Michael
Collins

Ask a Cork person to name the most famous Corkman and you will get this answer before you finish the question. Michael Collins was born in October 1890 on a farm at Woodfield, outside Clonakilty in West Cork, the youngest of eight. At fifteen he took the boat to London to work as a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank. He came back an organiser, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and within a decade he was running the intelligence war against the most powerful empire on earth from a bicycle.

That bicycle matters. Collins fought the War of Independence with ledgers, card indexes and nerve as much as with guns. While British forces searched Dublin for him, he pedalled from meeting to meeting in a good suit, tipped his hat to policemen, and kept his appointments. Very few of the men hunting him knew what he looked like. He made sure of that.

The organiser

His weapon was information. Collins built a quiet network of clerks, typists, railway porters and detectives inside the Castle itself, people who passed him what the British knew before the British had finished reading it. Then he used it to dismantle their spy system piece by piece.

He held half a dozen titles at once, Minister for Finance among them, but the job underneath was always the same: keep the movement funded, armed and one step ahead. He raised a national loan in secret, smuggled rifles in through the ports, and kept a card index on every detective in Dublin Castle's G Division. The British posted his description on walls across the country. He walked past the posters on his way to work.

Bloody Sunday and the truce

On the morning of 21 November 1920 his Squad went to a list of addresses across Dublin and shot the British intelligence officers they found there. That afternoon, in reprisal, troops opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park and killed fourteen people. The day is still called Bloody Sunday.

The war went on for another eight months of raids, ambushes and burnings, and Cork took the worst of it. Three weeks after Bloody Sunday, British forces set fire to the centre of this city. By the summer of 1921 both sides were worn down, and a truce in July brought them to the table in London.

Somebody had to go and negotiate. De Valera stayed home. Collins went, and he did not want to.

The Treaty and Béal na Bláth

Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921. It gave Ireland a self-governing Free State with its own army and its own parliament, and it stopped short of the full republic he and his comrades had fought for. He called it the freedom to achieve freedom. Many of the men who had followed him called it a betrayal, and the argument hardened into a civil war between people who had shared safe houses two years earlier.

In August 1922 he was commander-in-chief of the new National Army, and he insisted on touring Cork, his own county, against every piece of advice he was given. On the evening of 22 August his convoy drove into an ambush at Béal na Bláth, a bend in a quiet valley road in West Cork. There was a firefight. He was the only man killed. He was thirty-one years old, and Cork has never quite let him go.

On the tour

Collins belongs to the whole county, so we tell his story where it touches the streets you are standing on: the war that scarred this city centre, the rally on the Grand Parade in 1922, and the West Cork roads that made him and ended him. If you have a car and an afternoon, Béal na Bláth is an hour west of the city, and the museum in Clonakilty is worth the trip on its own.