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Mick: The Real Michael Collins

av Peter Hart

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
1213224,107 (3.55)1
Few people in history have been as mythologized as Michael Collins. Before his death at the age of 31, Collins fought in the Easter Rising, organized the I.R.A., outspied British intelligence, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and ran the first independent government of Ireland. To this day, millions revere him as the father of modern Ireland. Yet Collins was first and foremost a man who sought power and exercised it ruthlessly. More politician than soldier, he surrounded himself with followers loyal only to him. And his death left behind a troubled legacy: an I.R.A. he could not control, a Northern Ireland problem he did not solve, and a civil war he could not prevent. Drawing on previously unknown sources, historian Hart explores Collins's life and asks what made him such an extraordinary and complex person.--From publisher description.… (mer)
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There are few people in modern Irish history who loom larger than Michael Collins, "The Big Fellow" who more than any other individual is credited with winning independence for Ireland. In a matter of a few short years he emerged from the ranks of the Republican movement to become one of the key figures in the struggle against British rule. His early death as a result of an ambush in the subsequent civil war gave him the aura of a lost leader, laden with the possibilities of what might have been. In this book, Peter Hart seeks to penetrate beneath the many legends surrounding Collins in order to get at the truth behind this famous figure.

Faced with the stories and misconceptions about Collins's life (many of which were of his own making), Hart bases his narrative on the extensive documentary evidence about his subject's life. The Collins that emerges is not a great guerrilla warrior but a master administrator, one whose organizational abilities and work ethic were both the keys to his rise and his great contribution to victory. These skills were the product of his years in London, where he worked as a postal clerk and spent his free time in various Irish social organizations. His subsequent rise through the ranks of the Irish revolutionary leadership was aided by the loss of the top leadership in the aftermath of the Dublin rising in 1916. The loss of most of the senior leadership created opportunities that Collins exploited to the fullest, gaining positions of authority in which his managerial talent ensured a flow of money, supplies, and (most critically) intelligence to the members of the IRA in the field.

Hart's achievement in uncovering the real Michael Collins from the layers of myth that built up over the years is impressive, providing a truer assessment of his role in Irish independence than any previous biography. His detective work on Collins's time in London is especially exemplary here, illuminating a part of his subject's life often overshadowed by his subsequent achievements. People seeking the Collins of legend would be better off watching Neil Jordan's hagiographic depiction, but for those wanting to discover the true Michael Collins, this is the book to read. ( )
  MacDad | Mar 27, 2020 |
I did not know what to expect upon starting this book. Having finished it I was very happy with the outcome as Peter Hart attracted controversy for previous works of his. First and foremost I should say I do not lionise Collins - too many do that already and more critical analyses such as this are warranted. Hart disassociates himself from the hagiography, and also a lot of the outlandish smears and gossip which were levelled by opponents of Collins, dealing instead with facts which he can reference and substantiate. This leads to an interesting bibliography which provides an interesting reading list for those who may wish to read further. This is not mere hero worship and he highlights how it is grave ignorance to suggest that Collins was a simple soldier as some would suggest, in fact that does a grave disservice to his level of intelligence as demonstrated by the level of his political intrigue and ability throughout the years 1917-22. ( )
  thegeneral | Jul 4, 2011 |
My attraction to this book was my obvious admiration of Collins and the opportunity to read a new biography (there have been many before). Although I was excited, I was also wary because this book was supposed to take a not-very-flattering look at Collins' life. I found this to be true as Hart attempted to look through the praise and hero-worship that has accompanied Collins since his untimely death in 1922. Hart in several places goes too far, interjecting spite and taking the opposite position just to stir things up.

I can say one good thing about the effect the book has had on me, though: if I had not been reading this book, I would never have chosen the topic I did for my final history paper and broken new ground in the canon of Collins literature. Overall I found it to be very informative and an exciting read (this is probably due to the fact that this is the first Collins biography that I have read cover to cover and there were many things that I learned for the first time). Despite all of Hart's best efforts, I still find myself a devotee of Michael Collins, maybe even more than before, and for that reason I would recommend this book to anyone interested. ( )
  bibliothecarivs | Nov 15, 2007 |
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Peter Hart considers that, "in the time allotted to him," Michael Collins "became the most ruthless, the most powerful, the most calculating and the most successful politician in modern Irish history." There is no disputing Collins's ruthlessness, power and calculation. Success is harder to measure. Collins's great onetime friend and rival, Eamon de Valera, in the much longer time allotted to him, was the most forceful presence in Ireland, through victory and defeat, from the Easter Rising of 1916 to the end of the civil war in April 1923; again from his coming to power in 1932 to his loss of power in 1948; and yet again when he returned as Taoiseach (prime minister) from 1951 to 1954 and from 1957 to 1959. It was de Valera, not Collins, who gave Irish people a sense of themselves as a nation, mindful of their history and mythology, their nearly lost language, their identity and difference. Even when he moved to the mainly nominal office of president of the Irish Republic, from 1959 to 1973, de Valera retained much of his symbolic aura and maintained his dream of "the republic." He was for good and ill a visionary, something of a scholar, a mathematician, nearly a poet; Collins was a pragmatist, determined to take one strong step at a time, without misgiving.

