Irish pay tribute to Collins with 1st public statue

CLONAKILTY, Co. Cork — Eighty years after former comrades assassinated Michael Collins, the pragmatic mastermind of Ireland’s fight for independence was honored last Thursday with his first public statue.

Politicians from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, drawn from opposite sides of the 1922-23 conflict, joined more than 5,000 visitors and the actor Liam Neeson to unveil a bronze likeness of Collins in Clonakilty, his home village in West Cork.

“In Collins’s day the buck always seemed to stop with him,” said Neeson, who was born in County Antrim and portrayed the IRA commander in the 1996 film “Michael Collins.” “He is my hero. He still inspires me.”

Historians and politicians increasingly laud Collins, who was killed Aug. 22, 1922, in a roadside ambush. Aged just 32 but already a general, he commanded the army of the fledgling Irish Free State.

“He was the George Washington of Ireland,” said Tom Morrissey, a retired American policeman who led U.S. fund-raising efforts for the 12-foot, $100,000 Clonakilty monument. “It’s crazy that he’s never had a proper statue before.”

All sides agree Collins helped organize the Irish Republican Army into an effective guerrilla force in the 1919-21 war of independence against Britain. He became an expert intelligence gatherer, directing a wave of assassinations of senior police agents in Dublin.

But Collins was branded a traitor by hard-line colleagues when he accepted a 1921 treaty with Britain that stopped short of independence but laid foundations for the modern Irish state. Collins famously conceded that by signing the document, “I may have signed my own death warrant.”

His political nemesis, Eamon de Valera, led IRA diehards against the treaty. In a civil war, Collins’s Free State Army crushed the anti-treaty faction, but de Valera survived to become Ireland’s dominant politician of the 20th century — prime minister or president for most years from 1932-72.

Ireland remains divided between fans of Collins, whose pro-treaty colleagues founded Fine Gael, and admirers of the intellectual, uncompromising “Dev,” whose Fianna Fail party is the perennial vote-winner.

“You’d never have had this statue put up while Dev was alive,” said Dan O’Riordan, who traveled from a nearby village to join the pro-Collins crowd. “And I’d put good odds on somebody trying to tear it down again.”

Before Thursday, Ireland had approved few honors to Collins: two busts in public parks, statues hidden in two army barracks named after him, and a minor street in Dublin. The state also bought the Collins’s ancestral home outside Clonakilty and funded a historical center that opened there in 1990, the 100th anniversary of his birth.