Michael Collins and the Making of the Irish State edited by Gabriel Doherty and Dermot Keogh Mercier Press, £9.99 PB
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Just what more can be said about the Big Fellow? Bookshop shelves creak under the weight of Michael Collins biographies, countless newspaper column inches detail the latest suspect in his murder, and his life is even immortalised on celluloid courtesy of Neil Jordan.
For this latest tome (at last count, the 29th concerning Collins) to trot out and contribute something new and worthwhile is asking a lot. However, this volume of essays not only throws valuable new light on Collins's life, but reveals how neglected and understudied the 1919-1923 period has remained.
Based on a conference held in UCC last year, the collection includes contributions from a veritable flotilla of celebrated historians, including Joe Lee, Martin Mansergh, Ronan Fanning, along with personal memoirs from the nephew and niece of Kitty Kiernan.
The much neglected truth is that Collins's time was absorbed in much more mundane stuff than directing a war from the back of a bicycle. Andrew McCarthy's essay points out that as Minister for Finance from 1919-22, Collins found himself thrust into the unenviable position of having responsibility for raising the first National Loan. He was just twenty-nine, and his slender CV did not suggest he had the necessary credentials for the job. Yet against a backdrop of strict censorship, suppression of the Dail and repeated raids of his roving Finance Department, he exceeded the wildly ambitious target of raising £1 million.
In an episode that could have been taken straight out of today's banking scandals, the British authorities appointed Alan Bell, RM, to launch a Mary Harney-style investigation into Collins's use of hidden bank accounts. When Bell began serving summonses to banks for malpractice, Collins took action. Bell was taken from a crowded tram and shot. Collins later reported to the Dail that all bank accounts were perfectly safe. One expects the Tanaiste's methods will be a little less heavy-handed.
Not as dramatic was Collins's meticulous attention to detail as he placed strict, efficient and innovative financial procedures on government business that are used to this day, and sought that the position of Accountant General be created - the post we now know as Comptroller and Auditor General.
Joe Lee, in his essay, "The Challenge of a Collins Biography", writes that despite the number of words lavished on Collins, he still remains an elusive subject. The reason, he suggest, is lack of commitment and imagination in tracking down sources, especially oral ones, on the part of academic historians. He commends Tim Pat Coogan's resourcefulness in interviewing marginalised figures of the day and digging out newspapers in the writing of his best-selling biography.
The much overlooked political legacy of Collins is examined by John Regan. For a military man, Collins had strong democratic credentials, setting up institutions such as the unarmed Garda Siochana. Yet he casually urged that meetings of the Dail be suspended, which would have left him with near dictatorial powers. His involvement in the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood also left behind a legacy of conspiratorial politics and revolutionary institutions which would reach their apogee in the Army Mutiny of March 1924.
In the context of Neil Jordan's furiously-paced Hollywood epic, the temptation is to think of Collins as a dashing, romantic figure who almost single-handedly fought off the might of the British Empire, not to mind contending with the murky and malevolent figure of de Valera. Where this collection is at its strongest is in challenging this simplified view, and the recent tendency to deify Collins and demonise de Valera.
Collins was hugely talented, yet he was also dangerously turbulent and he is all the more human for that.
