Béalnabláth was only nineteen miles from Cork city, but the convoy with the body of Collins had a nightmare journey. ‘We were forced to take to the back roads because of trees felled and trenches cut across the main roads,’ Dalton recalled. ‘At one point we had to drive through a farm haggard over a shallow ditch and cut through a paddock gate.’. 1..
He also said, ‘So long as I live the memory of that nightmare ride will haunt me.’. 2..
It was the early hours of the following morning before news reached army headquarters in Dublin. A telegraph operator handed the message to Adjutant General Gearóid O’Sullivan, who went to wake Emmet Dalton’s brother, Charlie, with the news. ‘Charlie,’ he said as he broke down in tears, ‘the Big Fella is dead.’ The grief was palpable. Tom Cullen and Joe O’Reilly, two of the men who had been particularly close to Collins over the years, went to inform Cosgrave in the morning. He brought them in to tell the cabinet. When they saw the faces of the ministers, O’Reilly and Cullen suddenly broke down and wept uncontrollably. ‘This is a nice way for soldiers to behave,’ Cosgrave exclaimed.. 3..
‘Ireland’s greatest leader since Shane O’Neill has died at the hands of his own countrymen,’ Pat McCartan wrote to Joe . McGarrity on 23 August 1922. ‘He was not a clever politician but he had a big heart and a stout heart: as lovable as a child, as lighthearted as a boy and as generous and forgiving as a god.
‘I’m really too sad and too sick to write,’ McCartan continued. ‘If all belonging to me were dead I’d not feel half so sad. Collins was Ireland’s one hope for he was not bitter nor vindictive.’. 4..
‘Don’t let them make you miserable about it: how could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight, falling to the shot of another Irishman – a damned fool, but all the same an Irishman who thought he was fighting for Ireland,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote to Hannie Collins, the sister with whom Collins had lived in London during his emigrant days. ‘I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death. So tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colours in his honour; and let us all praise God that he did not die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.’. 5..
Richard Mulcahy took over from Collins as commander-in-chief of the government forces. He received an extraordinary letter from his counterpart in the IRA, Frank Aiken, who some months later took over as head of the IRA under rather similar circumstances following the killing of Liam Lynch in action. ‘Accept my deepest sympathy for the loss of our old friend Mick,’ Aiken wrote on 27 August 1922. ‘God rest him! I know you’ll acknowledge that I am truly sorry for him even though I have been in arms against him lately.’ Aiken went on to observe that it was Collins ‘who most of all was responsible for the building up . of the strength of the nation’.. 6.. That same day Austin Stack wrote to Joe McGarrity in the United States that Collins ‘did great work for Ireland up to the Truce – no man more’.. 7..
With even his bitterest enemies prepared to acknowledge that he had contributed more to the cause than anybody else, it was probably inevitable that some would have difficulty accepting that a fellow countryman had killed Collins without even recognising him. In time the finger of suspicion would be pointed at others as various conspiracy theories floated around.
John ‘Jock’ McPeak, a Scot, came under suspicion because the machine gun in the armoured car that he was manning had jammed during the ambush. Some thought, in trying to free it, he might have fired a careless shot and killed Collins accidentally. Later when he defected to the republican side with the armoured car in an effort to flee the country, he came under suspicion of having deliberately killed the Big Fellow and he was called ‘Jock the Giant Killer’.. 8..
Others, knowing that de Valera had been in Béalnabláth on the fateful day, became suspicious of his role and the whispering began. ‘Where was de Valera when Michael Collins was shot?’ Canon Jeremiah Cohalan asked at a political rally in Bandon five years later. ‘There was a scowling face at a window, looking out over that lovely valley, and de Valera can tell you who it was,’ he added.. 9.. Fr P. Tracy, the local parish priest, wrote to The Cork Examiner confirming the canon’s insinuations. ‘De Valera’s presence at Béalnabláth in the early part of the day was a notorious fact witnessed by many persons,’ he wrote. ‘In the morning of the day of the murder he was seen superintending the arrangements and about mid-day motored back to Ballyvourney.’. 10.. There is no . doubt that de Valera was some miles away from Béalnabláth when the ambush took place. He certainly took no direct part and it is most unlikely that he had any input whatever, because Deasy had no time for his military views.
