Michael
Collins

Cork’s most famous son was born on a farm at Woodfield, near Clonakilty in West Cork, in 1890, the youngest of eight children. He left for London at fifteen to work as a clerk, and there he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. By his early thirties Michael Collins was the most wanted man in the British Empire and the effective head of a new army.

He fought the War of Independence with paperwork and nerve as much as with guns. He ran the movement’s money, its arms and, above all, its intelligence, and he did it while cycling openly around a Dublin that could not picture the man it was hunting.

The organiser

Collins built a network of clerks, detectives and railway porters who fed him what the British knew, then used it to take apart their spy system from the inside. Information was his weapon, and he was better at gathering it than anyone on either side.

He held a string of titles, but the work behind them was the same: keep the movement funded, armed and one step ahead. He raised a national loan in secret, smuggled in rifles, and kept a card index of every detective in Dublin Castle.

The British put a price on his head and posted his description on walls across the country. He walked past the posters on his way to meetings.

Bloody Sunday and the truce

In November 1920 his squad struck at the British intelligence network in a single morning. The reprisal came that afternoon at Croke Park, where troops fired on a crowd at a Gaelic football match and killed fourteen people.

The war ground on through raids, ambushes and burnings, including the burning of Cork city by British forces in December 1920. By the summer of 1921 both sides were exhausted, and a truce in July brought them to the table.

London wanted to negotiate. The movement sent Collins, against his own wishes, to do it.

The Treaty and Béal na Bláth

Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. It won a self-governing Irish state but not the full republic many had fought for, and he knew what it would cost him. The split over the Treaty hardened into civil war between former comrades.

In August 1922, as commander-in-chief of the new National Army, he toured his native county against advice. On the evening of 22 August his convoy was ambushed at Béal na Bláth, a quiet valley in West Cork. He was the only man killed, at thirty-one. A century on, Cork has never quite let him go.

On the tour

Collins belongs to all of Cork, not just the city. We tell his story where it touches the streets you walk, from the war that scarred the centre to the West Cork roads that made and ended him. The valley at Béal na Bláth is still marked every August.