Michael Collins was a Fenian

In the “decade of centenaries”, today might be one of the most divisive and problematic.

Yesterday the establishment parties and their media shills arrived at Béal na Bláth to lay claim to their sanitised version of Michael Collins.

I thought that Seán  Mac Brádaigh put it rather well with this Tweet yesterday.

Full disclosure Seán was, for a time, my editor at An Phoblacht.

For the avoidance of doubt, I think that he calls out the hypocrisy of the veneration of Collins by people who would have detested him in life.

This Tweet also states some inconvenient truths for the gobshites establishment yesterday.

Mick was a Fenian all of his days.

He believed that physical force was the only way to dislodge British power from this island.

During his time in Frongoch, he imagined what a successful insurgency against the Brits would look like.

Like all visionaries, he unlocked the code at the heart of previous failures.

By the early 1900s, the colonial administration on this island had the Irish under a microscope.

The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in the country and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) had a vast network of informers.

Collins knew this finely meshed intelligence-gathering membrane was vital to British control over Ireland.

Consequently, if this could be neutralised, the Crown Forces, for all their power, would be a blind giant flailing around in impotent rage.

Such angry behaviour would, Collins reasoned, finally push the apolitical Irish into action.

Interned after Easter Week, Mick used his time in Frongoch well.

He devised a plan to make Ireland ungovernable.

The 1800 men in the camp with him included my grandmother’s brother Michael Derrig.

Frongoch gave Collins his trusted network.

The young fella from Mayo recommended his brother-in-law, who worked on the railways.

That was my grandfather, Joe.

During the Martial Law period being the guard on the Westport to Dublin railway was an invaluable position to act as a courier.

Carrying those dispatches was to be in possession of a death sentence every time.

I cannot conceive of such quiet, calm courage.

When he arrived in Dublin at Kingsbridge Station (now re-named after Seán Heuston ), Collins insisted on speaking in person to the man bringing the dispatches up from the West.

Those meetings had a huge impact on my grandfather.

One thing that Collins had was enormous reserves of energy.

The number of roles that he held during the revolutionary period was incredible.

He was Minister for Finance in the Provisional Government and led a hugely successful fundraising drive by way of a loan.

However, it was as the IRA’s Director of Intelligence that he brought his Frongoch plan to fruition.

Throughout those fraught years, he never carried anything more dangerous than a fountain pen.

He walked through checkpoints chatting to British soldiers like a friendly, harmless Paddy.

All warfare is based on deception.

For the first time in Irish history, our side had a better intelligence service on the ground than the Brits.

His HQ in Crow Street was the gathering point of what the spooks call Open Source Intelligence (OSI).

Essentially these young fellas who were passing themselves off as clerks in an insurance office read everything that was available to build a picture of the British administration.

Collins also developed assets inside Dublin Castle and the DMP.

In this part of the war, women played a central role.

Lily Mernin was one of the several female agents that Collins used to know the most highly guarded secrets in Dublin Castle.

He also needed a cutting edge to complete the task.

The Active Service Unit of the Dublin Brigade had several nicknames; the main one was “the squad”.

With one exception, they were all unmarried young men; Collins insisted on that.

Their ugly task was to take out high-value targets within the British intelligence operation, thus blinding the giant.

In other words, killing another human being at close range with pistols.

This was demonstrated most visibly on Bloody Sunday.

The retaliation by Crown Forces to this targeted forensic operation was to shoot into a crowd of civilians at Croke Park.

Seven days later, in Collins’ own county, a detachment of the elite of the British forces, the Auxiliaries, were wiped out at Kilmichael.

The pan that was hatched in Frongoch was to make Ireland ungovernable.

In a seven-day period in November 1920, it was game ball.

The foreign journalist based in Dublin filed their copy that the Brits had lost control of their colony.

This would reverberate throughout the British Empire, especially in India.

The stories of Collins that I was reared with were at variance with what I heard from comrades in my twenties.

The post-Treaty Republican position was that Collins betrayed the cause and turned his guns on the Irish people.

I always thought that the truth was more complex and that we should have an uncomfortable conversation about it.

That is why I wrote this piece for An Phoblacht in 1999.

Let’s just say comrades didn’t universally welcome it.

I hope now that there is a more nuanced appreciation of the situation he found himself in as he negotiated with a  superpower.

Of course, in 2022, the idea that Britain is a global behemoth is utterly laughable.

We Irish still have our exiled children in America and gallant allies in Europe.

Post-Brexit Britain is weakened, and, rather wonderfully, they did it to themselves.

As demographics finally compromise the confected statelet in the Northeast of this country, the road to ending Partition is over.

My Big Fella, who spent a couple of years in South Korea and is the living image of that IRA courier on the train to Kingsbridge, observed that Michael Collins is Ireland’s very own Admiral Yi.

A bit like the man from West Cork, my firstborn sees things that others around him do not.

It would be a significant victory for revisionism if me and my kind here were not to reclaim Collins as one of our own.

A starting point might be to look at the circumstances of his death Béal na Bláth.

As ever, the question must be:

Cui bono?

My Collins bookshelf in the study is rather preoccupied with that unanswered question.

I’m sure that the man himself would approve.

One hundred years ago today, Ireland lost one of her greatest sons.

This century will almost certainly see the restoration of Irish sovereignty throughout this island.

That will be a fitting tribute to the lad from Clonakilty who schemed in Frongoch and took the war to the enemy in a way that they couldn’t answer.

Here is Collins at the Garrienderk Bridge at Kilmallock, County Limerick on his way to Charleville.

He had 24 hours to live.

Until the moment of his death on that bóithrín in West Cork, he never stopped being what he was.

A Fenian.