Legacy is still as strong as ever
DEATH AGED 31 MEANT HIS LEGEND NEVER WENT STALE
Other leading lights of the later war were still schoolboys.
Collins was there in the blazing General Post Office, later recounting the event had “the air of a Greek tragedy about it”.
To have been there at Easter Week was the foundation stone of a leadership role in all which followed.
Admiration for Collins abounds in the firsthand testimonies of those who participated in the revolution.
They reveal not only a respect for military and political leadership — but character.
Michael Noyk, a solicitor of vital importance to the movement, remembered how he was “full of fun and had a keen sense of humour which he exhibited in practical jokes.
“He had a command of language that even a
British Tommy might have envied.”
There are few words of criticism, coming from those who walked a different path politically after the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and who questioned his over-arching power, in retrospect.
Admirer
In the words of one: “I was a tremendous admirer and a convinced supporter of Mick Collins always, thinking him innocent of ulterior motives, in spite of better informed criticism by other people who tried to put me on my guard.”
The manner in which Michael Collins died, shot in an ambush identical in format to those of the earlier War of Independence, is undoubtedly a factor in the memory of Collins.
In a conflict sometimes defined by murky deaths, it was the death of a soldier.
In the immediate aftermath of his passing, the Civil War entered a period of new bitterness.
It’s difficult to disagree with historian MA Hopkinson’s assertion that: “His death was a prime factor in turning the civil war from a half-hearted affair to something resembling a national vendetta.”
The idea of Collins as one who could hold the various forces together — and considerable sway even amongst his opponents — is central to the ‘What If ’ thesis of a different direction in 1922.
In the aftermath of the Irish revolution, the task of telling the story befell historians.
Reflecting on what had happened, one volunteer observed: “History is for the historian to write. Those of us who were involved in the making of our recent history are like the storied man in the forest who couldn’t see the wood for the trees.”
But other participants took a different view, penning memoir and histories with their own unique insights.
The emergence of a heroic Collins is a common trait in their own accounts, but historians and writers would follow the same path.
A runaway success biography, The Lost Leader — by historian and author Margery Forester — came out on the 50th anniversary of his passing.
When director Neil Jordan brought the story of Michael Collins to the big screen in the 1990s, he was not creating an icon — that had already been done.
Character
He was drawn to the involvement of Collins in the whole of the story, from Easter Week to the Civil War, and how “through this single character...one could tell the story of the most pivotal periods in Irish history”.
Yet Jordan also felt the time was right, as Ireland was moving towards peace, to explore that earlier period and what it meant.
We know of the former revolutionaries who became our politicians, but perhaps the story of The Big Fella makes us ponder how other lives would have played out.
Historian, writer and broadcaster Donal Fallon is the presenter of social history podcast Three Castles Burning.