; it is for the acquisition of territory. An English missionary gets killed, his country bemoaning his fate shrieks loudly for revenge, an army in red coats is sent out, and the country is coloured red on the map.21

‘The expansion of the already large British Empire means,’ he argued, ‘a greater responsibility to the mother country, and an increased force to keep the colonies in subjection – as they cannot be expected to be very loyal, because every country has a right to work out is own destiny in accordance with the laws of its being, which eventually may mean conscription.’22 Ironically, eight years later it was to avoid being conscripted into the British army during the First World War that Collins left London and returned to live in Ireland.

Presence of mind was probably the single characteristic that most distinguished him when under pressure in the coming years. As a teenager he actually wrote a college essay on the subject. Quick thinking was ‘one of the most valuable qualities as well as one of the least common,’ he wrote. ‘To know what to do at a crisis we must, if we have an opportunity to learn up thoroughly the matter before-hand, and by practising this in trivial things we will beget a habit of ready resource in untried or unforeseen circumstances.23

‘History and tradition are rich in instances demonstrating the values of presence of mind,’ Collins continued. ‘All great commanders have been famed for their coolness in the hour of danger, which perhaps contributed more largely to their success than their actual courage … Real valour consists not in being insensible to danger, but in being prompt to confront and disarm it.24

‘Of course, this excellent quality is largely constitutional, but it also is largely cultivatable,’ he added. ‘As Socrates, who had at one time a most violent temper, by long training and constant practice, acquired a mild and equable one, so can people who are not naturally born to it, achieve the rare gift of presence of mind.’ Even at this early stage it seemed that he was preparing for the future.

‘No great and noteworthy achievement was ever attained without exertion and ambition,’ Collins wrote in another essay on 24 April 1908. ‘We have only to look around us and see how many of the failures in life that are due to the fault of blindly and fatuously trusting in “luck”. To wait passively for good fortune to smile on us is like waiting for the stream to run dry.25

‘Good luck knocks at least once at each man’s door but the tide must be taken at the flood and in a lively and vigorous manner,’ Collins added. ‘In the history [of] the world’s famous men we find that all of them were ready to venture even their existence on the attainment of their ends. Washington played for a large stake, and it was only by venturing everything he was master of, that he won it. The same was true of Garibaldi in Italy, and in England Richard III unfeelingly sacrificed his nephews because they were in his way to the throne.26

‘We must not however be too rash. It has been truthfully said that “vaulting ambition o’erleaps itself” and history is rich in stances.’ He went on to cite Napoleon and Cromwell as examples: ‘Fire, when kept under restraint, is a useful servant, but when it gets the upper hand it is a merciless tyrant. The same holds good of ambition. If we take it to mean an unquenchable desire to advance by honest methods towards perfection, it is one of the best qualities a man can be endowed with.’27

In an essay on contentment, written a couple of weeks before his eighteenth birthday in October 1908, he foreshadowed his own determination to make the best of his lot during his internment in Frongoch, Wales, following the Easter Rising. ‘Fretting never does any good, but often much harm, as no amount of grumbling and peevish illhumour can change our lot, but only serve to make others dislike us,’ he wrote. ‘If we look into the pages of history we find that nearly all great leaders were funny hearted men. The hopefulness of Columbus cheered on his men, and the genial kindness of Washington contributed largely to his success.’ Some would later remember Collins as ‘the laughing boy’, while others would be appalled by his apparent desire to make light of matters, even in the most inappropriate conditions. ‘Happiness consists in the fewness of our wants, and we must remember that we want but little here below, nor want that little long,’ he wrote. ‘This being the case we must take care that our wishes are also few. If abundance comes let us enjoy it, but if it does not, we must cease wishing for it …’28

He held particularly strong views on charity when he wrote on the subject in the first week of November 1908:

Charity cannot be tested by the magnitude of its gifts, but by the feelings that prompt them. To be poor and in distress is only too common a condition of men around us, and surely we can all find some little work to do, whereby a struggling comrade may be encouraged and comforted.

