Michael Collins - Irish Revolutionary (Part one)

 

                         Michael Collins – Irish Revolutionary            Gerry OShea

Michael Collins was born in 1890 in the townland of Woodfield, near Clonakilty in County Cork. He was the youngest of eight children born to Michael John Collins and his wife, a local woman named Mary Ann O’Brien. It was an unusual match insofar as the father was 61 when he married Miss O’Brien who was just 23. Mary was pregnant with their oldest child, Margaret, before the nuptials, a circumstance that would certainly have invited censorious gossip in those days.

Michael attended a local school where he was influenced by stirring nationalist stories told by his teacher Denis Lyons, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and also by a local blacksmith, James Santry, an old-time Fenian, whose forge was located near the school.

He took the Boys’ Clerk Examination in 2006 and obtained a job in London with the Post Office Savins Bank. In his new domicile where he lived with his sister, Hannie, he joined the Geraldines GAA club and he played football and hurling for the Gerys – as they were called. He also enrolled in the Gaelic League in an effort to improve his limited Irish language skills. He was recruited into the IRB by two Cork friends, Sam Maguire and P.S. Hegarty, and he gladly took the oath where he committed to promoting a 32-county Irish republic.

Encouraged by Hannie, he read extensively from Dickens to Thackeray to Shaw and they both attended the theatre regularly in London.

The Great War (1914-1918) was in progress at that time and English leaders were talking about conscripting young Irishmen in England to fight in the horrible European battlefields. Fearful of the possibility of a roundup of young Irishmen to serve in continental trenches, Michael returned to Dublin in January 1916.

He fought in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising, serving as aide-de-camp to Joseph Plunkett, a top leader of the insurrection. After Pearse’s surrender he was corralled with many other insurgents in the area adjoining the Rotunda Hospital at the top of O’Connell Street. One of the English commanders, Captain Percival Lea-Wilson, subjected the revered Tom Clarke to demeaning treatment, including stripping him half naked and mockingly parading him for nurses in the adjoining hospital. Collins was shocked by this repugnant behavior and told a colleague there that Percival’s humiliating actions would be remembered.

Revenge took a few years. On June 15^th, 1920, Mr. Wilson, who was serving as district inspector of the police in Wexford, was assassinated on instructions from Michael Collins.

The rebels who weren’t marked for execution were transferred to prison in Stafford Detention Barracks in England and later to Frongoch in North Wales. There Collins distinguished himself as a capable organizer brimming with charisma. By the time they were released in December 1916, he had developed close relationships with many of the other internees which helped him after the War of Independence started in Soloheadbeg in Tipperary on January 19^th 1919.

Michael Collins was one of the main proponents of guerilla warfare by the IRA. Confronting the British army and police in open combat as happened in 1916 meant assured failure. Instead, Collins and other young revolutionaries advocated successfully for a hit-and-run strategy, using surprise tactics and superior knowledge of the local terrain in setting targets for attack.

The English leaders condemned these new tactics as cowardly acts giving those attacked little or no chance to defend themselves – a perspective that made sense to some traditional republicans and nationalists wedded to Patrick Pearse’s rhetoric about the nobility of blood sacrifice. The Irish guerilla War of Independence started on January 19^th, 1919 and ended with a standoff truce between the two sides on July 6^th, 1921.

Many traditional Sinn Fein supporters, led by the highly-respected Arthur Griffith, favored passive resistance along the lines being promoted in India by Mahatma Gandhi during those years. In response to the many IRA attacks and ambushes, which he strongly disapproved of, Griffith found ways in his written and verbal pronouncements to point to the English war machine as the real culprits.

Michael Collins was elected unopposed as an MP for South Cork in the December 1918 elections. After the massive swing away from the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Sinn Fein leadership refused to take their seats  in Westminster and, instead, set up their own parliament in Dublin. This met for the first time on January 19^th, coincidentally, the same day as the Soloheadbeg Ambush.

Collins did not attend because he was in London with his close colleague Harry Boland planning the escape of Eamon de Valera from Lincoln Jail. This successful derring-do event, prising open a prison that was deemed impregnable by the authorities, really upset the top Government leaders and provided an important boost to republican morale at home in Ireland.

Both de Valera and Collins attended the next meeting of the Dail where Dev was elected President and the man who masterminded his escape from jail became Minister for Finance. In that role he was known as a punctilious record keeper with all financial dealings – down to pennies - carefully documented.

Michael Collins was a realist who understood that he could never match his opponents militarily – they had superior numbers, better training and, above all, an abundance of modern weapons. To compensate for the IRA’s military inferiority, he decided to focus on their Intelligence services. To this end he recruited carefully from young, single members of the IRB in Dublin. He set his sights on defanging the powerful Intelligence apparatus of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), the notorious G Division.

This elite group of idealistic gunmen came to be known as the Squad, later to be identified - with a sting of irony - as the Twelve Apostles. For cover, they were pseudo-cabinet makers with a respectable business storefront in Upper Abbey Street. Each man was paid four pounds ten shillings a week, ready to act any time that the boss called.

By the end of 1919 the Squad had decimated the G Division. Three of its nineteen detectives were dead, another permanently disabled, four had retired and five more had transferred out of the Division. An attempt to rejuvenate the group by putting District Inspector Redmond from Belfast in charge ended when the Squad executed him on the 21^st of January 1920 in an area close to Dublin Castle.

The British authorities realized the importance of capturing or killing their arch-enemy, Michael Collins. They sent in specially-trained agents to assert better control in Dublin and to “deal with” Michael Collins who was the most wanted man in Ireland but who still moved among the people in the capital, mostly on his bicycle.

Still the war in Dublin was swinging in favor of the British and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, boasted that “we have murder by the throat” in Ireland. In response Collins decided to eliminate enemy intelligence agents in one fell swoop. Fifteen targets were killed and three were injured early in the morning of November 21^st, 1920. Collins was disappointed that some of those who were targeted got away easily, but it was still a massive achievement which sent a seismic shock through the whole government system.

That afternoon British forces shot wildly into the crowd in Croke Park killing twelve people. Collins attempted to have the game – a challenge match between the footballers of Dublin and Tipperary -  called off in the early afternoon but the officers in Croke Park deemed it too late to postpone it as crowds would be gathering anyway in the vicinity of the field on Jones’s Rd.

Gerry OShea will continue the Michael Collins story next week