The death of Michael Collins  

Michael Collins was one of five delegates appointed by the Irish Government in 1921 to negotiate with the British Government with the object of forming a Treaty between the two Governments.  The delegation was under instruction to carry the negotiation as far as it could, but not to sign off on any deal without specific authorisation from the Government that appointed them.  

Under Collins’s influence they acted contrary to their instructions and signed off on what is called ‘the Treaty’, not even informing their Government that they intended doing so.  

On 5th December 1921 the British Government gave them an ultimatum:  they must immediately sign the deal it proposed or else it would launch an “immediate and terrible war in Ireland”.   Knowing that they were acting contrary to their instructions they signed.  By doing so they took government authority on themselves.  The Irish Government that appointed them read about it in the British papers the following day.  

The British ultimatum was that all five of them must sign immediately or war would follow.  

Collins said later that the British threat of immediate war had nothing to do with his signing.  Another of the delegates, Robert Barton, said that he signed only because of the ultimatum.  He was the last to sign.  The British Prime Minister told him that, if he did not sign, he would be personally responsible for the war that would follow.  Collins did nothing to shield him from the wrath of the Prime Minister.  And Barton, a Protestant landowner, did not feel that he could bear the responsibility for bringing fresh war on the nationalist population when the head of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, along with the founder of Sinn Fein, were against him.  

It might be that Collins had not surrendered to the threat of force when he acted against the instructions of his Government, and signed the ‘Treaty’ instead of referring it back to his Government to deal with.  

If that is so, it means that he had decided beforehand to make this deal with the British Government, and to do so without revealing his intention to his own Government.  

Nevertheless, the ‘Treaty’ was signed under duress, and only because of the duress, because of the way Barton was brought to sign.  

Griffith had made it clear to his Government beforehand that he was in agreement with the British proposals.  But he had also agreed that an attempt at a settlement based on these proposals would split the country and he undertook, when returning to London in a final attempt to improve the British terms, to bring the matter back to the Government before doing any signing.  If he had not given this undertaking, the Government would, presumably, have made other arrangements.  

Collins had not even informed his Government that he considered the British proposals acceptable, though he had, apparently, done so with the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood conspiracy, of which he was Secretary.  

Collins’s action subverted the regime established in 1919-21.  It split the Government, the Dáil, and the Army.  

He gained a majority of one in the Government—but only because Barton felt obliged by his signature in London to vote for the ‘Treaty’ in the Government before going on to oppose it.  

Collins also gained a small majority in the Dáil, but it was much, much too small to carry the day decisively on such an issue—which was to replace the Dáil Government with a Government under the Crown based on the 1920 BritishGovernment of Ireland Act—which the Dáil had rejected.  (The Northern Ireland administration was set up under that Act.)  

Collins lost the Army, and deprived it of the Government to which it had sworn allegiance.  

It owed no allegiance to his Provisional Government, set up on British authority at a meeting of the Parliament of Southern Ireland, which was the Treatyite half of the Dáil.  

The  Dáil kept on sitting, and going through the motions of being a Government, but its effective powers were transferred to the Provisional Government.  

Under a Treaty worthy of the name, between Ireland and Britain, the Irish Army would have been the IRA.  That would not have suited Britain at all.  

It gave Collins a new Army, a  regular  paid Army, which it armed and financed.  

The purpose of this elaborate new Army was to destroy the IRA.    

Collins may have fantasised about using his new army to conquer Northern Ireland, but that was not what he was given it for.  When he attacked Northern Ireland in May 1922 he found, apparently to his surprise, that it was part of the British state and defended by the British.  

Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill may have whispered certain things to him in London for a certain purpose, but when they established him in power they were not going to let him whittle away parts of their state.  

The only enemy of the southern Treaty State was the Army dedicated to the Republican State.  

Collins did his best to evade the logic of the situation but, after many twists and turns over seven months, Whitehall obliged him to make war on the IRA.  This time there was no doubt that he acted under duress and did what he wanted not to do—rather like he made Barton do on December 6th 1921.  

What he did seems to have unsettled the balance of his mind.  He was increasingly at odds with his Provisional Government.  He imagined himself as a soldier, which in fact he had been only briefly in 1916.  He did not have the mentality of a soldier, the crisp factualness focussed on the matter in hand.  

He insisted, as Commander in Chief, on driving into the heart of enemy country—the country from which he had emerged to be remade by the outer world.  

He had become alien to it.  He had become a kind of displaced person who related to others by means of a fierce bonhomie.  

When his convoy was ambushed he ordered it to stop—instead of ‘driving like hell’, as the very experienced  Major General Dalton, who was second in command, had ordered.  

Then, instead of taking cover, he wandered about the road, firing random  shots into the dusk, until somebody shot him.  

It seems that by usurping the powers of Government on December 6th he had made himself a problem to himself.  

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Letters from Philip O’Connor and Manus  O’Riordan

The tragedy at Béal na Bláth

Sir —

Mary O’Rourke, in her column last week, recalled in her ever-pleasant style Brian Lenihan addressing the annual commemoration at Béal na Bláth 10 years ago. But in it she continually repeats that Michael Collins was “assassinated”. This is just not true.

“Assassination” is the pre-meditated killing of someone in particular. But virtually no one — apart from film-maker Neil Jordan — claims that the IRA group which attacked the Free State military convoy entering their region during the Civil War, had any idea Collins was in the armoured car their bullets ricocheted off so harmlessly.

Collins should have stayed inside the car and driven on. However, there appears to have been drink taken, and Collins recklessly insisted on getting out and engaging the attackers, who were positioned high up on the adjacent hillside. Why, we don’t know, for his aides pleaded with him not to.

Maybe — and this is purely conjecture — it was because he had not actually personally ever been in a gun battle, at least not since he served as Joseph Plunkett’s aide in the GPO at Easter 1916.

At Béal na Bláth, Collins sadly went down with all guns blazing — what in military jargon is called “killed in action” — in a battle in which he needlessly insisted on participating. There was no “assassination”.

Philip O’Connor, Howth, Dublin

Sunday Independent 30 Aug 2020

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Collins killed in action, not assassinated

Letter, History Ireland, September-October 2020:

Sir, – I read with interest Alison Martin’s article on Michael Collins and the British press (HI 28.4, July/August 2020). It is, however, a pity that her opening sentence contains a historical inaccuracy, which is repeated in the penultimate paragraph, where the August 1922 death of Collins is termed an “assassination”. There were indeed assassinations during the Treaty War. In December 1922, the pro-Treaty TD Sean Hales was assassinated while on his way to Dáil Éireann, following which, in reprisal, Liam Mellows and three other anti-Treaty prisoners were murdered in Mountjoy Gaol.

But Collins was neither “assassinated” nor “murdered”. Ignoring the advice to drive on to safety, Collins chose to stop the car, step out, and exchange fire with the Republican ambush party. Collins was no more assassinated than had been his anti-Treaty opponent Cathal Brugha in July 1922, nor, indeed, The O’Rahilly in Easter Week 1916. To employ the term “assassination”, in such circumstances of two-way exchanges in warfare, is not only historically inaccurate, it does a disservice to the memory of Collins who, if incredibly reckless, was undoubtedly brave. We can say of all three – The O’Rahilly, Brugha and Collins – that they were killed in action, having chosen to engage in combat, each with gun in hand.

– Yours etc., MANUS O’RIORDAN

Finglas Road Dublin 11