Richard Hogan: Michael Collins and the legacy of a leader lost too young

My wife’s parents’ house overlooks the back garden of Michael Collins’s original homestead in Woodfield. The landscape has remained untouched since Collins was a boy playing in the stream there. At night, I imagine him, slumbering Peggy’s stories of Ireland into the marrow of his soul. I often find myself just looking out over the fields, daydreaming about Michael Collins; wondering what it must have been like for his family when the Black and Tans turned up with menace in their hearts, and burned it to the ground. What did he think when he came back to Woodfield, after becoming Michael Collins, Minister for Finance and later Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State and commander-in-chief of the National Army? How did he relate to his people; his life’s journey was so remarkably profound. I think it is fair to say, there hasn’t been an Irish person that has left such an indelible mark on the course of Irish history as Michael Collins.

It is hard to think of someone who achieved as much in 31 short years. Of course, Alexander the Great creeps into mind, he who conquered much of the known world at 25. But he had the might of the Macedonian army behind him.

In the relatively short amount of time humans have been walking this pale blue dot, we have produced some incredible people that dented a hole in the universe. Collins is one such person. Yet, it’s hard to think of him as a human being. A boy who grew up, had dreams, romantic interests, and was just like you and me. Of course, when someone dies young we tend to romanticise them, and when they change the course of a country’s identity, we tend to emblazon their memory into the collective national conscience of that country. Everyone wants a piece of the sulphur that trailed behind them. And we quickly forget, in our desire to apotheosise them as heroes that they were, at one point, innocent children who grew up with dreams like the rest of us, but the times they were in, and the steel of their character, transmuted them into legend.

Over the years, on Christmas Day, my father-in-law (Tom McDonough) has asked me to climb Carraig an Radhairc. Generally, I would have turned down the offer, too stuffed to with the bounty of Christmas Day to move. But last summer, in honour of the 99th anniversary of Michael Collins’s death, my wife, Tom, and I took off on a climb to replicate Christmas morning 1921 when Michael and his brother Johnny Collins set out from Sam’s Cross and climbed to the top of Carraig an Radhairc.

As we stood at the top looking over the magnificent landscape, I wondered what was the great man thinking — did he have any insight that this would be his last Christmas, his last climb and view of his childhood surroundings? Could he have known the impact he had on the course of Irish history?

Standing there in 1921, in the midst of the Irish War of Independence, could he have known the real tragedy waiting for Ireland in the summer that was coming?

Monday August 22 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Michael Collins. There have been few Irish people that have left a legacy like Michael Collins. A young boy who grew up in Woodfield and was educated in Lisavaird National School. Down the road lived Tom Barry and further still lived O’Donovan Rossa. Fearless men who fought the “wanton fight”, as the song goes.

Michael Collins has become a byword for heroism. He took a dream of a sovereign Ireland, and in his inimitable style and genius, he brought that dream into life. The treaty, as he saw it, offered Ireland “not the freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve freedom.” How right he was.