But on the other hand, we must be careful not to do mischief by giving our alms promiscuously. It is a melancholy but indisputable fact that a very large percentage of ordinary beggars are rogues and impostors. Many with good show of reason maintain that we should never give to any beggar without knowing his history or being prepared to follow it up.

There is no doubt whatever, that to give open assistance to any person is in a great measure to spoil his independence, as it deprives him of the spirit of self-reliance and causes him to fall into idleness and open beggary. In many cases begging becomes a disgusting trade, practised by skulks too lazy to work. The most infamous means are taken for moving our feelings. Sores, often wilfully produced, are paraded before us. Infants with bare feet and scanty clothing appeal to our sympathy … The really deserving are, as a rule, too proud to expose their misery before the world, and must be sought out in their homes and kindly persuaded to receive our help.

We should be careful about giving to charitable institutions without first satisfying ourselves as to their worth. Many of them are mere shams got up to exhort money from the generous-minded.29

Piaras Béaslaí, who was active in Irish circles in London at the same time, wrote that Collins was active in Sinn Féin as a teenager in London. He gave prepared speeches on ‘The Catholic Church in Ireland’ and ‘The Great Famine of 1847’ at Sinn Féin meetings in London during 1908. The address on the church was violently anti-clerical and ‘full of all the intemperance and exaggeration of a boy’.30 Desmond Ryan noted in his book Remembering Sion that Collins actually called for the extermination of the clergy. The draft of his paper on the famine has actually survived in a school exercise book at Marquette University in the United States. As far as Collins was concerned, the Great Famine was a ‘manufactured’ catastrophe. ‘Though the inexorable laws of nature caused the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘England and English muddling caused the famine.’31

There had been plenty of warning of the blight in 1845, but the government did nothing about it because, he argued, the English politicians welcomed the catastrophe as a way ‘to get rid of the surplus Irish’ to ensure that a strong Ireland could not become ‘a menace to the Empire.’ Moreover, he wrote, ‘a depopulated Ireland could export more food to England, than an industrial Ireland could.32

‘It is not my intention to go into the horrors which characterised the famine years,’ Collins continued. ‘You know only too well of the frightful miseries which the people suffered hunger. And how hunger was followed close by a nauseating fever. You have also heard of the hinged coffins so largely used in Skibbereen. In that town people will still point you out two large pits where hundreds of corpses found a coffinless grave.’ As a result of his research, based largely on the books of John O’Rourke and John Mitchel, Collins was scathing in his condemnation of British famine relief efforts. He was scornful of Queen Victoria’s supposed £5 contribution. In fact, she gave £1,000, which was a small fortune in those days, but generations of Irish school children were told she just gave the fiver. ‘Didn’t the English get subscriptions for us amounting to over £200,000 and was not one of these subscriptions headed by Queen Vic with a donation of £5,’ Collins wrote in indignation. ‘We may forgive and forget many things but it would pass even Irish ingratitude to forget this £5.’33

When he was about twelve years old, he wrote approvingly of Arthur Griffith and Sinn Féin. ‘He has none of the wildness of some I could name,’ Collins wrote. ‘Instead there is an abundance of wisdom and awareness of the things that ARE Ireland.’34 In 1908, however, the teenage Collins was moving towards wildness himself, as he looked to violence as a means of achieving Irish independence. In his exercise book, immediately before the draft of the famine article, there was another draft entitled, ‘Finland and Ireland’, in which he argued that Ireland should follow the example of Finland in its quest for self-government.

The revolutionary Eugen Schauman had assassinated Nicholai Bobrikov, the Russian governor general of Finland in 1904. With the help of Russian dissidents who were on the brink of revolution in the aftermath of the loss of the Russo-Japanese War, the Finns gained a significant measure of autonomy from Tsar Nicholas II.

Collins clearly admired the Finns. They are a quiet race and do not specialise in talk. ‘Their object,’ he said, ‘is not to make people cheer, but to make them think. Finland, I am sorry to say, is, with the exception of Russian Revolutionaries, fighting single-handed. Freedom-loving England is friendly with the Tsar.’ In fact all of the main countries of Europe were taking a similar line in order not to offend the Tsar.