Michael Collins was born on Oct. 16, 1890, the youngest of eight children, to Michael and Marianne Collins, a farming couple in Woodfield, County Cork. At the age of 15, after a nondescript education, he managed to pass the post office's boy-clerkship examination and took up a job in London. He consorted only with Irish emigrants like himself, joined the Gaelic Athletic Association, played Gaelic football and hurling with no great distinction. In 1908 he joined Sinn Féin and the following year was sworn in as a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Moving from one minor job to another, he apparently stayed in London till January 1916, when he went back to Ireland and - in April - took part in the Easter Rising. But he was not one of the leaders. On the collapse of the rising, he was arrested and interned in Frongoch, Wales, where for the first time he asserted himself among his peers.

Released in December 1916, he returned to Dublin and a few months later took a job as secretary to the Irish National Aid and Volunteer Dependents Fund, an association to help those who suffered for their participation in the rising. This was an ideal job for Collins at that moment, because it kept him in touch with men and women of similar convictions: he used these connections to set up a remarkably effective underground intelligence network. During the war of independence, from 1919 to 1921, Collins's spies infiltrated Dublin Castle, center of the British administration in Ireland. His "Squad," as it was called, was responsible for killing several senior detectives and members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

Not a natural-born killer, Collins killed for what he regarded as cause. On Nov. 21, 1920, the Squad executed a dozen British secret service agents. Fearless for his own life, though with a price on his head, Collins stormed through the streets of Dublin and thought himself invincible.

The aim of his insurgency was to make Ireland ungovernable and to force the British to call a truce, to begin with, and then to talk terms of peace, departure and independence. In September 1921, de Valera, as president of the Dáil (the provisional government), chose Collins, Arthur Griffith and five other men as the delegates to a peace conference in London. A question is often asked: Why did de Valera refuse to take part in the talks? Collins did not want to go to London without de Valera, but in the end he did. De Valera probably thought the talks with the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, would fail to achieve what he - de Valera - wanted: that the whole of Ireland would be granted its independence, and that the only tie with Britain would be "external association," whatever that meant.

What Collins, Griffith and their colleagues brought back from London was much less than de Valera's dream. They got dominion status for 26 of the 32 counties, with complete independence in domestic affairs and fiscal matters. They accepted under duress an obligatory oath of allegiance to the crown. Naïvely, they took seriously the promise of a boundary commission that might or might not propose to reduce the size of Northern Ireland - already established by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 as the Six Counties - in consideration of the demographic, religious and cultural conditions in perhaps two counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh. The Irish delegates thought these Articles of Agreement were the best they could get, and they signed them on Dec. 6, 1921. They were accepted by a narrow margin of the Dail on Jan. 7, 1922. De Valera and the republicans rejected the terms. A civil war was inevitable. In April members of the Irish Republican Army occupied the Four Courts in Dublin. The government - the Irish Free State - did not respond till June 28, when it ordered its troops to shell the Courts and drive the I.R.A. out. In July, Collins became commander in chief of the Free State Army. One month later - flamboyant to the end - he was traveling in the back seat of an open car with a small convoy to protect him, when they were ambushed by a few I.R.A. men in a small valley in County Cork.

Collins was shot to death, probably killed by a ricochet.

Peter Hart's "Mick," a fine biography, concentrates on Collins's work, the tasks he took on for the associations he joined and ultimately for the provisional government: minister of finance, a job he carried out brilliantly; director of intelligence, the main source of his reputation as a hero, daring beyond description; and commander in chief of the army, in which he acted as if he had indeed an army to inspect in full order and battle dress.

According to Hart (the author of "The IRA and Its Enemies"), the secret of Collins's success is that he worked harder, and at more tasks, than anyone else. If de Valera was one of a kind, Collins was the perfection of a common kind. He did not have "the moral stature of a Daniel O'Connell, a Martin Luther King or a Nelson Mandela," but he had other qualities, short of greatness. Hart's book is written with immense verve, as if he wanted to acknowledge by the rapidity of his own style the relentless pace of the man he describes. He doesn't bother much with Collins's private life, his fiancée (Kitty Kiernan), his dalliances with women of high estate (Lady Hazel Lavery, Moya Llewelyn Davies, Lady Edith Londonderry), his drinking and carousing in London. There is plenty of such lore in Tim Pat Coogan's "Michael Collins: A Biography" (1990), one of the reputed sources for Neil Jordan's film "Michael Collins" (1996). Hart's account of the peace talks is especially good, but I wish he had explained more thoroughly why Griffith and Collins and the rest allowed themselves to be intimidated by Lloyd George and accepted his deadline, Dec. 6, 1921, for the end of the talks. The threat of sending in thousands of soldiers and destroying the Irish insurgents seems to me to have been a bluff.
 
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Few people in history have been as mythologized as Michael Collins. Before his death at the age of 31, Collins fought in the Easter Rising, organized the I.R.A., outspied British intelligence, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and ran the first independent government of Ireland. To this day, millions revere him as the father of modern Ireland. Yet Collins was first and foremost a man who sought power and exercised it ruthlessly. More politician than soldier, he surrounded himself with followers loyal only to him. And his death left behind a troubled legacy: an I.R.A. he could not control, a Northern Ireland problem he did not solve, and a civil war he could not prevent. Drawing on previously unknown sources, historian Hart explores Collins's life and asks what made him such an extraordinary and complex person.--From publisher description.

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