Michael Collins: The Man Ireland Loved, and the Treaty That Divided Them
On this day, 16 October 1890, Michael Collins was born in Woodfield, near Clonakilty in West Cork. Today marks the 136th anniversary of the birth of a man whose short life became inseparable from Ireland’s struggle for independence.
He would become “the Big Fellow”: admired for his courage, trusted for his ability and loved with an affection few political leaders inspire. Yet before his death at just 31, some who had stood beside him would come to regard him as a traitor.
His story was never a simple journey from national love to national hatred. It was something more painful: a country dividing over a man who remained a hero to one side while becoming an enemy to another.
A West Cork childhood
Collins was the youngest of eight children, born into a farming family. His father died when Michael was six, leaving his mother, Mary Ann, to raise the family and manage the farm.
His childhood connected him to the land, local community and memories of an older Ireland. His father’s generation had witnessed the Great Famine, and its consequences remained visible around Woodfield.
Research by Michael Collins House reveals a family background more varied than the familiar picture of an entirely militant republican household. Alongside nationalist influences were moderate political views and relatives who had served the Crown. Collins’s eventual revolutionary convictions developed through experience.
Behind the future public figure was also a son deeply attached to his family. He carried his mother’s memorial card during the Easter Rising, years after her death in 1907.
London, rebellion and a growing reputation
As a teenager, Collins moved to London and worked in clerical and financial employment. He became involved in Irish sporting and cultural organisations and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1909.
Returning to Ireland in January 1916, he served in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising. After the surrender, he was interned at Frongoch in Wales.
These years helped turn an energetic young nationalist into an organiser with valuable contacts and practical skills. His growing importance rested on his ability to make things happen: finding people, securing money and building connections.
That competence would become central to his appeal. In a movement demanding enormous sacrifice, Collins offered the possibility that sacrifice could produce results.
Why people believed in him
During the War of Independence, Collins became central to republican intelligence. Informants inside the police and British administration supplied information that helped the movement anticipate arrests and identify threats.
His network depended on people willing to take extraordinary risks. Ned Broy, a policeman who secretly assisted him, illustrates how Collins could win cooperation from within the institutions he was fighting.
There was, however, violence behind the legend. His intelligence organisation supported targeted killings, including attacks on detectives and intelligence personnel. The qualities supporters admired as determination and effectiveness could appear ruthless to his enemies.
For admirers, Collins represented a reversal of the usual balance of power: British authority could be penetrated, challenged and outmanoeuvred. His reputation grew around that promise of effectiveness
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The agreement that changed everything
The truce of July 1921 brought an opportunity to negotiate. Collins joined the Irish delegation that signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December.
The agreement offered substantial self-government through an Irish Free State with dominion status. It fell short of the independent republic proclaimed in 1916. The Crown retained a constitutional place, an oath was required of parliamentarians, and the settlement allowed six counties to remain outside the Free State.
To supporters, it offered a foundation on which greater independence could be built. To opponents, accepting it meant abandoning the republic for which people had fought and died.
Collins defended the settlement as giving Ireland “the freedom to achieve freedom.” On 7 January 1922, the Dáil approved it by 64 votes to 57.
That narrow decision exposed a profound disagreement: could accepting an incomplete freedom honour the struggle, or did it betray it?
When admiration became accusation
Collins’s personal standing made the split especially bitter. People had placed their faith in him, and faith could become anger when he accepted terms they could not.
For committed opponents, the issue went beyond disappointment in a politician. They believed the republic already existed and that no delegation had the right to surrender it.
Yet opposition to the Treaty did not always mean personal hatred of Collins. Nor did the country collectively reject him. The June 1922 election demonstrated substantial support for the settlement.
Efforts at compromise included the Collins–de Valera electoral pact. But negotiations and personal relationships could not overcome the widening division over political authority, the Treaty and the future of the army.
The tragedy was that people who shared the ambition of Irish freedom increasingly regarded one another as obstacles to achieving it.
Irishmen fighting Irishmen
On 28 June 1922, government forces began bombarding the anti-Treaty garrison in Dublin’s Four Courts. The Civil War had begun.
Collins now stood on the government side of a conflict against former comrades. To his supporters, defending the settlement meant protecting the opportunity for Irish self-government. To opponents, the new authorities were using force to impose a British compromise.
This transformation gave the hostility its emotional force. The revolutionary organiser had become a leader of the state, responsible for confronting men who still understood themselves as defending the revolution.
The same career could now be read in two opposing ways: as the difficult completion of a struggle, or its abandonment.
Death, grief and an unfinished life
On 22 August 1922, Collins was killed when his convoy was ambushed at Béal na Bláth in his native Cork. He was 31.
He left behind his fiancée, Kitty Kiernan, and a future they would never share. Their surviving correspondence places a private relationship beside the political turmoil that consumed his final months.
Crowds gathered in Dublin for his funeral on 28 August. Their presence makes any claim that Ireland had simply turned against him impossible to sustain. He died deeply mourned as well as bitterly opposed.
On his birthday, that is the difficult life worth remembering: a man who inspired devotion, accepted compromise and became the focus of a divided nation’s hopes and accusations.
Collins’s tragedy was that love and hostility existed together. The freedom he helped secure could not protect him from the conflict over what that freedom should mean.