‘France another glorious upholder of freedom is similarly disposed towards him,’ Collins continued. ‘What is true of France and England is even more forcibly true of Italy, Austria and Germany. The diplomats of all these countries are seeking a Russian alliance and so Finland can scarce[ly] expect much sympathy from them.’

‘I have headed my remarks Finland and Ireland,’ he went on. ‘You will perhaps be impatient to see what all this has to do with Ireland. Let me paint the moral. As a rule I hate morals and hate moralists still more, but in the present case I think it excusable, even desirable.’ He saw a parallel between the murder of Bobrikov and the assassinations of Chief Secretary Frederick Cavendish and the much-hated under-secretary for Ireland, T.H. Burke, in the Phoenix Park on 6 May 1882, but ‘the results were not so gratifying in Ireland as they were in Finland’, because some foolish Irish people denounced the Phoenix Park killers but ignored a horrific incident in Connemara on the same day.

‘A little Irish child of 11 or 12 years was bludgeoned to death for shouting for Michael Davitt,’ Collins reproached. ‘His murderers were not denounced’, nor were they ‘stigmatised as savages’. Thus he felt that a moral line should be drawn between what happened in Ireland and the way the Finns exploited the Bobrikov murder for their own advantage.

‘I do not defend the murder simply as such,’ Collins said. ‘I merely applaud it on the grounds of expediency.’35

He described what happened in Finland in terms of a ‘fairy tale’. The Tsar agreed to free elections and the establishment of a national parliament, based on proportional representation and universal adult suffrage. Women were given the vote for the first time in Europe. It did not last long, but the fact that it happened at all was enough to encourage Collins. ‘We have seen how the Finns found it advantageous to ally with the Russian revolutionists – may not we also find it beneficial to allow our best to be helped by the English revolutionists,’ he explained. ‘The Swedes and Finns also united in the face of the common enemy – here then is a lesson for Irishmen all the world over. I maintain that the analogy between Finland and Ireland is almost perfect.36

‘The Finns are almost less homogenous than the Irish,’ he argued. ‘Altogether there are 2,000,000 of them and they won against the might of Russia. Cannot we go and do likewise?’37

2

Collins and the GAA

The struggle for Irish independence was taking separate but converging paths in Collins’ view. ‘Irish history will recognise in the birth of the Gaelic League in 1893 the most important event of the nineteenth century,’ he later wrote. ‘It checked the peaceful penetration and once and for all turned the minds of the Irish people back to their own country. It did more than any other movement to restore national pride, honour and self-respect.’1

Collins joined the Gaelic League in London with the aim of learning Irish. Particularly prominent among his contemporaries from Cork were Joe O’Reilly, whom he met for the first time in London, and his long-time friend Jack Hurley, with whom he remained particularly close. ‘We think the same way in Irish matters,’ Collins wrote. ‘At worst he is a boon companion, at best there is no one else I would have as a friend.’2 Unlike most of his young contemporaries, Collins reportedly showed little interest in the opposite sex at this stage of his life.

‘The society of girls had apparently no attraction for him,’ according to Piaras Béaslaí, the only biographer who could claim to have been more than a passing acquaintance of Collins. ‘The usual philanderings and flirtations of young men of his age had little interest or attraction for him, though he sometimes amused himself by chaffing his young friends over their weaknesses in that direction,’ Béaslaí added. ‘He preferred the company of young men, and never paid any attention to the girls belonging to the Branch, not even to the sisters and friends of his male companions.’3

Maybe this teasing actually prompted him to cover up a relationship he had been conducting across the water with Susan Killeen, a girl he had met in London. His frequent correspondence with her after her return to Dublin certainly bespoke an affectionate relationship, as he described his loneliness in London. Of course, it would be many years before the letters of that discreet relationship would come to light. In the interim, the image of Mick the misogynist would take root.

