Michael Collins
Michael Collins ran the intelligence war that made Britain negotiate and was killed by his own side ten months later. He was born in Cork in 1890, worked in London as a post office clerk from sixteen, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood there, and came home in 1916 to fight in the General Post Office in the Easter Rising. He was interned at Frongoch, which functioned as a university for the movement. What he built afterwards was not an army. It was a system: a network of clerks, detectives, railwaymen, warders and telephonists who supplied information; a squad of a dozen men who killed police intelligence officers; and a war of ambushes conducted by flying columns in the countryside while he cycled around Dublin without a disguise and with a price on his head. On Bloody Sunday in November 1920 his men killed fourteen British agents in their beds in one morning, and the Auxiliaries fired into a football crowd at Croke Park that afternoon. He was also minister for finance, raising a national loan door to door. He was sent to London in October 1921 to negotiate, against his own judgement, and signed a treaty giving twenty-six counties dominion status and partition — remarking that he had signed his own death warrant. The Dáil ratified it by seven votes and the movement split. He commanded the new state's army in the civil war that followed and was shot in an ambush in his own county in August 1922, at thirty-one.
- Lived: 1890 CE – 1922 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: military_leader, revolutionary, politician
