Michael Collins: A Biography

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A large part of the Irish Republican Army opposed the Treaty and in March 1922 voted at an Army Convention to reject the authority of the Dail, Collins' GHQ and to elect their own Executive. Also controversial was the British retention of Treaty Ports on the south coast of Ireland for the Royal Navy. The Anti-Treaty faction objected on several grounds, chief of which being the carving out of Northern Ireland from the Free State. The still-secret Irish Republican Brotherhood continued to meet, fostering dialogue between pro- and anti-Treaty IRA officers. This is the first book to concentrate on an aspect of his life and work hitherto overlooked: the crucial role played by women in his personal and working life.

The republican view of the same meeting is that Collins met FitzAlan to accept the surrender of Dublin Castle, the official seat of British government in Ireland. Along with Julius Caesar, Ahmad Shah Massoud and probably Trotsky*, Collins has shaped and influenced my perspective on politics ever since I was introduced to his larger-than-life story through Neil Jordan’s 1996 biopic. I'm interested in reading a book that takes an objective look at Michael Collins' life as opposed to the myths and deification of him that have developed.While the Treaty fell short of the republic for which he had fought, Collins concluded that the Treaty offered Ireland "not the freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it. In addition, the force which by the will of the electorate he was obliged to lead had been re-organised since the Truce.

Lloyd George was a tough negotiator and Collin's diary on the night the treaty was signed was ominous . My favourite part of this book is in its telling of the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty that saw the creation of the Irish Free State and the eventual division between the Pro-Treaty faction headed by Arthur Griffiths and the Anti-Treaty faction headed by Eamon De Valera. On 28 October 1921 the Frieda slipped out to sea with Charles McGuinness at the helm and a German crew with a cargo of leftover World War I weapons – 300 guns and 20,000 rounds of ammunition. The prospect was real enough that on 3 June 1922 Churchill presented to the Committee of Imperial Defence his plans "to protect Ulster from invasion by the South". Along with an independent judiciary, the Treaty granted the new Free State greater independence than any Irish state, and went well beyond the Home Rule which had been sought by Charles Stewart Parnell or by his Irish Parliamentary Party successors John Redmond and John Dillon.First row, left to right: Laurence Ginnell, Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, Arthur Griffith, Éamon de Valera, Count Plunkett, Eoin MacNeill, W. To be so installed he had to formally meet the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Viscount FitzAlan the head of the British administration in Ireland. A majority perhaps of the IRA he had helped lead in the War of Independence, were now ranged against the Provisional Government, which he represented.

As to his afterlives, authors of books, plays and memoirs as well as filmmakers posited the Collins they needed and he “endured in all the ways we wanted him, far more than any other figure from that time”. In this spirit and with the organising efforts of moderates on both sides the Collins–de Valera "Pact" was created. Collins became one of the leading figures in the post-Rising independence movement spearheaded by Arthur Griffith, editor/publisher of the main nationalist newspaper The United Irishman, (which Collins had read avidly as a boy. Collins and National Army GHQ secretly supplied weaponry and equipment for the offensive, and some British arms that had been supplied to the Provisional Government were passed on to the IRA. Artillery was provided to Richard Mulcahy, as Minister for Defence and the Free State Army by the British for the purposes of attacking the Four Courts.These were the "flying columns" who comprised the bulk of the War of Independence rank and file in the south-west. The book does, however, do justice to a multilayered revolution and its manifold visual representations. Along with the Long fellow these were the two movers and shakers in the early history of the Irish state.

In 1920, following Westminster's prominent announcements that it had the Irish insurgents on the run, Collins and his Squad killed several people in a series of coordinated raids, including a number of British secret service agents. In the ensuing War of Independence, he was Director of Organisation and Adjutant General for the Irish Volunteers, and Director of Intelligence of the IRA. Before the new body's first meeting, Collins, tipped off by his network of spies, warned his colleagues of plans to arrest all its members in overnight raids. The book seems to be what I'm looking for but I understand Hart is controversial due to him making allegations of anti-Protestant killings on account of religion that don't stand up to scrutiny.Since June 1920, communal conflict had been raging in north-east Ulster between the Protestant unionist majority there, who wanted to remain part of the UK, and the Catholic Irish nationalist minority, who backed Irish independence. This biography of Michael Collins (1890-1922) is the first since Tim Pat Coogan's definitive Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland in 1992, and admirers of Collins will find verification here for their sentiments. Northern Ireland, which had a majority unionist population, could opt out of the Free State, a year after the signing of the Treaty.