In the following years, Collins became particularly close to Batt O’Connor, a builder who constructed hiding places for him. He would often visit O’Connor’s home, which was also frequented by other prominent members of the movement, but O’Connor singled Collins out as the one ‘that I knew the least because he was always too engrossed in his important occupation to take part in small talk. But the women who worked for him and with him overlooked that characteristic in him and did not expect anything different from him because they knew how much he had on his mind.’4

Some people – who never knew Collins – would later suggest that he might have been homosexual. This was pure speculation, based largely on how Béaslaí and Frank O’Connor depicted him, though neither ever actually suggested it.

O’Connor relied heavily on Joe O’Reilly for background information. His portrait showed Collins as a contradictory conglomeration of various characteristics – a buoyant, warm-hearted, fun-loving individual with a thoughtful, generous nature, but also a thoughtless, selfish, ill-mannered bully. While other young men went looking for sex, he was depicted as more inclined to go looking for ‘a bit of ear’.5 He would burst into a room and jump on a colleague and wrestle him to the floor, and then begin biting the unfortunate friend’s ear until the other fellow surrendered, sometimes with blood streaming from his ear. It certainly painted a picture of a rather strange fellow.

During the War of Independence Collins frequently stayed in a room reserved for men ‘on the run’ at Vaughan’s Hotel in Rutland (now Parnell) Square. ‘He usually shared a bedroom with Boland and myself,’ Béaslaí wrote, ‘and frequently shared Boland’s bed with him.’6

Given the times and the circumstances there was nothing unusual about sharing a bed with a colleague. They were lucky to have a bed to share. When Collins stayed elsewhere, Béaslaí did not know about his sleeping arrangements. For much of the period, especially between 1919 and 1921 Collins had no fixed abode. He was a wanted man and he purposely kept colleagues in the dark about where he stayed. If they could find him, then so could the police. It therefore probably suited him to let people think that he had no time for women, because his safe houses were mostly run by single women like the aunts and widowed mothers of colleagues and, in at least one case, the wife of a confidante of the British prime minister.

Having read those early biographies one grandnephew suspected that Michael Collins must have been gay. He said this one day to his grandfather, Michael’s oldest brother Johnny, who burst out laughing and said that if Michael had a problem, that was certainly not it. If anything, Johnny Collins seemed to think that Michael was too fond of too many women. There was no suggestion of a sexual relationship with these women, but this did not stop others from characterising him as a rampant philanderer. This charge was akin to suggesting that any man who shared an apartment with a sister was in an incestuous relationship.

Remember, Collins was only fifteen years old when he first went to London, and it would not have been that unusual for someone so young to show little interest in the opposite sex at that point. He was a young, working man, deeply involved not only in furthering his education but was also very active in sport and politics. Tim Pat Coogan uncovered a cache of letters that confirmed the previously mentioned warm relationship between Collins and Susan Killeen during and after his years in London. This relationship began while she was in London and continued after she returned to Dublin in 1915. As none of the earlier biographers even mentioned her, it would seem that the relationship was quiet and discreet. It would not have been surprising if he were in no hurry to form an attachment. After all, his father was sixty years old before he married, and Michael would not be that age until 1950.

Although Collins gave the main credit for promoting Irish nationalism to the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), founded in 1884, arguably played an even more important role, because it blazed the trail for the Gaelic League to promote the idea that Irish people ‘must look to themselves for economic prosperity, and must turn to national culture as a means to national freedom’.7 The GAA certainly had a much greater influence on Collins, but both organisations had widespread influence on Irish people.

‘They reached out to every phase of the people’s lives, educating them to make them free,’ Collins argued. ‘No means were too slight to use for that purpose. The Gaelic Athletic Association reminded Irish boys that they were Gaels. It provided and restored national games as an alternative to the slavish adoption of English sport.’8

A key to Collins’ thinking can be found in so many of his own writings, which are quite extensive even though he was killed at the early age of thirty-two. He was an inveterate letter writer. Much of what he wrote may be of little interest from the broad national perspective, but his correspondence provides a wealth of insights, contradictory or otherwise, into his own mind and his personality.