Later the conspiracy theories would be taken further with Seán Feehan’s suggestion that Emmet Dalton may have killed Collins. Dalton had served in the British army in the First World War, but like many others he came home to fight in the War of Independence. Most of those closest to Collins became disillusioned with the Free State authorities after his death. Dalton resigned from the army as a major general and tried his hand at a number of different ventures. During the Second World War he worked for British Intelligence in MI6 and hence the conspiracy theorists suspected that he might have been a British agent all along and that he killed the Big Fellow.
There is no real evidence to support any of these theories. The likely truth is that Collins was probably shot by one of the republicans who did not even recognise him. It was war and the men on both sides were shooting at the enemy. But the conspiracy theories that surround the death of Collins grew, just like the speculation about the death of President John F. Kennedy would four decades years later. Ironically there was another parallel in relatively similar posthumous speculation about their love lives. In the first full-length biography of Collins published in 1926, Piaras Béaslaí, who knew Collins well, depicted him as having little interest in the opposite sex. ‘The society of girls had apparently no attraction for him,’ Béaslaí wrote. ‘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.’. 11..
. A second biography by Frank O’Connor, initially published in 1937 in America under the title Death in Dublin, was later published under the title The Big Fellow. It is a highly readable account, which shows Collins as a contradictory conglomeration of various characteristics – a buoyant, warm-hearted, fun-loving individual with a thoughtful, generous nature, but also a selfish, ruthless, ill-mannered bully. While other young men were looking for sex, he was more inclined to go looking for ‘a piece of ear’. He would burst into a room, jump on a colleague, wrestle him to the floor and begin biting the unfortunate friend’s ear forcing him to surrender, often with blood streaming from his head. It is the portrait of a rather strange fellow.
From the early biographies one grandnephew of Collins came to the conclusion that the Big Fellow was homosexual. He actually said this to his grandfather, Michael’s eldest brother Johnny. The latter just laughed and said that if Michael had a ‘problem’, it was certainly not that he was not fond of women. Within his immediate family this would have been known, but they probably did not talk much about it.
At the time of his death, Collins and Kitty Kiernan were engaged to be married, but this was not even mentioned by either Béaslaí or O’Connor. She was later inclined to play the part of the grieving widow, which did not go down well with some of the Big Fellow’s sisters. When Kitty later married, there were suggestions that her husband felt he was competing with the ghost of Collins. It was not until 1983 – long after her death and that of her husband – that her correspondence with Collins was published. By then Béaslaí’s depiction of the misogynistic Mick had been well and truly demolished. Meanwhile rumours of his . amorous activities had taken on a life of their own.
For his biography published in 1958, Rex Taylor had the advantage of a cache of sixteen letters that Collins wrote to ‘John O’Kane’ during the Treaty negotiations in London, but it seems that this may have been a pseudonym, because nobody else appears to have heard of O’Kane. Many of the Big Fellow’s contemporaries were still around, but none of them knew O’Kane. There seems to be no reason to question that Collins actually wrote those letters, as there is evidence elsewhere to suggest that the views expressed in them were very much in line with his views and there has been speculation that John O’Kane was a pseudonym for Moya Llewelyn-Davies.
Since the early 1960s biographers have looked deeper into the background of Collins and new light has been thrown on his relations with many young women. Tim Pat Coogan was able to show in his biography that Collins had a close relationship with Susan Killeen while they were both in London before 1916, and they corresponded with each other following her return to Dublin. Their correspondence was of an affectionate nature.
Many of the people who worked for Collins – passing information on to him from within the British civil service, or doing direct secretarial work for him – were young women who obviously admired him. They included his cousin Nancy O’Brien, who later married his elder brother Johnny after the death of his first wife; Jenny Mason, who worked as one of his secretaries; Lily Merlin, who worked as a typist for the British army; and Eileen McGrane, who stored documents for him. There was also Dilly Dicker, the piano player who lived near him in Mountjoy Street, and there was Moya Llewelyn-Davies, whom he had known in London as . Moya O’Connor when she was friendly with his sister Hannie. Moya later married Compton Llewelyn-Davies, who was a solicitor friend of David Lloyd George. Like Eileen McGrane, Moya stored material for Collins at her house, Furry Park, on the Howth Road, Killester. This was also apparently one of his safe houses.
