Michael Collins called the treaty he signed the freedom to achieve freedom
Michael Collins spent his teens as a post office clerk in London, then became the intelligence chief of Ireland's war for independence. In 1921 he helped negotiate the treaty creating the Irish Free State, knowing many comrades would reject it. Within a year a civil war over that treaty had killed him, aged 31.
Collins was born on 16 October 1890 at Woodfield, a 90-acre tenant farm near Rosscarbery in County Cork, the youngest of eight. His father, a farmer, amateur mathematician and former member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was 60 when he married and died when Michael was six. A local blacksmith whose family had forged weapons for earlier rebellions, and a headmaster who belonged to the Brotherhood, first stirred his nationalism. The nickname the Big Fellow dates from childhood. At fifteen he sat the British civil service exam and moved to London, clerking at the Post Office Savings Bank, working for stockbrokers and studying law at King's College London without finishing. Through the Gaelic Athletic Association he was recruited into the Brotherhood.
He came home in 1916 and fought in the Easter Rising at the General Post Office in Dublin as aide to Joseph Plunkett. After the surrender he was nearly singled out for harsher treatment at Richmond Barracks, but slipped across the room to join a group bound for internment, an escape historian Tim Pat Coogan counted among the luckiest of his life. At the Frongoch camp in Wales he organised protests and built a nationwide network of contacts, while openly criticising the Rising's tactical blunders, such as occupying indefensible St Stephen's Green. Released in December 1916, he inherited the movement's secret contacts from Kathleen Clarke, widow of the executed leader Tom Clarke.
In the 1918 election Sinn Féin swept much of Ireland and Collins won South Cork, but the new members refused to sit at Westminster and instead formed their own parliament, the First Dáil, in January 1919. Collins became finance minister and, during the War of Independence, director of intelligence, famed as a guerrilla strategist. When his spies warned of mass arrests, Éamon de Valera ignored the tip and was jailed; Collins evaded capture, reportedly once by passing himself off as an Orthodox Jew.
After the 1921 ceasefire he was one of five envoys sent to London. The resulting Anglo-Irish Treaty required an oath to the Crown, which de Valera and others would not accept, but Collins persuaded a Dáil majority to ratify it and chaired the provisional government. As commander-in-chief of the new National Army in the ensuing Civil War, he was killed in an ambush by anti-Treaty forces at Béal na Bláth, Cork, on 22 August 1922.
Source: Michael Collins (Irish leader)