In his 1997 book, Michael Collins and the Brotherhood, Vincent MacDowell suggests that Collins was amorously involved with three married women while he was in London during the Treaty negotiations – with Moya Llewelyn-Davies, Lady Edith Londonderry and Hazel Lavery, the wife of painter Sir John Lavery. MacDowell actually suggests that Hazel Lavery was involved with Lloyd George in blackmailing Collins into signing the Treaty by threatening to disclose that Collins was the father of Moya’s son Richard, who was born in 1912.. 12.. But on the basis of the evidence produced, Collins could just as easily have been the father of any of the children born in London from 1907 to 1916!
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The record of some of those closest to Collins makes disturbing reading after his death. On 8 September 1922, men under Dalton’s command tortured and killed Timothy Kennefick near Coachford, County Cork. A coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of murder. The killers were former members of Collins’ Squad serving under Dalton’s command. Commandant Peter Conlon protested to Dalton that there would be mutiny if it happened again.
Even worse incidents took place in Kerry, including the blowing up of eight republican prisoners who were strapped to a mine at Ballyseedy. Major General Paddy O’Daly, who had been in charge of the Squad during the War of Independence, was . in command of the Free State forces in Kerry where the worst atrocities were committed during the Civil War. He subsequently chaired the army inquiry, which was a proverbial whitewash. It was believed by many that he had actually ordered the outrage at Ballyseedy. Whether or not this was true, there was no doubt that he covered up the killings.
In 1924 the Free State government decided to cut drastically the size of the army, much to the disapproval of some of those who had been closest to Collins. General Liam Tobin and Colonel Charlie Dalton issued an ultimatum to the government to halt the demobilisation. They and their backers had followed Collins in accepting the Treaty as a stepping-stone to full freedom, but now it seemed that the government was happy with the Irish Free State as an end in itself. They therefore insisted that the goals of Collins be implemented. The army mutiny posed a real threat to democracy in Ireland. Mulcahy opposed the mutiny and loyally stood up to his former comrades. The mutineers were forced out of the army, but Mulcahy was compelled to resign from the government. He went quietly. By having the courage to accept his humiliation, he ‘forestalled a really serious crisis’, according to historian Joe Lee.. 13..
When the boundary commission finally met in 1925, Lloyd George was long gone from power. The commission essentially decided on only minimal changes to the boundary – giving the Free State a bit of Northern Ireland here and giving Northern Ireland a bit of the Free State there. Since such changes would add insult to the outrage that was likely to be provoked by the surprise failure to transfer Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone to the Free State, the London, Dublin and Belfast governments all agreed to scrap the findings. As a sweetener the British agreed to absolve . the Free State from any responsibility to contribute towards the British national debt. De Valera was later able to claim that this absolved the Free State from having to pay land annuities to Britain, but the Cosgrave government did not realise this at the time. ‘In the long and sorry story of departure from undertakings and the spirit of assurances given by British Ministers there was never a more flagrant breach of faith by them than the cynical fiasco perpetrated at the time of the boundary commission,’ in the opinion of Seán MacEoin.. 14..
De Valera wished to exploit the political unrest, but Sinn Féin refused to take their seats in the Dáil, so he broke with the party, severed all connections with the IRA and founded Fianna Fáil (The Republican Party), which promptly became the main opposition party. In the days before Fianna Fáil came to power, Johnny Collins, Michael’s eldest brother, was particularly anxious. In 1932 he had a young family and had only a temporary civil service job and his brother’s political enemies were coming to power. Before the change of government he made frantic efforts to have his appointment made permanent, but he was unsuccessful. In desperation his wife explained their plight to the wife of a prominent Fianna Fáil politician. A few days later de Valera sent word that the appointment was being extended for six years and that he could keep the job as long as he was able to do it.
There was subsequently a controversy over blocking supporters of Collins from erecting a large headstone over his grave. The real issue was that the headstone was larger than the specifications allowed for everybody else. Maybe it was small of de Valera not to use his influence to allow the Big Fellow to have a bigger headstone, but then there were the families of others also to be . considered. By contrast, de Valera – who was later buried with his wife, Sinéad, and their son, Brian – has a small headstone.
Fianna Fáil won more seats than any other party in the general election of 1932, with the result that de Valera was able to form a minority government with the help of the Labour Party. Eoin O’Duffy tried to get the army to join with him and the Garda Síochána in staging a coup d’état, but neither was prepared to support him. Nevertheless Cosgrave’s party, Cumann na Gaedheal, soon joined with the Centre Party and the neo-fascist Blueshirts to form the United Ireland (Fine Gael) Party under O’Duffy, whose fascist tendencies proved so embarrassing that he was quickly removed as leader. But Fine Gael tried to frustrate de Valera’s efforts to dismantle the 1921 Treaty by using the steppingstone approach to full freedom advocated by Collins.
It was largely at the secret instigation of Cosgrave and his party that the British initiated the Economic War against the Irish Free State in 1932 over de Valera’s refusal to pay land annuities to Britain. De Valera contended that the Free State did not owe the money. Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain admitted in March 1932 that de Valera had ‘an arguable point’, because the wording of the boundary commission agreement absolved the Dublin government ‘from liability for the service of the Public Debt of the United Kingdom, and that the Irish annuities form part of the Public Debt’.. 15..
The Irish people endorsed de Valera’s stand in a snap general election in 1933 by returning Fianna Fáil with the first overall majority since the Treaty split. His government then systematically dismantled the objectionable aspects of the Treaty by abolishing the oath, introducing a new constitution, replacing the governor . general with a popularly elected president, and securing both the handover of the Treaty ports and the abrogation of Britain’s rights to Irish defence facilities in times of war. This paved the way for Ireland to stay out of the Second World War, which was the ultimate proof of independence. It is one of the great ironies of history that it was de Valera who proved that Collins was right – the Treaty was a stepping-stone to the desired independence.
Some critics blamed the Treaty for partition, but partition had already been introduced before the Treaty negotiations even began. De Valera subsequently pretended that he had opposed the Treaty because of partition, but this was a gross distortion. The partition clauses of the Treaty were essentially in line with what he had previously advocated in the Dáil, and he included those verbatim in his proposed alternative to the Treaty, Document No. 2. Collins and de Valera both stated publicly that they did not wish to coerce the unionists or loyalists into a united Ireland. Collins did, to an extent, try to win them over with the two pacts with Craig, but behind the scenes he encouraged a militant policy to coerce them. De Valera, on the other hand, did neither.
When he was negotiating to abrogate the defence clauses of the Treaty and end the Economic War in 1938, he tried to persuade the government of Neville Chamberlain to agree to a united Ireland behind the backs of the unionists. Seán MacEntee, who was a member of de Valera’s negotiating team, wrote a strong letter disapproving of Fianna Fáil’s attitude towards the northern question: ‘In regard to partition we have never had a policy,’ he wrote. Some of their colleagues had been ‘subordinating reason to prejudice’, he warned. As a government they had done nothing to try to win over the northern Protestants. ‘With our connivance . every bigot and killjoy, ecclesiastical and lay, is doing his damnedest here to keep them out.’. 16..
People in the Republic of Ireland remained sublimely ignorant about aspects of the partition issue, and the role that Michael Collins had secretly encouraged. The mistakes of the Northern Offensive of 1922 were repeated to a lesser degree during the border campaign of the 1950s, but on that occasion the government of Éamon de Valera introduced internment to hamper the IRA. As minister for justice in the early 1960s, Charles Haughey was one of those who cracked down on the republicans and compelled the IRA to call off the campaign, yet, like his father before him, he became involved in efforts to support another campaign before the end of the decade.
‘It is now necessary to harness all opinion in the State in a concerted drive towards achieving the aim of unification,’ Captain James J. Kelly wrote on 23 August 1969 as he was organising the attempted gun-running that led to the Arms Crisis of 1970. ‘This means accepting the possibility of armed action of some sort, as the ultimate solution.’ At the time the arms were depicted as a means of helping the northern nationalists to protect themselves against armed loyalists, but Captain Kelly had a much more ambitious motive. He was trying to end partition. ‘If civil war embracing the area was to result because of unwillingness to accept that war is the continuation of politics by other means,’ he added, ‘it would be a far greater evil for the Irish nation.’. 17.. Whether he was a mover or a mere conduit in the subsequent events is another question.
The events subsequent to 1922 are really beyond the scope of this book. But there were events in 1922 that history has largely ignored, and there is scope for suggesting that because of ignorance of that history the mistakes of 1922 were repeated again and again.